In the lofty-ceilinged, shelf-encircled library there was also plenty of space for their carpentry bench, stamp collections, chemistry sets, air guns, catapults, and other impedimenta. On the mantelpiece, leaning up against the silver candelabra that lit their way to bed, was a board on which they nailed skinned rat-tails, for which my father paid them a penny a dozen. The castle was full of rats.
On the fifth floor were the maids’ rooms; the young girls shared a dormitory, chaperoned by the head housemaid, who had a private, adjoining bedroom. Just above this floor the stair carpet stopped, revealing the granite of the treads; as one clambered up the final flight of stairs, past the lofts piled high with mysterious boxes, with cobwebbed trunks and disused furniture, one found oneself unconsciously walking on tiptoe, to avoid the clatter of heels on stone.
The top of the tower was flat, and was divided into two parts. Where the stairs ended, a trapdoor led to the higher part, an enclosed area a few yards square, carrying only the flagstaff, and at one side, a heavy, nail-studded door opening onto a lead-covered rooftop, surrounded by iron railings. Here were the chimneys of the central tower—the big one, which plunged straight down to the dining room, and the smaller ones leading to the library, schoolroom, and other rooms in the tower. Here, too, were the mystery chimneys, from fireplaces in rooms that nobody could find. We tied a bell on the end of a rope and lowered it down these chimneys. Yard after yard of rope vanished over the edge of the chimney pot. One of us jerked the end while others ran round the rooms below, listening for the sound of the bell; it rang, muffled, in the thickness of a wall. What was there? We listened from every angle in the passages and nearby rooms, and measured the walls. Yes, there was space for a room. But where was the door? Where were the windows? We searched the outside walls, but two hundred years previously a tax had been imposed on windows, and many had been bricked up; some of these bricked-up windows were painted on the outside to look as if they were still in use, and some were not. We never found the hidden rooms.
Around the base of the main chimney were the ‘prisoners’ seats’—small stone projections like flat-topped gargoyles, placed about five feet apart. Between them, heavy iron rings were set into the stone. We were told that this was where prisoners had been chained, each sitting on a stone seat with his hands tied on either side to a ring, exposed to the fatal winter weather, but as the top floor of the tower had only been added in about 1700, by which time these sort of customs had presumably died out, it might be that the seats had been moved, and that the story was a handed-down memory of the use they had served at a previous, lower level.
Just below the rooftop railings was the elephant—a yard-high bas-relief of an animal looking like a cross between a mammoth and a sheep dog. The legend was that during the building of the tower a man had come home from abroad with a wild story of an animal that had a tail at both ends; nobody believed him, so he incorporated a carving of the animal into the tower, saying that time would prove that he was not a liar.
A considerable part of my father’s twelve-thousand-acre estate could be seen from the top of the tower. It was in many ways an ideal estate, for, except that it lacked a seashore, it contained virtually every type of land and sport to be found in Scotland. Away to the north, farm lands and forests ran right to the boundary of the estate on the south flank of a volcano-shaped mountain, some seven miles distant. South and east, more farm lands—green and gold, wooded and fenced, traced with streams and dotted with the granite houses of the tenant farmers—stretched toward the sea and the county town, twenty miles away. To the west lay the foothills of the Grampians; on that side, the boundaries were not visible even from the roof of the castle. Partridge skimmed over the oat and turnip fields of the fertile lowland farms, and fat pheasant peered from the beech woods and coverts. The forests provided timber for the sawmills and shelter for deer, black game, and capercailzie. Streams tumbled their way through the valleys, to meet in the wide salmon river that flowed past the castle walls, and in the pine forests that covered the hills between the farming land and the grouse moors lay a dark loch, the calm of its waters disturbed only by the splash of a fishing heron or the soft plop-plop of rising trout. In spring and summer, it was one of the prettiest places on earth, and when autumn came, baring the trees and covering mountain, forest and field with snow, its prettiness did not fade but was transformed to beauty.
My father had no time for contemplating the loveliness of his estate. He was far too busy running it. This was not made any easier by the fact that he had had absolutely no preparation for the task, being by both training and inclination a cavalry soldier. In my grandfather’s time, nobody thought of teaching a boy how to manage his inheritance; if he was the eldest son, it was assumed that he would know how to act when the time came for him to succeed. I was too young to know how my father ran the estate, but where his children were concerned he was an implacable disciplinarian, dealing with us in a strictly military manner.
No matter what we were doing, if either he or my mother came into the room we had to spring up and stand to attention beside our chairs, and at meals we sat bolt upright, like puppets suspended by strings from the ceiling, afraid to open our mouths except to put in food. ‘Sit up!’ ‘Shut up!’ ‘Get up!’—the commands were barked at us; my father’s word was law, and to disobey him resulted in instantaneous punishment.
