My father, with the greatest naturalness, dominated absolutely everyone. During meals, from his big chair at the end of the long table, he would talk to visitors or to my mother at the far end of the table. None of us children spoke unless we were spoken to first, and when our father broke off his grown-up conversations to question us about what we had been doing, we were careful to tell him only of the activities of which we were sure he would approve—fishing, shooting, riding, and so on—for if he thought we were occupied in anything he considered idle, like sitting indoors reading on a fine day, he would press-gang us into some activity that he felt was more constructive, such as gathering wood or picking up stones.
Although himself surprisingly well-read, my father thought that the actual act of reading should be confined to hours when nothing more obviously useful could be done; he himself rose at six on pitch-dark winter mornings, to study old family papers in the ice-cold library; he pored over hundred-year-old bundles of letters, marking the tape-tied packets ‘READ’, but unfortunately never noting down any summary of the facts that he must have so diligently gleaned. Equally, he felt that any outdoor activity should, if possible, produce more than one result; when walking round the estate, for instance, he always carried a stick shaped like a golf-club, with a sharp blade where the club-head would normally be. His mind might have dwelt on some problem of estate management but simultaneously his arm swung the stick from side to side, cutting down thistles; a stick almost identical to the one he used is depicted in a fourteenth-century manuscript—St Mary’s Psalter, one of the treasures of the British Library.
* * *
We were not allowed to think that the circumstances of our birth gave us any right to either money or leisure. Privilege, in my father’s opinion, brought with it no rights, only duties, and although he did not allow us to play with the children of his tenants, he was determined that we should not grow up to consider ourselves in any way superior to them. Whatever the tenants through economic necessity made their children do, we were required to do for the sake of our characters. Because the village children had to gather wood for their mothers’ kitchens, we had to do the same for our schoolroom fire, even though our own mother rarely even stooped down to put a log on a fire herself but rang for a servant to do it for her. In winter, therefore, much of our playtime was spent searching the forests for fallen branches. The equivalent work in summer was stone picking. Armed with round wicker baskets, we scoured the rocky upland pastures, carrying stones to the edges of the fields and adding them to the rough walls that separated one field from the next. It seemed in those long, hot summer days as if some devil lurked under the wiry grass, pushing up another stone to replace each one that we laboriously carried to the side of the field. Far below, the river wound through the beech trees of the valley, beckoning us with a promise of deep, cool pools—smooth-pebbled, salmon-haunted. But it was useless to dream of swimming; none of us would dare to stop work without our father’s permission.
Mealtimes held another ever-present fear—that of not getting enough to eat. At the Home Farm—the one that lay nearest to the castle and produced much of the food that was eaten there—the fat cows lowed in their stalls, letting down steady streams of rich, creamy milk, while in the five-acre kitchen garden, gardeners laboured over regimented lines of peas and beans, lettuces and cucumbers and asparagus, cabbages and spinach. Raspberries and strawberries and plums and damsons and cherries and grapes poured into the castle every summer morning, carried shoulder-high by barefoot garden boys, while in the shooting season the gamekeepers, their tweed breeches stained by the blood of their victims, impaled on the sharp hooks of the game larder the delicately-muscled legs of deer and hare, and hung, on nails hammered into the rafters, great clusters of pheasant, partridge, snipe, duck and grouse; the dead birds’ heads, beaks agape, lolled sideways, the cords that circled the radiantly-feathered throats giving each plump body an undeserved air of pendulated felony. Salmon were hauled from the river—struggling on the pointed steel of the gaffs—with such frequency that servants, disdaining the tender pink flesh, insisted that their contracts of service included a clause guaranteeing that salmon would not be served to them more than once a week. Towards the sea rolled the fields of oats, to be ground in autumn between the flat stones of the village mill; in winter, potatoes and turnips and carrots lay heaped in earth-covered mounds, while all the year round pigs and calves died, protesting noisily, in murky farm-yard pens. Almost all this activity was for the purpose of feeding the people in the castle, yet we children seemed perpetually hungry. Our mother never took all six of us to the same children’s party, partly because, if there were competitions, our sheer exuberance caused us to carry off an unfair share of the prizes, but also because between us we would have wolfed down all the trifles and jellies and éclairs. But it never seemed to occur to her that we might have welcomed more food at home.
