Read Online Did You Really Shoot the Television? by Max Hastings - Free Book Online
Authors: Max Hastings
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Nonetheless, so desperate was the demand for men that in 1917, at the age of thirty-seven, he donned the uniform of a corporal in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps. It seemed absurd even to the staid spirits of the War Office that a talented writer approaching middle age should waste his time guarding some remote encampment. Thus he was transferred to the Royal Flying Corps, and spent the last year of the war producing a weekly newspaper for flight trainees, entitled Roosters and Fledglings . Many of its columns were taken up with recording the grisly roster of training accidents, which killed more embryo British pilots in World War I than did the Germans. Basil finished with the rank oflieutenant in the new Royal Air Force, though his commissioning letter emphasised: ‘He is clearly to understand that he is appointed for ground duties only, and in no circumstances will he be permitted to go into the air, except in connection with the actual duties of his appointment.’
Throughout the war, Basil continued to work on further plays, though West End audiences craved light entertainment. He embarked on a collaboration with the novelist and playwright Eden Phillpotts, who wrote from Torquay in January 1917:
Dear Hastings, Now I hear [H.B.] Irving has changed his mind again and may use [the stage adaptation of Phillpotts’s novel] ‘The Farmer’s Wife’. But there is something so volatile and contradictory about the actor’s mental make-up that one rather despairs. It is because the game is worth the candle – one real success worth working for – that we put time into play-writing. It’s a pure gamble of time. Drinkwater suspects that there will be a tremendous demand for plays after the war; but not khaki plays. I like your construction, but feel it won’t be worth putting the time into until we both feel we’ve got a likely proposition for [the actor-manager Gerald] du Maurier, or somebody of that sort. I’m holding ‘A Happy Finding’ and will send it in at once, when you let me know. With [Sir Charles] Hawtrey it would be bound to do well, for it is very funny, and a shrewd hit at our disgusting divorce laws. Try and get Hawtrey interested again. Yours always EP.
Mac was seven when, in 1917, he followed the usual family path to Stonyhurst’s preparatory school, Hodder. A two-horse brake carried him from Whalley station to his new abode, full of fears which were soon fulfilled. Unlike his father and grandfather, Mac possessed no piety. He found his new residence mindlessly cruel, was himself ‘unutterably miserable’, and was bullied from the moment of his arrival. When his tormentors suspended him from a ladder in the gym, the prefect who released him – at Stony-hurst masters rather than senior boys were called ‘prefects’ – slapped his face to check his tears. ‘Physicalviolence, so it seemed, was a way of life…I make no excuse for the bitterness of my pen,’ he wrote long afterwards. At seven especially, but likewise afterwards, he found incomprehensible the religious tracts which he was obliged to read. At confession, he was driven to invent imaginary sins. ‘The round of daily mass and prayers was hateful to me…I parroted the words, I fingered the rosary. But deep down inside, I was wondering what it was about.’
Mac achieved a brief spasm of happiness with his introduction to school theatricals, playing Morgiana the slave girl in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves . But he found the brutality of the Stonyhurst system unforgivable. In that last year of the war, boys with richer parents were permitted to pay for extra food such as bacon and eggs, which Mac did not receive. Because the Jesuits censored the boys’ letters home before dispatch, it was impossible for him even to reveal his miseries. Bullying was institutionalised. Not long after his arrival, in that cold, dank, draughty, cavernous place, Mac contracted pneumonia. Their matron, ‘the hag’, shrugged her shoulders and wrote him off.
Throughout the war, Basil continued to work on further plays, though West End audiences craved light entertainment. He embarked on a collaboration with the novelist and playwright Eden Phillpotts, who wrote from Torquay in January 1917:
Dear Hastings, Now I hear [H.B.] Irving has changed his mind again and may use [the stage adaptation of Phillpotts’s novel] ‘The Farmer’s Wife’. But there is something so volatile and contradictory about the actor’s mental make-up that one rather despairs. It is because the game is worth the candle – one real success worth working for – that we put time into play-writing. It’s a pure gamble of time. Drinkwater suspects that there will be a tremendous demand for plays after the war; but not khaki plays. I like your construction, but feel it won’t be worth putting the time into until we both feel we’ve got a likely proposition for [the actor-manager Gerald] du Maurier, or somebody of that sort. I’m holding ‘A Happy Finding’ and will send it in at once, when you let me know. With [Sir Charles] Hawtrey it would be bound to do well, for it is very funny, and a shrewd hit at our disgusting divorce laws. Try and get Hawtrey interested again. Yours always EP.
Mac was seven when, in 1917, he followed the usual family path to Stonyhurst’s preparatory school, Hodder. A two-horse brake carried him from Whalley station to his new abode, full of fears which were soon fulfilled. Unlike his father and grandfather, Mac possessed no piety. He found his new residence mindlessly cruel, was himself ‘unutterably miserable’, and was bullied from the moment of his arrival. When his tormentors suspended him from a ladder in the gym, the prefect who released him – at Stony-hurst masters rather than senior boys were called ‘prefects’ – slapped his face to check his tears. ‘Physicalviolence, so it seemed, was a way of life…I make no excuse for the bitterness of my pen,’ he wrote long afterwards. At seven especially, but likewise afterwards, he found incomprehensible the religious tracts which he was obliged to read. At confession, he was driven to invent imaginary sins. ‘The round of daily mass and prayers was hateful to me…I parroted the words, I fingered the rosary. But deep down inside, I was wondering what it was about.’
Mac achieved a brief spasm of happiness with his introduction to school theatricals, playing Morgiana the slave girl in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves . But he found the brutality of the Stonyhurst system unforgivable. In that last year of the war, boys with richer parents were permitted to pay for extra food such as bacon and eggs, which Mac did not receive. Because the Jesuits censored the boys’ letters home before dispatch, it was impossible for him even to reveal his miseries. Bullying was institutionalised. Not long after his arrival, in that cold, dank, draughty, cavernous place, Mac contracted pneumonia. Their matron, ‘the hag’, shrugged her shoulders and wrote him off.
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