Boys were beaten, with a cane that was kept in an umbrella-stand in the hall, along with golf clubs, old polo sticks, and the shepherd’s-crook walking-stick that my father carried when he went to highland games. I don’t remember what punishments were meted out to my elder sisters, but possibly because I may have ranked as a sort of substitute boy (my father, before I was born, having hoped that I would be one, because—being the last of his line—he was anxious to make absolutely sure of the succession) I was also occasionally beaten, although usually I was only severely smacked. The culprit was always sent to fetch the cane. Once, when I was sent to get it, I was crying so hard with terror that I could not see it through my tears; I crept back to my father and sobbed out that I could not find it. He stormed downstairs, located it, and beat me twice—once for the misdemeanour and once for being a coward. After that, I always managed to find the cane, no matter how much I was crying.
My mother, who had had a very warm and loving relationship with her own father, did everything she could to stop these physical assaults. ‘Don’t, dearest, don’t!’ she would cry, trying to hold back my father, and then, when she saw that he was not to be restrained, she would run from the room. Afterwards, weeping in our darkened bedrooms, we would hear across the courtyard the sound of her playing Chopin on the Big Drawing Room piano; this was her way of telling us that she was thinking of us. It would never have occurred to her to come personally to comfort us; that would have been tantamount to undermining my father’s authority.
Usually, I knew what I was being punished for—I had broken a rule and was fairly resigned to paying the price—but sometimes I was punished for a crime that I did not know was a crime, and then misery and bewilderment were added to the physical pain. Once, I was thrashed for waiting outside the dining-room door to eat the scraps that came out from a grown-up dinner party; my father saw me and, thinking I had been eavesdropping, beat me instantly, without giving me time to explain that I was there only because I was hungry. Not that I would have had the courage to tell him—I would have feared he would speak to my nanny, who was meant to feed me, and she would have punished me instead.
I was, in fact, never quite sure who was in charge of me. I feared every adult in my life with the exception of my mother, and even she, I knew, was easily overruled by my father. Anxiously I struggled to find some pattern in the rules by which I was governed, some line of conduct which, if carefully followed, would ensure at least a reasonable safety from smacks and reprimands, but I never succeeded. Whatever I did was sure to be wrong in the eyes of at least one of the grown-ups, so that the best I could do was to try to a
void annoying my father, whom I feared most of all.
The question of manners was especially confusing, for governesses often had different rules from parents. At breakfast, a governess might deprive me of brown sugar on my porridge—sugar being a luxury, for salt, put in during the cooking, was the more normal flavouring—because, while waiting to be served, I had not placed my hands neatly on the table, one on each side of my plate; at luncheon, my father would send me out of the room precisely because I had put my hands on the table—he thought they should be clasped in my lap.
So large was the castle, and so varied the occupations of its inhabitants, that often one person was unaware of what had been said or done by another. Nanny would send me down to the kitchen to fetch sugar for nursery tea; as soon as I opened the kitchen door, Cook would tell me to go away, and then for half an hour I would wander up and down the long corridors that separated nursery from kitchen, trying to decide what to do. Perhaps I could pilfer some from the canisters in the pantry, but if the butler caught me he would be sure to reprimand me; Cook might get really angry if I dared go back to the kitchen; Nanny would stand me in the corner if I returned sugarless. I stood in the darkening corridor, tears dripping into the empty sugar bowl.
It was frequently impossible for me to know exactly what I was meant to do. If I wandered into the library my brothers, busy with their boat-building, would tell me to go and play with my big sisters, but they, when I edged diffidently into the boudoir, would break off their fascinating boarding-school conversation, stare at me coldly—and order me to go back to the boys. Mother would reprimand me for wearing unpolished shoes, but when I went to change them a maid would refuse to give me another pair because the hall-boy, slamming the door of the boot-room behind him as he ran to his next task, had flatly refused to polish any more. The lines of communication were confusingly tangled; I felt perpetually puzzled and unsure.
So, no doubt, did the hall-boy, who lived in awe of the butler. The butler was the most senior of all the indoor servants, and was in charge of the dining-room, the wine and the silver, although my father always retained the keys of the wine cellar and of the walk-in strong-room which housed the spare silver. As well as the hall-boy, the butler had a footman to help him. All our footmen were called John, irrespective of what name the parson had bestowed on them at baptism. My father announced firmly that he couldn’t be bothered to learn a new name every time the footman changed, and for the same reason the hall-boy who, as well as cleaning shoes and carrying wood, cleaned the steel knives in a machine like a small hurdy-gurdy and was virtually the butler’s personal slave, was always called George.
Another of George’s jobs was to refill and trim the oil lamps with which the castle was lit. Every morning he scurried round the castle, collecting the lamps from drawing rooms and bedrooms and bathrooms and passages and halls and bearing them to his den below stairs where, in semi-darkness, he polished and refilled them for the evening. As dusk fell the lamps, already lit, would be borne back into the principal rooms by the butler and footman, walking one behind the other. In lesser rooms, such as the schoolroom, we lit our own lamps.
The butler and footman also waited on us at meals, handing round the food, while the hall-boy reeled to and from the kitchen, carrying a heavy mahogany tray piled high with plates and dishes.
