‘Sit up straight! Knees in! Heels down!’ yelled my father as the horse rocketed out of control over the jumps.
But it was no good. I always fell off. Alas, no fall, unless it resulted in unconsciousness or a visibly broken limb, excused me from the rest of the lesson. It never seemed to occur to my father to teach me how not to fall off; trial and error was his method, and because my errors were so painfully obvious the trials continued.
In contrast, the pony rides that we took on our own were filled with delight. No matter in which direction we set out, we seldom reached in an afternoon the boundary of the estate, and, as each direction had its own particular enchantment, we sometimes gave the ponies their heads and let them go where they pleased.
To the north lay the river and the dark coniferous forestry plantations. No bridge crossed the river near the castle and we would ford our ponies through the water, their unshod feet nimble on the boulder-strewn banks; climbing out, they shook their stocky, unclipped bodies, sending a rainbow of water drops arching through the sunshine. In the plantations lived the deer—not the heavy-antlered, red deer of the mountains but gentle, timid, roe deer, who fled from us, their white scuts bobbing like rabbit tails, down the fern-edged, moss-carpeted aisles of the forest.
Or we might go west, toward the foothills of the Grampians, bracken-covered, birch-decked, their flanks scored by busy, tumbling streams. Here lived all the animals that, driven from the lowlands by the advance of agriculture, were neither skilful nor tough enough to survive the more rigorous life of the mountain tops. Rabbits bounded in and out of sandy burrows and fought desperate, doomed battles with predatory weasels; coots and snipe disputed possession of the secret pools; voles and water-rats tunnelled the banks of the streams, while their small relations, the field mice, hurried through the coarse grass. Only the flies, following our ponies in relentless swarms, marred the perfection of the afternoons.
South and east, fertile land dotted with farms stretched away toward the distant sea. There were about a hundred dwellings in the estate, and we knew them all. The sister next to me—the elder Child—had an especially close relationship with our father’s tenants, and was welcomed wherever she went; farmers’ wives, their homespun skirts covered with aprons fashioned from discarded sacks, would come to their doors as we rode by, inviting us in for milk and oatcakes. The oatcakes cooked over open farmhouse fires were infinitely more delicious than the ones we were given at home; sometimes we would arrive just when they were being made and would watch the thinly rolled mixture of coarse oats and beef dripping being placed on the black iron griddle and swung on a hook and chain over the peat fire. The smell of the crisping oatcakes mingled not unpleasantly with that of warm woollen clothing, and with the lingering steam from the latest batch of boiled potatoes, for in many farmhouses mid-day dinner consisted only of a big bowl of plain boiled potatoes, washed down by milk.
Sometimes, after lessons, a combination of hunger and greed drove us to raid the kitchen garden. like most castles in Scotland, ours was surrounded by lawns, embellished by ornamental trees and banks of flowering shrubs, but it had been—as was reported by an early-nineteenth-century writer—the ‘fashion to remove the fruit and vegetables to an inconvenient distance from the cook’, and our main, or kitchen, garden, with its big vegetable patches—each covering nearly half an acre and edged with herbaceous borders—was about a quarter of a mile away. Since it was ringed by a high granite wall and guarded by a dour head gardener, backed up by garden-boys, raiding this garden was no easy undertaking. The only door that was not overlooked was kept locked; my mother had a key, but we never thought of asking for it, so natural did it seem to us that we should be excluded.
Secretly, we made rope ladders, and prospected adjacent trees for overhanging branches. Although we were happy to scramble over the wall and grab anything that could be eaten—from peas to unripe apples—the citadel to be stormed was the grape house, where hung cosseted, steam-ripened pendants of black grapes destined for our parents’ dinner parties. An attack on the grape house demanded tactical planning, the deployment of all available children, and particular courage on the part of whoever was chosen for the final assault. As the doors of the grape house were always locked, the only way of getting in was through the iron ventilation louvres, which, even when fully extended, offered a passage only about nine inches high. Usually we succeeded in capturing a bunch and getting clean away, but one awful day the head gardener caught my second brother half-way in through a louvre and, quickly winding the crank that shut it down, imprisoned him by the waist. Standing outside, he beat my brother’s lower half with the handle of a garden spade, while on the other side of the glass my poor brother’s upper half yelled helplessly.
