typewriter. ‘I don’t think the pater liked anything so much on earth as these plays,’ wrote Basil. ‘He was always frightfully solemn at the solemn parts, and roared like mad if there was anything comic. At the end he clapped and clapped till he was tired. If you wanted to cheer him up you only had to tell him that there was to be a play the next Saturday.’
Edward carried to extremes a refusal to display signs of alarm, less still panic. Once, two of the younger boys hired a steam engine from Tuppence-the-Most. After it had been running for some time, delighting the Tribe, their parents went to bed. Lewis and Basil set about discovering how fast the engine could be driven. They poured fuel into its furnace, even breaking up their siblings’ toy theatre to feed the flames. There was a thunderous explosion, smoke filled the house. The nurse woke, and hammered in terror at the Pater’s door. ‘Come out sir, come out!’ she cried. ‘The house is on fire!’ The Pater’s response caused the children to howl with laughter: ‘All in good time, Nurse, all in good time. Wait till I find the coat I usually wear on these occasions.’ When Edward emerged, however, he went out into the street and rang the fire alarm, causing the brigade to appear, its horse-drawn engines galloping up the street. The children were ecstatic, the Mater furious. She pointed out that the fire could have been extinguished with a few buckets of water. She was neither the first nor the last Hastings wife invited to endure much at the hands of her husband and offspring.
At ten, Lewis and Basil were sent to Hodder, Stonyhurst’s prep school. They proved successful schoolboys, both in the classrooms and on the sports field, winning prizes, Basil wrote later, without extravagant effort. Edward’s letters to his sons display the same relentlessly didactic spirit as do those of his own father Hugh to himself, a generation earlier. Because the boys had never known any other kind of father, and lived in an age and a family powerfully influenced by religion, they seem to have been untroubled by screeds which were, more often than not, exam papers.
‘My darling son Basil,’ Edward wrote from Herm on 10 October 1892,
I have your letter of 6 October. I notice you by mistake left the name of the archbishop blank. Please (1) supply the blank. Mamma has received the manual of Prayers for Youth, and I have got the list of books, for which I thank you. (2) please send the timetable. Please (3) answer question 34 more fully. I have told Gladys you thank her for her letter. (4) find out the derivation of the word ‘blandyke’. (5) what does ‘Night Studies’ in the Stonyhurst Calendar mean? (6) have you got Ethel’s umbrella? (7) have they any rules at Hodder, and can you send me a copy of them.
There followed an extract from Gladys’s journal of their Channel Islands holiday, then further bullet points, culminating with:
(17) I regret to hear of the drowning of the Jesuit you mention…By the bye – don’t call us your parents, but ‘my dear pater and mater’. It is a point of the utmost significance that when you leave Stonyhurst you should enter the world well apprised of its dangers and infinitely on your guard against bad company and the love of vanities and pleasures. You cannot fortify yourself too much against these evils. You must bring along with you all your religion. I wish you to pray to God to know your vocation.
The barrage of questions was punctuated with fragments of whimsy: ‘Have you asked for Lumley’s Select Plays Of Shakespeare? – which you lost. Responde mihi. Have you found Smith’s Latin Grammar?, respondez s’il vous plaît. I thank you for the programme of the concert of the 1st of November 1892 which was not, as you allege, a Sunday, but a Tuesday – Please apologise.’
Soon after Basil was promoted from Hodder to the main school at Stonyhurst, on 15 February 1893, his father demanded:
Did you cry when you left Hodder?
Do you suck your thumb still?
Do you feel at home at Stonyhurst?
Do you like any of the boys?
Do the boys kick or ill-treat you?
Please answer all questions.
And a week later:
We were sorry to hear that you were spending your holidays in the Infirmary. Did you offer up the sickness to God ‘all for thee, Oh my God – To do thy will, o God’. If you did not – you missed a grand opportunity of earning merit in the sight of God, for this sickness was a great disappointment to you – entailing as it did the loss of 15 days skating. Did you get any skating at all before you were taken ill? The 3rd term’s Report has come. You have attained only 13 marks in Religious Doctrine as against a possible 75 of marks attainable!!!
Edward’s obsession with recording trivia amuses his descendants, but suggests eccentricity of heroic proportions. In great-grandfather, pedantry tipped over into dottiness.
Basil’s Stonyhurst diary was as banal as most schoolboy records, as shown by this entry in 1894: ‘84 more days…Retreat began today. Association. I played right-wing and got two goals, 17 marks for my Greek theme. I have saved 9d. Xmas presents: Lewis got 2 pocket knives, a top hat, a purse; I got a pack of Snap cards, 2 coloured tops; sweets; a steerable balloon; parlour cricket; an artificial nose.’ More interesting was his catalogue of books read. First, there were those from the Spiritual Library: St Paul of the Cross, St Elizabeth of Hungary, The Little Flowers of St Francis. Then came works that he read for pleasure. He listed seventy-six titles, and many were exactly those tales of adventure which his own son, and later I, his grandson, in due course learned to love. G.A. Henty and Walter Scott figured prominently among favourite authors. Basil mentioned with special enthusiasm Bonnie Prince Charlie, Tales of Daring and Peril, The Talisman, St George for England, In the Dashing Days of Old, A Cornet of Horse, Stirring Stories by Land and Sea, Cutlass & Cudgel. A passion for books, and for historical romance, has persisted in the family. To give Edward his due, he did not allow his preoccupation with religion to deny the children fun.
More and more of his father’s letters to Basil included lines of congratulation on prizes won, runs and goals scored. But Edward could never abandon the habit of admonition, as in April 1894: ‘Your poem on Stonyhurst is disfigured by things attractive to the senses being given more prominence than things in which the mind plays a part.’ Nine months later, in January 1895, Edward was quoting Samuel Butler: ‘Nothing is more dangerous and nice and more difficult than for a man to speak much of himself without discovering a complacency in himself…and without discovering symptoms of secret self-love and pride.’ On 22 March, he advised Basil: ‘In your essay on the capture of Gibraltar you might bring in these saints as follows: “Not only did the capture of Gibraltar lead to the establishment of the Moorish dominion in Spain, but indirectly it may be said to have led to numberless martyrs sealing their fidelity with their blood. Had not Gibraltar been captured by the Moors it may be doubted whether saints like ss Nunilo and Alodia would have had the opportunity of winning their crowns.”’
As Lewis and Basil grew older, money matters intruded with increasing frequency into their father’s postal injunctions to them, as in this succinct note of 12 October 1896: ‘Dear Basil, please return enclosed bills with your observations. Don’t have any more neckties. Pater tuus S. Edward Hastings.’ Immense pains were taken to economise on their journeys to and from school. As an end of term approached, Edward dispatched a banknote to Basil with these lines: ‘3rd class railway ticket Whalley to S. Pancras 17-6; margin for contingencies 2-6. £1 supplied. Please give me a written account of how you spend it, and hand back to me the balance. Lewis omitted to write and acknowledge receipt of the £1.10s. This was a solecism on his part.’
Shillings mattered to the Hastingses.
