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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 October1909; 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