At luncheon in the dining room, the hall-boy would carry in a tray of heavy silver dishes, and the butler and footman, one behind the other, would advance on the table. As the first dish was handed to my mother, six anxious pairs of eyes would assess the quantity that it held. Nine small rissoles of leftover meat. Well, at least that was fair—one each (our governess ate lunch with us). Then came the potatoes—misery, there were only sixteen. Which of us would get two, and which only one? My mother took a single potato—oh, good. But then my father took four, and gloom descended on those children who were waiting to be served after him. Even the quantity of green peas was avidly estimated, and though we would never have dared to complain while actually at table, the post mortems that took place after meals were acrimonious.
‘You took two spoonfuls of peas—I saw you!’
‘I didn’t.’
‘You did.’
‘Well, perhaps I did have a very small second spoonful, but some of my first spoonful were maggoty.’
‘Greedy pig.’
‘I’m not.’
‘You are.’
And everyone would fall on the floor, fighting.
My parents, who had our welfare very much at heart, cannot have intended us to go hungry, but my mother’s upbringing had been very religious and had instilled into her a firm conviction that it was sinful to pay attention to such worldly things as food. She had been taught that a true Christian ate what was put in front of him and thanked God for it both before and after the meal; to question the taste of what one ate—or, worse, to be interested in the quantity—was almost as wicked as studying one’s own face in the glass to try to find out whether or not one was pretty. As for my father, he thought that to be greedy showed weakness of character—something not to be tolerated either in oneself or in one’s children.
At our table, food was never wasted. ‘Eat up, child,’ my father commanded, if one of us should leave a bit of gristle or fat. (He hardly ever addressed us by name, and when he did he as often as not used the wrong one.) Mournfully, the culprit would force the unappetising morsel into his mouth; if my father suspected that it was not actually swallowed but simply parked behind a tooth to be spat out later, he would order the child to open his mouth for inspection.
What we lacked at luncheon or dinner, though, we made up at the more informal meals of breakfast and tea. Dining room breakfast began with porridge, liberally doused with cream; after the porridge, one could take one’s pick of eggs, bacon, finnan haddie, sausages, kedgeree or grilled kidneys served from lidded silver dishes warmed by heating lamps, and finish with baps or toast or oatcakes, spread thickly with butter and home-made marmalade. Tea was equally lavish. Although between the six of us we were only allowed one cake a week—this vanishing, down to the last crumb, within minutes of being put on the table—there was always an ample supply of freshly-baked scones and drop-scones, of sticky treacly bread and large biscuits known, because of the raisins and sultanas they contained, as ‘squashed flies’. Both at breakfast and tea—except for my mother and the governess—everyone, including my
father, drank milk.
But we had to have reached schoolroom age before we ate in the dining room; as small children, we led almost completely separate lives from the grown-ups. For all that we saw of our parents, they might have lived in a different house. Up to the age of about six, our lives were centred on the nursery, or, to be accurate, the nursery wing, for our nanny’s domain extended to the point where the heavy green baize doors shut off the wing from the rest of the castle, forming a barrier that prevented our parents, leading their grown-up lives in the main part of the castle, from being troubled by the screams of their children.
Screams there were in plenty. We screamed when we were buttoned into our newly-washed liberty bodices; these were heavy cotton jackets worn next to the skin, as stiff as sailcloth and always, on purpose, one size too small, the idea being that it was good for our chests to be ‘supported’. Their freshly-starched edges cut sharply into our tender skin, and the bones that ran down the front and back compressed our ribs unbearably. After a few days, the starch softened and we dressed in comparative comfort until it was time for clean underclothes, when the screams would begin again.
