to try and find a taxi, I made tea which was very much liked by the ladies and also the strawberries and cream. Mr Smith had arrived by then and joined us. Mrs Mont was obliged to go by tram, then Mr Eastern waltzed The Merry Widow with Mrs Gordon, their tall hats stuck at a most ridiculous angle. Then the girls waltzed a little to Beryl playing. She was very jollie [sic] and nice, she kept us alive. After a while Father Alton had to go and Mr Eastern also. I think myself that he is rather afraid of his brother George. He made two or three trys [sic] to go, and at last ran down the road like mad. Then Mrs Hastings and the girls went, leaving us alone with pere Leo il y avait encore quelque chose dans le bouteille n’est ce pas.
This narrative continues for many pages, before concluding: ‘There is no need to send you my hopes & wishes for you both because you know them, but may God and the blessed Virgin shower you both with blessings and may you and your husband be Pals to the end, is the one wish of your loving mother.’
Liz Hastings, Edward’s widow, also wrote to her new daughter-in-law the day after the wedding: ‘Does Basil know he had a column in the Morning Leader on Saturday? I forget the title…You must have had dreadful trouble with confetti. Well, dearest Mina, I must draw this scribble to a close with much love and the hope that you will always be very happy in this world and the next. Very affectionately your mother L. Hastings.’
Basil indeed found happiness with his Billie. They had two children: a son, my father Douglas Macdonald Hastings, born in October 1909; and a daughter, Beryl Ursula, who arrived two years later. The Basil Hastingses gradually drifted apart from the rest of the Tribe. Only Lewis featured much in their later lives. None of the other brothers or sisters made much mark on the world. Gladys, indeed, chose to leave it, following her great-aunt Emily into a convent and taking the veil. Among the others, though all remained churchgoers, religion no longer played the dominant, indeed oppressive, role which it had done in the lives of Hugh and Edward Hastings. Basil addressed worldly concerns with more ambition and greater success than either his unlucky father or grandfather.
Lewis, meanwhile, was cutting an exuberant swathe across South Africa. He adopted a lifestyle so remote from those of his forebears as to defy any notion of inherited values. It was as if he set out to compensate for generations of stiff-collared family respectability and piety by cramming a century’s misdeeds and extravagances into a single lifetime. He was also writing verse. Here is a fragment of doggerel, inevitably Kipling pastiche, published in a South African newspaper in 1903, while he was serving with the Mounted Police.
When I was out in Africa amaking of my pile,
I met a sort of auxiliary bloke got up in reg’lar style;
He was sitting over a Kaffir pot concocting a sort of stew,
‘And so,’ says I, ‘excuse me please, but who the deuce are you?’
Says he, ‘I’m His Majesty’s half-and-half, policeman and soldier too.’
They can handle a sword or carbine, a lance or a billiard cue,
And what they learned of botany was never learned at Kew.
They can follow the spoor of a cattle thief from the bleating of a ewe,
Though they’re only blooming hermaphrodites, policemen and
soldiers, too.
Since then I’ve met them everywhere, a-sleeping under the skies,
Hard as a packet of tenpenny nails, the sort as never dies.
They ain’t quite strict teetotallers, they like their Mountain Dew, And like it, of course, just half-and-half, whisky and soda too. With some dop and a government blanket, they lie in the air so clear, On the wide veldt in the moonlight with their troop-horse hobbled
near.
Lewis wrote much later, at the end of a life rich in incident:
In De Quincy’s words, I have taken happiness in its solid and its liquid form, both boiled and unboiled. The world is so full of beasts, birds, fishes. The swoop of pratincoles on a Kalahari locust swarm. Rosy circles of flamingos above a salt marsh. Crocodiles on Zambesi sandbanks, and the great shapes of hippo walking by night past the camp-fire. Salmon leaping the fall in a Highland river. And sounds – the thunder of hooves of a great herd of wildebeest. The high, singing note of a ship’s rigging in a full breeze (the crew of that ship lived in a filthy rat-haunted fo’c’sle, but they had a new Bible apiece given to them by the kind shipping company). Smells – the damp smell of Africa around the Primasole Bridge in the Sicily campaign. The linked odours of horse and leather in night marches of the older war. The smell of a beech wood in autumn, and the sweet scent of a flue-cured tobacco barn.
Then there are people – bushmen with their bows and arrows in Ovamboland. The stripped divers at Monkey Island. Early Brown-shirts waving their antennae at the Brandenburger Tor. The black and the white and the brown, the hairy-heeled and the sophisticated, the hard-boiled and half-baked.
Lewis made a career as an adventurer, or, if you like, as a sensationalist, in the sense of one who pursued sensations, preferably in wild places. He took the title of his published fragment of autobiography from an early experience at a circus in Delagoa Bay. Having paid his half-crown for admission, he was dismayed to discover that he was expected to put a hand in his pocket again, to view one special attraction. Challenged, its cockney keeper responded impenitently: ‘What do you expect, gents? Dragons are extra!’ In Lewis’s life, not much else was. His experiences would have adorned the pages of a Rider Haggard novel. He became well known in bar rooms and around campfires across southern Africa; uncomfortable without a rifle in his hand, or at least in his saddle bucket; welcoming a ‘roughhouse’; heedless of where next week’s grubstake would come from. In the second decade of the century he became briefly prominent in South African Unionist politics. When the First World War ended in 1918 Lewis, who had acquired a reputation as a public speaker, was dispatched around France to address disgruntled soldiers about their demobilisation. At one such gathering, a man called out accusingly from the crowd: ‘Aren’t you the same Lewis Hastings who murdered a man in Eloff Street during the Johannesburg diamond riots of 1913?’ Lewis, quite unabashed, called back: ‘I didn’t murder him. I broke my rifle stock over his head.’
Lewis argued that the disease-carrying insects of Africa fulfilled an admirable function by preserving the virginity of the vast tracts of bush he loved so much. He was irked when, in later life, he received a cool reception from the British Empire Society for his proposal, advanced not entirely in jest, to form a committee to protect the tsetse fly. In his early days as a professional hunter in Natal, he worked with two young Boers killing springbok, which in Kimberley fetched as much as a sovereign apiece for a ninety-pound carcass. He and his companions rode out to spend three days at a time pursuing the vast herds, shooting scores to be carried to market on a groaning wagon drawn by sixteen oxen. ‘To be nineteen years old,’ wrote Lewis, ‘to wake before sunrise with Halley’s Comet overhead, a rifle by one’s side, and a whole perfect day before one on the plains, that was surely very near the crown of life. It was so cold at early morning that the frost crackled beneath our feet and the rifle barrel seemed to burn one’s fingers.’
Having stalked a herd, often hundreds upon hundreds of springbok dancing across the veldt in great irregular columns, Lewis and his companions aimed to fire three, four, five shots apiece as fast as they could push bullets into the breeches of their old falling-block rifles, dropping as many beasts. Then they snatched the bridles of their ponies and set off in pursuit, racing to overtake the herd, bent low over their saddles: ‘The nearest waiting horseman goes for all he is worth, not towards the buck but across their line. Hardly checking from the gallop,
