In his ‘ family memoir’ Did You Really Throw it at the Television, renowned war correspondent and military historian Max Hastings has this to say of his eccentric great uncle, Major Lewis Hastings, whose swashbuckling life in South Africa in the early years of the twentieth century was in marked contrast to that of so many members of his family at that time:
‘He adopted a lifestyle so remote from those of his forebears as to deny any notion of inherited values. It was as if 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…Lewis possessed real literary gifts, not least a talent for verse. When he exercise his brain and pen, the results were sometimes remarkable. His accomplishments were much slighter than they might have been because he always chose to please himself, to forswear discipline, to pursue whatever overhead star momentarily seized his imagination…To my father and later myself, when we read of the Hastingses of the nineteenth century, they seemed respectable, hard-working, decent Christian people…Lewis by contrast was more fun than the chaps who got made head of house at school or lived blameless lives…’
In a typewritten poem entitled ‘PLAIN PRAYER’ and inscribed in pencil ‘ by Lewis Hastings ‘ which we found in the Jot 101 Archive recently ( the provenance is unknown) , the former Rhodesian MP, South African farmer and all-purpose adventurer and maverick expresses his contempt for all those people and their values that Hastings writes about in his tribute.
PLAIN PRAYER ( To be recited only at Regimental Dinners, Old Boys Reunions and meetings of the Virgin Uplift Society).
Grant me, O God! Thine aid
Touching this matter of evil
And the pains that follow it.
It is written that no man shall escape wrath
For the guilt that is in him.
But is fall I must
Let me fall for the venal things,
And the little human hells-
Let me avoid the Deeps
Where Dives dwells,
And Lady Mary Toadspit,
And General Wart C.B.,
And Mr Jones
(Not the Swype-Jones, O God,
The Leicestershire ones I mean)
And all the other reputable
Church going,
Superior,
Social ornaments.
Give me the guts to survive
The poison gas of good form.
If crash I must
Let me do it with bloody hands in the open
For it is better to sin than to snigger
On soft chairs in drawing-rooms
Like male and female half-virgins
With orderly minds
And head-masters’ ethics
Whose notion of Christ
Is a highly prosperous member of the Rotary Club
Taking the chair at a Conference
For the limitation of Alcohol and Large Families
Among the Masses.
Give me the strength to escape
The blacker heresies of the broad-minded.
Save me alive
From Lord Beaverbrook,
Dean Inge,
And Henry J. Ford.
Deliver me from satisfaction,
From the cant of clothes and of games,
From most Bishops,
From Public School traditions,
And nearly all Priests;
From bath-proud pot-bellies
Sniffing disdainfully
At the compulsory dirt
And the crowded heroisms of the slums;
From the esteem of the well- brought-up
From taking the common-sense view,
And subscribing to the Morning Post;
From dementia praecox and syphilis
And being considered Sound—
O God !
If any of my departed relatives has any influence
Don’t let it come to that!
O, if you like,
Let me wallow in lost gutters
And sleep with prostitutes—
Let me lose my substance with the Books
And die rigid of two-block dope,
But never, never,
O God of Justice !
Let me become respectable
Down in the Pit
With Dives,
And Lady Mary Toadspit,
And General Wart C.B.,
And Mr Jones,
(The Leicestershire Jones, O God!)
And all the other eligible,
Elevated
Super-select
Pillars of Society.
The novelist Doris Lessing met Hastings in Rhodesia when she was a gawky teenage girl. Her impressions of him will be discussed in a future Jot. [ R Healey]