Next to the butler in authority came the cook. She ruled the stone-flagged, raftered kitchen like the captain of an old-time sailing-ship, giving orders to her second-in-command (the kitchenmaid) and to the luckless scullery-maid, who, isolated in the dungeon-like scullery that opened off the kitchen, spent her days—and often her nights as well—scrubbing a seemingly endless cascade of dishes and greasy pots. The cook never washed so much as a spoon; she stood at the huge pine table—so frequently scrubbed that its surface resembled a wind-eroded desert—conjuring butter and flour into pastry of a cloud-like lightness, or, the butterfly back bow of her white apron turned to the room, stood at the black coal stove whisking Sauce Mousseline or Crème Brûlée with a tiny sheaf of bleached birch twigs.
‘If you don’t brace up, my girl, it’s back to the bothy with you!’ she would threaten the kitchenmaid, if the willing girl was a moment late in handing her some needed utensil or ingredient. The bothy was the house where the unmarried farm labourers lived; it was run by the kitchenmaid’s mother, and the girl well knew that if she was sent back she would have to work even harder than she did in what the servants called ‘the mansion house’. She ran from side to side of the cavernous kitchen, trying desperately to anticipate the cook’s wishes.
Upstairs, the head housemaid, her white apron so stiff with starch that I could hear it rustle down the long corridors moments before I was aware of the sound of her footsteps, chivvied the second-housemaid and the under-housemaid. The under-housemaid, until she worked her way up to the rank of second-housemaid, came rather low in the servant hierarchy, and successive under-housemaids were sometimes more or less indistinguishable one from another. Indeed, when one was dismissed—they hardly ever left of their own accord, for jobs were not easy to find in the highlands—the girl who was to be her replacement was often chosen by size. If a girl fitted the uniform of the one who had left, she got the job. Sometimes a girl of the wrong size would be taken on by virtue of being the relative or protégée of another servant, and then until she found time to alter her dress she would shuffle disconsolately round the castle, swamped in a garment several sizes too big for her, or, alternatively, with a precociously-developed bosom bursting out of a dress originally bought for a flat-chested schoolgirl.
The housemaids’ work was hard. They swept and dusted the main rooms before the family came down to breakfast, and during this early-morning work they had to fit in the job of waking every member of the family—and any guests who might be staying—with early-morning tea. They carried a brass can of hot water up to each washbasin, and in the winter lit fires in the bedrooms to drive away the frost before people got out of bed, for from November to March the cold in the bedrooms was so biting that it would freeze a jug of water solid overnight. They laid out the clothes of anyone who did not have a personal maid, gave a brief, usually depressing report on the weather, and hurried off to have their own breakfast before starting on the backbreaking task of cleaning the rest of the castle.
As there was no electricity, all the sweeping was done with brooms. Even when damp tea-leaves were scattered over the carpets to absorb the rising dust, this was an inefficient method, and every spring carpets that were small enough to be moved were carried out-of-doors and, suspended on poles slung beneath a particularly large old tree-branch, were beaten by male estate-workers. Eiderdowns were also beaten, escaping feathers—flying upwards for perhaps the first time in fifty years—spiralling joyfully away in the fresh spring breezes. The workers, doggedly belabouring Axminster and Wilton with wicker bats shaped like tennis-racquets, paid scant attention to the fact that the massive branch above their heads had more than once served as a gallows.
Such floors of the castle as were not carpeted had to be scrubbed or polished. Up and down the stairs hastened the maids, bearing buckets and mops and brooms; they staggered down the stone passages, lugging unwieldy pails of soapy water or, their arms piled so high with linen that they could barely see over the top, struggled between bedroom and linen-room and laundry.
The laundry occupied two large rooms off the kitchen yard. There was a washroom and an ironing room, both commanded by a genial, red-armed widow who lived, as did all the employees who were not actually resident in the castle, in a cottage on the estate. One never had a very clear idea of what either she or her two minions looked like, so thickly were they enveloped in the steam from the coppers in which they boiled the clothes. Halfway through the week, the three of them moved from the washroom to the ironing room, where they thumped about with enormous flatirons that were heated on a black iron stove. Although their work was perhaps the hardest of all, they at least had the advantage that, li
ving out, they finished at a definite hour each evening, whereas the housemaids were scurrying around hanging up clothes, turning down beds, and putting in stone hot-water bottles—known as ‘pigs’—until late into the night. My mother told me that her mother had felt that she was being magnanimous when she had decided that her personal maid need no longer wait up each night to help her undress; previously, the girl had remained on duty until my grandmother was actually in bed, which might mean that on the night of a party she did not finish work until the small hours of the morning. We took gleeful pleasure in teasing the housemaids, pursuing them up and down the corridors on toy bicycles or pedal cars, or—using trays as toboggans—hurtling past them unexpectedly on the steep uncarpeted back stairs.
On leaving the nursery, each pair of children was allocated a maid. My brothers were inclined to bully their maid, so they were usually assigned an old, strong-minded one, but my sisters and I had young maids, and although they always treated us with a certain deference we became real friends; the senior servants, on the other hand, dominated them unmercifully.
A Childhood In Scotland Page 3