If we lacked time to go riding or courage to raid the garden, we could always find something to do at the Home Farm, whose buildings formed a square contiguous to that of the garden. It offered almost endless diversions. At one end, raised above the level of the farmyard, lay the duck pond, complete with an island. Here were watered not only the huge slow-moving farm horses but also the riding horses, whose stables faced the pond. Fat ducks destined for the table fished, tails up, in the shallows, and moorhens darted warily in and out of the surface-trailing branches of the willow trees that edged the shores. This was a good place to try out my brothers’ homemade canoes, which had to be tested before we could risk taking them on the river; resolutely, we paddled across the venturesome waters of the Mediterranean or the Pacific, to beach our craft on the reedy island, transmogrified for a single summer afternoon into Crete or Mindanao.
The duck pond also provided a reservoir of waterpower for the circular saw that cut up logs, and for the threshing machine that separated the oats. There was little difference in the texture of the oats roughly ground to make our porridge and that fed to the animals, and if our next meal seemed a long time away we would sometimes climb up the steep wood ladder that led to the storeroom above the thresher and, thrusting our hands into the animals’ bins, stuff our mouths with the raw grain intended for the horses.
Next to the threshing machine was the dairy, with its uncovered buckets of milk and large flat pottery bowls in which the cream rose thick to the surface, to be skimmed off by the dairy-maid and thumped into butter in a barrel-like hand-worked churn. Beyond the dairy lay the cow shed. Here in semi-darkness stood the rows of placid milk cows, munching sliced turnips as they awaited the arrival of the milkers with their three-legged stools. In a heavily-barred enclosure, the bull—ring-nosed—snorted and stamped, while, outside, the wobbly-legged calves lifted their soft, wet noses and licked our proffered hands with rough, hesitant tongues, perhaps mistaking our outstretched fingers for the udders of the mothers from whom they had been so summarily parted.
In the creosote shed, a long tank filled with the black creosote in which fence posts were soaked looked like a slit in the surface of the earth; gazing at the crocodile shapes of the half-submerged logs I was convinced that the tank was bottomless, and that the viscous liquid was oozing directly from the centre of the world.
Once my elder brother, dancing cheerfully on the logs in an attempt to make them rotate under his feet, fell in, and was blinded for a week. White-faced, he lay in bed, with the curtains of his room drawn, while my father—resolutely showing no signs of perturbation—sat by the tiny crack of light that was allowed to enter, first reading him White Fang and then—so that the time would not be entirely wasted—selected pages of Chambers’ Encyclopaedia.
In one corner of the farmyard, near to the creosote shed, was the carpenter’s workshop. The carpenter, who did all the woodwork not only in the castle and on the Home Farm but on the other houses and farms on the estate, was dry and thin, like one of his own seasoned planks, and not given to any unnecessary talking, but as he usually had an apprentice working under him we could learn a lot simply by listening to the lessons that he gave. Perched on a trestle, we watched while he taught the mysteries of dovetailing a
nd mitring, of planing and pinning and rebating and chamfering. Rasp saws, tenon saws, hacksaws and keyhole saws were lifted from their wooden pegs and their different uses explained and demonstrated. Round nails, oval nails, French nails, panel pins and tacks were hammered home, to show their proper functions. Evil-smelling pots of glue simmered on a paraffin stove by the half-open door, and heavy wooden vices groaned as, with a twist of an oaken bar, they were tightened around the homegrown pine planks.