We screamed when nanny smacked us, and, when nanny was out of the room, when the nursery-maid smacked us as well. In theory, only nanny was allowed to administer corporal punishment, but in practice the nursery-maid only waited till nanny was out of earshot to get rid of her own pent-up irritation by slapping any child within reach. Perhaps the nursery-maids smacked us as often to work off the feelings of resentment that they had against the nannies as for any real naughtiness on our part. Nursery-maids, on whom a nanny would pile as much of her own work as possible, did not have an easy life.
Not all our nannies smacked us. My first nanny was kind to me, and I loved her very much. She had gone to work for my grandmother when she was fourteen and my mother was a year or two younger. From under-housemaid she had worked her way up to ladies’ maid, in which capacity she had gone with my mother on her marriage. She married one of the footmen, and later, when he died, she trained as a midwife, returning to our family when children were being born and often prolonging her visits for several years. She wore a starched cotton uniform, on which it was pleasing to rub one’s finger-tips; I toddled behind her as she bustled about the nursery, patting her ample posterior with a dawning tactile delight.
‘Now stop it, you rascal—you’ll wear my nice dress all out!’ And she picked me up and cuddled me, before putting me in my high chair with a silver thimble on the wooden tray to keep me diverted. The sunshine sparkled on the tiny facets of the thimble; outside the open nursery window starlings and sparrows chirped in the ivy. I was happy.
This nanny was an expert at spelling-talk—the art of communicating information not suitable for infant ears by spelling words at speed to another adult, and my eagerness to understand the gossip that passed between her and her cronies awakened in me my first realisation that there was a connection between the alphabet—which I had up to then seen only as a collection of coloured wooden blocks—and potentially interesting words. But she left us when I was still very young, and was followed by a succession of less kindly nannies. All nannies were, of course, known simply as ‘Nanny’.
On the nursery side of the green doors, Nanny’s authority was total. Even the footman, carrying up fresh logs for the fire on the hall-boy’s afternoon off, was berated if he dared drop so much as a sliver of bark on the patterned Turkish carpet of the nursery passage; the butler, with great good sense, never came into the nursery wing at all, choosing to preserve his dignity rather than risk a battle of wills with Nanny. Occasionally, a nanny was friendly with a cook, but more often a blood feud raged between nursery and kitchen. Nanny would complain to my mother about the nastiness of the food, and Cook, spoken to by my mother, would get her own back on the nursery by sending up a dish that was even nastier.
The day started early in the nursery wing. Through the bars of my drop-sided cot, which, as the youngest child, I occupied long after the normal age, I would watch Nanny dressing. Winter and summer, she wore a long-sleeved wool nightdress, and it was a perpetual wonder to me how she managed to dress inside it. First, she would extricate her arms from the sleeves, then a hand would come out from under the hem and lift her wool combinations off the bedside chair. Stays followed, and then a curious band of cotton known as a bust bodice. Black wool stockings, bloomers—everything was ingested by the nightdress, and then, suddenly, off it would come, revealing Nanny almost fully clothed.
Breakfast, which, like the other nursery meals, was carried up from the kitchen by the nursery-maid, was followed by playtime. We had few toys, but those we did have were substantial. In one corner of the nursery, there was a large playhouse of the kind normally erected out of doors, a pile of battered wooden bricks, toy soldiers inherited from my brothers, and sundry rag animals.
Lunch was early, and after it my sister and I would be taken for a walk. Walks with Nanny consisted of a decorous procession down one or another of the drives. Mile-long, lugubrious, these radiated from the castle like the spokes of a wheel; they were lined with huge old beech trees that in winter dripped water and in summer kept off the sun. Walks with the nursery-maid, though more amusing, were rather frightening, for it was important to her to keep us anchored in one place while she slipped away and flirted with the farm workers.
‘Now, you stay there—right there under the apple tree—till I get back. And if you move so much as an inch,’ she would threaten us, ‘the giant’ll come and eat you.’
