Read Online Did You Really Shoot the Television? by Max Hastings - Free Book Online Page A

A Jesuit gave him the last rites with an insouciance the memory of which disgusted the boy when he defied probability by surviving. He never forgot the readiness of his keepers to deliver him to his Maker.
    At Stonyhurst, he wrote later, the Jesuits ‘devoted an unconscionable time getting us ready for the next world before we were even ready for this one’. His ‘beaks’, like most pedagogues, were poor pickers of people. Boys who achieve office in their schooldays often sink without trace thereafter, ending up as secretaries of suburban golf clubs. The qualities which commend prefects and games-players to teachers are seldom those which will prove of much value thereafter. Willingness to conform is perceived as the highest good in schoolboys, but it ill fits them for any subsequent attempt to reach the stars. School masters are also the only people on earth who claim a right to place money on horses after races have been run. Decades on, they seek to embrace former pupils who have prospered in life, however abominably they treated them in childhood. This was Mac’s experience.
    While recuperating after his bout of pneumonia he was granted a respite, staying with his family at St Leonards-on-Sea for the durationof one glorious missed school term. Then he was returned to Lancashire, his father assuring him, with timeless fatuity, that modern Stonyhurst was much less harsh than it had been in his own and Lewis’s day.
    Mac learned to live with the place, if never to love it. When he advanced from Hodder to the main school, and began to achieve some academic success, his life brightened. From an early stage he displayed a gift for public speaking, and always applauded the fact that the school taught Elocution as a specific skill: ‘I am best in the class at Latin, English, History by heart and all oral work,’ he wrote exuberantly in November 1918. He urged his parents to come and see him perform in the Shrovetide play, but said he realised that the expense of the journey to Lancashire would probably be prohibitive, as indeed it proved. ‘We have had two holidays because the armistice has been signed. I have learned two pieces of poetry for you when I come home, The Jackdaw of Rheims and the other King John and the Abbot of Canterbury Cathedral . I wish you would tell Daddy to send me some of his articles now, especially out of the Sunday Herald . He has made a name for himself here. I’d love to tell you more but Tempus Fugit .’ A Stonyhurst report for 1919 suggested that Douglas ‘showed distinct talent as an actor’.
    Mac shared the enthusiasm of almost every Hastings schoolboy through the generations for tales of war and adventure – Conan Doyle’s Sir Nigel and The White Company – ‘the fights are simply ripping’ – together with all of Kipling, especially the Just So Stories . He loved the school cadet corps, and relished any opportunity to use firearms – there were no guns at home. His toys were those of his time: Meccano, model soldiers, cigarette cards. The arrival of a new Gamages’ catalogue was a big event. He was increasingly fascinated by the countryside. Roaming the fields and woods around Stonyhurst, he developed a knowledge of birds and plants remarkable in the child of a family which was anything but rustic.
    His language reflected not only the period, but also a natural exuberance which persisted for most of his life. He was always ‘working like blazes’, his latest acquisition was ‘topping’, ‘ripping’, or ‘hairy’. He developed a mild interest in racing, and was extravagantlyimpressed by a schoolfriend whose father owned two horses. To the end, he tolerated Stonyhurst rather than loved it. Thank Heaven, he never considered sending me, his own son, there. Its oppressive devotion left him almost entirely irreligious. The Catholic Church’s spell upon our family was broken. But Mac retained a grudging gratitude for the education he received, for the classical and literary