On the north side of the farmyard stood the bleak and comfortless bothy, where the unmarried farm labourers lived. Stone-floored below and virtually windowless above, lacking all indoor sanitation, the only thing that could be said for it was that it was, at least, no worse than the accommodation the men would have found on any other farm. It was ruled by a hard-working widow, who fed her ravenous charges on great mounds of boiled potatoes, basins of scalding-hot porridge, pint mugs of fresh milk, and a sort of thick broth made from onions, turnips, carrots, barley, and the carcases of rabbits. It was rough but healthy food, and must have suited the inhabitants of the bothy, for they worked and frolicked with unflagging vigour.
The bothy looked straight out onto the central midden—as large as a tennis court—where all the manure from the stables and cow-shed was dumped. My accident-prone elder brother, chased across the farmyard by a bull, was saved from a goring by running across the midden; comparatively light in weight, he raced over the straw-threaded surface, while the pursuing bull, bellowing furiously, sank up to its stomach in the steamy morass. Hens and great grey rats, bigger than the ones that gnawed and fought in the walls of the castle, lived on the midden; the hens’ eggs were sent in to the castle kitchen whether they had been lifted from a clean straw nest in the barn or from beside a spatter of fresh cow dung in the farmyard. Nobody minded.
Around the corner of the cart shed, where the great wooden-wheeled farm carts squatted, their shafts pointing up, awaiting the black-harnessed, brass-decorated farm horses, was the kennel of the shooting dogs. We could hear them long before we rounded the cart shed. They bayed and barked and whined and yelped in their wire-netting enclosure, and when we neared the gate they hurled themselves against the netting in a struggling mass of legs and tails and white-fanged, vermilion-edged jaws. Fed only once a day, they ate rapaciously, wolfing down meals that were not so very different to those ladled out in the bothy, except that in the kennels the rabbits were boiled complete with skins. Behind the slavering dogs, the ferrets in their cages darted from side to side, their snakelike heads weaving nervously.
In spite of their ferocious appearance, the shooting dogs were well trained. They had to be, for in the life of the castle shooting came, in theory, second only to religion. In fact, of course, it took precedence over absolutely everything.
As the summer wore on and the grain ripened in the broad meadows, the thoughts of all the male inhabitants of the castle turned inexorably to slaughter. Killing was not only their favourite pastime; it was also the activity for which they had had the most intensive training and for which their upbringing and tradition best suited them. But whereas their ancestors, feeling the blood lust rising in their veins, would snatch a claymore from the wall and set out to decimate a neighbouring clan, the men of my childhood confined their murderous intentions to the animal kingdom. Strangely, none of them seemed consciously to think of this in terms of a destruction of life; it was more a test of skill, on a par with the archery contests of previous centuries.
As soon as they were tall enough to hold a gun—which was when they were about eight years old—the boys learned to shoot, first with a four-ten, then with a 20-bore, and finally, when they were fully grown, with a man-sized 12-bore shotgun. A boy’s coming-of-age present from his father might be a matched pair of Purdey or Holland & Holland guns, costing considerably more than a year’s wages of a groom or keeper.
Small boys practised for hours, intent on knocking empty cans off fence posts; my brothers went one better, using my nearest sister and me as moving targets for their air guns, which, being relatively harmless, they were allowed to use without supervision. The lawn behind the castle was planted with groups of rhododendron bushes, and we were made to run from one clump to another while our brothers took pot-shots at us. It all, they assured us—as we sprang, howling, from one bush to another—helped to improve their eye.
To have a good eye—that is, to be both quick and accurate with a gun—was a guarantee of popularity in the world of men. A young man who could be relied on to bring down any bird that flew within range was sure of many invitations to shooting parties; a host anxious to improve the sporting record of his estate was even known to invite someone he positively detested, if by so doing he would increase the quantity of the kill. That the game record, or bag, should be good was not only a matter of pride and a source of income—any game not eaten or given away was sold—but also a kind of insurance against hard times, for should lack of money force a landowner to let his shooting, the price he got for it would be in direct ratio to the amount of game that had been bagged in previous years. Except that toward the end of the season word might go out to spare the young hens to ensure an adequate breeding stock for the following spring, there was no limit to the number of birds that could be shot.
