assortment of property. One year, a boy left a gun case – quite a good one. Despite ringing round the usual suspects, no one claimed it, so it has joined the Hastings equipment collection. I would murder any child of mine who left a gun case on the other side of England, but maybe some families have so much sporting kit that they don’t miss trifles.
Every year I ask myself whether I can afford to go on entertaining the children’s friends in this way. Nobody did it for me. But nowadays we all know that if we don’t help them to get started, there is no way they can make it on their own. I guess I shall go on forking out as long as the bank manager allows. I see our children’s shoot as a minuscule contribution to ensuring that the marvellous ritual of field sports survives through the next generation, and the new century.
FOR ALL MY part-rural upbringing, it took me much too long to appreciate that the best things to eat are to be found in the countryside. Until at least twenty, I cherished a delusion that meals came from shops. In those longgone, pre-Fayed days, Harrods was a focus of middle-class London life. From the age of about eighteen months onwards, we met in its banking hall, had our hair cut by its barbers, bought our treats from the toy department, stationery from the stationery department and food, not unexpectedly, from the food department. The Hastingses were anything but rich but, since my mother spent her days editing magazines and organising fashion shoots, food was ordered by telephone and delivered weekly by green van, each item exquisitely wrapped in grey paper and tied with string.
I was born just after the Second World War. Food rationing, together with spasmodic black-marketeering for tea, meat and suchlike, persisted until I was seven. A lifelong enthusiasm for cheap sweets stems, I fancy, from the fact that when I was in rompers our allowance was only about four ounces of bull’s-eyes and gobstoppers a week. Nonetheless, at home we ate pretty well, managing about four heavy meals a day. Nursery delicacies, administered by my adored old Yorkshire nanny in her starched grey overalls, included bread and sugar, bread with hundreds and thousands, lots of steamed puddings and Bird’s custard. Oh yes, and there was Shippam’s potted meat paste, a great treat. Part of the fun was to make toast on a fork in front of the nursery electric fire, a process which caused me to fuse the element with irksome frequency. With hindsight, it is puzzling that I was not electrocuted.
There was a famous chain of teashops named Fuller’s, which produced its own branded cakes. Heaven for every boarding schoolboy of the 1950s was to receive one in a parcel. Fuller’s walnut was the most famous, but personally I preferred Fuller’s chocolate cake. My mother occasionally reminded me that they cost six shillings apiece and therefore counted as luxury food, but in my prep school prime I could demolish a two-pound Fuller’s cake single-handed, at one sitting. We occasionally drank Coca-Cola, but irrationally Kia-Ora orange squash and Lucozade were considered healthier for us. At about twelve I acquired a secret passion for that heavily marketed second-hand car salesman’s drink Babycham. It was very sweet, mildly alcoholic, and could be bought illicitly at the back door of the village pub for one shilling and three pence for a small bottle.
We ate a lot of fish, which came from the wonderful Knightsbridge fish shop opposite Harrods where the spoils of the sea lay on an open marble slab, presided over by a genial giant with a red nose, blue-and-white-striped apron and straw hat. The butcher, too, wore a straw hat as his badge of office. I was reared in the belief that all right-thinking Englishmen lived off huge chunks of bleeding meat, a vision that has never faded. In those days meat seemed, and indeed was, very expensive. Fillet and sirloin seldom entered our house. The Sunday joint was usually a second-division cut like topside. At grown-up dinner parties my mother favoured crown of lamb, the cutlets primly decorated with little paper coronets. These were followed by the Hastings household’s absolutely favourite pudding – chocolate profiteroles with whipped cream, created with sublime artistry by my mother’s German cook, Martha. The family always managed to be broke, in a very English middle-class way. That is to say, we lived amid chronic gloom about money, but everybody seemed to chuck it about.
When I was shipped off to prep school at the age of eight, my father inaugurated a custom designed to soften the blow. On the first day of every term, before delivering me to the 3 p.m. train from Paddington, he took me to a West End restaurant for lunch. His opening shot was Le Caprice, then as now in Arlington Street. He introduced me to Mario, the head waiter, asserting reverently that I would find him one of the most important people in my life. Father also pointed out stars such as Noëpl Coward and David Niven. With some help from Mario, whom even as a stripling I found pretty oleaginous, the French menu was interpreted
None of this diminished in the smallest degree my misery and terror about being removed from Rutland Gate SW7 to a punishment camp in Berkshire named Horris Hill. There, prowess on the playing field was the only virtue deemed worthy of applause, and certain masters did not trouble to conceal their enthusiasm for the prettier small boys. At the Caprice, when I asked tremulously for an ice cream and was presented instead with a sorbet, I perceived deliberate deceit and collapsed into hysterical sobs. If father had thought to sweeten the bitter pill of Horris Hill with a mere restaurant luncheon, he failed. I was still seething when I boarded the Hogwarts Express.
Yet restaurant lunches persisted on those black days at the beginning of each term. Once we went to Simpson’s-in-the-Strand, where we ate beef off the trolley and my father instructed me on the importance of tipping the carver half a crown. We tried the Ivy, where I was briefed about all manner of writers and literary agents to be seen at the tables, none of whose names meant a thing to me. I much preferred Lyons Corner House in Coventry Street, the huge multiple restaurant complex where we usually patronised the Seven Stars, which served delicious roasts with jacket potatoes for around fifteen shillings (75p) a head. When I first started taking girls out, the Seven Stars got a lot of my custom. I never bothered to ask my dates how they felt about roasts. I just assumed, like many of my generation, that you could never go wrong with meat. The most satisfactory meal I can recall as a teenager comprised a prawn cocktail and a fillet steak, with a second prawn cocktail to follow. ‘I knew you were eccentric when you came in,’ said the waitress gloomily.
In those days I spent about 150 per cent of my weekly income on entertaining girls. At eighteen, I remember giving one of them a notably lavish, overpriced dinner at a restaurant in Swallow Street near Piccadilly Circus named the Pipistrello. She didn’t display the smallest sexual gratitude at the time, but I suppose the evening wasn’t an entirely futile extravagance, since she is now my wife.
The restaurants which won my heart – and for many adult years my custom – were those great fisheries: Wheeler’s in Old Compton Street, the Carafe behind Harrods and the Vendôme in Dover Street. They were owned by an exuberant friend of my father’s named Bernard Walsh, for whom oyster was a middle name. Bernard staged annual seaside parties at Colchester to celebrate the opening of the season, from which his guests returned sick but happy. Father belonged to a notorious lunching group named the Thursday Club, which met every week on the top floor of Wheeler’s, and was regularly denounced by gossip columnists as a den of all manner of misbehaviour. Its star members in the early 1950s were Prince Philip, Baron the ‘society photographer’, actors Peter Ustinov and James Robertson Justice, the Marquess of Milford Haven, mouth organist Larry Adler and Daily Express editor Arthur Christiansen. That they all got very drunk was not in doubt. I am sceptical about whether much else went on. I was put down for the Thursday Club at birth, but sadly it collapsed before I was old enough to participate.
Any day of the week, Wheeler’s was my father’s home from home, and it became mine. The menu boasted twenty variations on Dover sole. My own favourite was Normande, served with a wine and grape sauce. Lunch for two cost about £3 including wine in the early 1960s, and was eaten huddled at tiny tables which became a trifle cramped when two members of the Hastings family were in possession. It was all so wonderfully English. There was no nonsense about