Legend had it that, once, the mountain that overshadowed the estate had been inhabited by a giant, who came down at night and stole food from the castle kitchen. The inhabitants, understandably annoyed, put bars on the ground-floor windows; the giant, frustrated and furious, went back to the mountain and threw stones at the castle. Although obviously a powerful stone thrower, at seven miles’ range his aim was luckily not accurate; the biggest stone fell short and landed in the river, where it still lay—a boulder the size of a car, by which we judged the level of the water during floods. The mountain had the unmistakable shape of a volcano—could the legend have been a folk-memory of some distant, prehistoric eruption? Whatever the origins of the legend, the bars remained on the windows; I was small enough to slip between them, which persuaded me that a giant’s hands were bigger than my entire body.
Waiting for the nursery-maid, we lay flat on our faces under the tree, whiling away the time by studying the activities of the tiny insects that lived in the grass. Minute green creatures waved antennae thinner than gossamer-threads at other minute creatures; bugs hardly larger than pinheads scaled, with infinite precaution, Matterhorn-peaks no higher than a breadcrumb. Centipedes hastened past, legs moving in agitated undulations; tiny red spiders pounced, like octopodian tigers from another, microscopic world, on prey so infinitesimal that it was impossible to see whether it crawled or flew. The grass, seen through eyes at daisy-level, was as busy as a market-square. But even as we watched, we listened apprehensively for the footsteps of the giant; we knew exactly what they would soundlike—heavy, earth-shaking—and there would, we were convinced, be no escaping the grasp of his vast horny hands. It always seemed an eternity before the nursery-maid returned, her cheeks flushed, the bib of her starched apron creased and faintly smudged with grime.
After tea, we were sent to the drawing room to spend a formal hour with our parents—or, rather, with our mother, because our father was usually still out, or else busy at his desk. In summer, I wore a muslin dress, hand-smocked from neck to waist and tied at the back with a butterfly bow of ribbon; in winter, the dress was velvet, with puff sleeves, worn under a white rabbit-fur coat. The coat was necessary because of the intense cold in the corridors; it was put on before I left the nursery and taken off by Nanny just outside the drawing room door.
My mother sat at the far end of the Big Drawing Room, beside one of the two fires that, in winter, were needed to keep it at a habitable temperature. Almost
always, she had visitors with her; the castle was so isolated that friends or relations who came to stay frequently remained for several weeks, sometimes even months, becoming absorbed into the daily life of the family.
The end of the room where my mother sat was brightly lit, but down by the door at which we entered it was dark. As we emerged from the gloom into the light of the oil lamps, the women would look up from their embroidery, and murmurs of ‘Oh, how sweet!’ or ‘The little dears!’—quickly spoken and even more quickly silenced—would drift towards us. It was not done to praise children to their faces; girls should grow up to think that they were ugly and could be saved from spinsterhood and its attendant miseries only by sheer goodness of character; boys should be taught that they were both stupid and inherently wicked, and that only incessant displays of physical courage and unquestioning obedience to their elders would prevent their ending up in prison or—almost worse—in the colonies.
During the hour spent in the drawing room, the grown-ups played with us, but it was an artificial sort of diversion, a one-sided game governed by rules we did not fully understand. A small porcelain tea set was produced, and make-believe cups of tea were drunk with much smacking of lips and cries (from the grown-ups) of ‘How delicious!’ and ‘Do give me some more!’ Dolls that were kept in the drawing room—small, hard-faced, with cold, uncuddly china limbs—were dressed and undressed, their tiny shoes forced onto their feet and their feathered hats tilted becomingly over their eyes. Picture books were brought out, and the pages turned. ‘Look! What’s this, darling?’
I wasn’t her darling, I longed to shout at the powdered, smiling face of the visitor—I wasn’t anybody’s darling, so far as I knew. And as for the animal in the picture, it was a sheep. Did she really think I didn’t know a sheep when I saw one?
A Childhood In Scotland Page 4