The opening of the shooting seasons varied with the type of game. By far the most important was that of the grouse—August 12th. The preparation for this took up much of the year. As soon as the snow had melted from the grouse moors in the spring, the keepers set to work repairing the butts. These were small hides made of piled-up turf, placed in lines over the moors just over two gunshot lengths apart. The weather was watched anxiously for conditions favourable to the survival of the baby birds; a really wet spring could drown many of them soon after they came out of the egg, and exceptionally cold weather might result in death from starvation. The grouse fed on young heather shoots; if icy conditions prevented the heather from sprouting, they died. To encourage new growth in the heather, one-seventh of all the moor was burned each autumn; day after day, fires raged across the hilltops, kept from spreading into areas where they were not wanted by a small army of workers, who beat out the flames with long-handled birch brooms. If the fires seemed to be getting out of control, the men might spend several days continuously on the hills.
At the beginning of August, it was impossible to get a sleeping-berth on the night train from London to the north; every one had been booked months in advance by the friends of the grouse-moor owners, travelling to Scotland to shoot on the Twelfth. The castle was always crammed with visitors. All the spare rooms were opened up, and every leaf inserted into the dining-room table. The strong-room doors were swung open, and the extra silver was counted and cleaned and carried upstairs, where it joined the reserve sets of silver candelabra, whose many-armed splendours were being assembled and polished by the green-aproned hall-boy.
Each gun—the man who did the actual shooting—brought with him his dog and his loader and, if he had one, his wife, though women were not encouraged to appear on the moors, where their bright clothes were thought to frighten the birds. (Bright meant any colour distinguishable from mud.) Children, however, were acceptable, as they could be used along with the dogs to retrieve the shot birds. We would hang about hopefully, gauging the right moment to ask if we could join a gun in his butt; often we would not dare to ask, but would, like a supernumerary retriever, simply tag along, hoping that the gun would not notice us and send us home.
On the muddy floor of the butt lay the gun’s dog, quivering and dribbling with excitement. I knelt beside it, oblivious of the sharp heather stalks that dug into my bare knees. Relaxed yet alert, a firearm resting lightly across his knees, the gun sat poised on his shooting-stick; beside him squatted his loader. While we waited, nobody moved or spoke, and in the still, upland air one could hear, mingled with the hum of the bees collecting nectar from the heather, the lowing of cattle down in the valley and the chuff-chuff-chuff of the single-carriage loc
al train as it set off from the village station on its hour-long journey to the sea.
Then it began, at first so faintly that I strained forward, wondering if I had really heard it—the sound of the beaters approaching across the moor. I craned my neck to peer over the edge of the butt and was instantly shoved down by the loader’s hand. But I had seen what I wanted. Along the horizon, the beaters were advancing, shouting and waving white flags. In line abreast, they closed in on the butts, and for all the movement in the narrowing strip of ground that lay between, it seemed that there was no living bird on the moor. Then suddenly it was as if the heather had exploded. Birds rose by the hundred and hurtled toward the guns, crying their raucous call that sounded so much like ‘Go back, go back, go back!’ as they flew. Guns were fired and reloaded and fired again so quickly that their movement between the hands of loader and firer blurred—when the birds came over well, it was not uncommon for both firearms of a pair to get almost too hot to handle.
The noise was deafening. Crouched at the feet of the gun, with the cartridges exploding within inches of my head, I tried to hold my hands over my ears without letting go of the chain of the dog, who, excited beyond bearing, was threatening to forget his training and go barking out among the falling birds. The birds plummeted down from the sky, their brown bodies thumping into the heather. I cowered back under the overhanging wall of the butt, for to be struck by a falling grouse could be as painful as receiving a hard-hit tennis ball straight in the face.
A Childhood In Scotland Page 6