As quickly as it had begun, it was over. The birds that had escaped the slaughter vanished over the other horizon, calling to each other as if to rally their ranks. The beaters reached the butts, and the dogs and children were set loose to run zigzag, quartering all the area within gun-range as they retrieved the dead birds. Then everyone moved off to the next row of butts, a mile or so distant, and the whole performance began again.
Around one o’clock, there was a break for lunch. Striding downhill, we would come on a small group of ponies, from whose panniered backs my mother and other women would be unloading a gargantuan picnic lunch. Cold game, ham, beef, chicken, hot lamb stew, pastries, baked potatoes, salads, biscuits, fruitcakes—everything was laid out on white tablecloths spread over the grass. Deer-horn drinking cups were filled and refilled with beer and cider and lemonade (except in cold weather, whisky was not provided). Discreetly separated from us by a hillock or a clump of trees, the loaders and dogs shared ‘doorsteps’—jaw-stretching sandwiches several inches thick, stuffed with homemade cheese or last year’s crimson raspberry jam.
Sitting close beside their mothers, shiny-nosed, wind-blown girls—visitors to the castle for the shooting-party—gazed resentfully at neatly-pretty girls who had spent the morning in bed, and, noting how all the young men were clustering around them, bitterly regretted the misplaced enthusiasm that had led them to rise early and go out with the guns. With his head resting on a half-empty cartridge-bag, the oldest member of the party snoozed peacefully, a half-finished glass of port tilting in drowsy fingers.
Duck shooting was similar to grouse driving, except that the guns stood in hides around the edge of a lake. Duck have very good hearing, and absolute silence was necessary. The dog who whined or the child who sneezed as the guns crept toward the woven-willow hides would not be taken on the next duck shoot. Then there were the pheasant shoots, and the partridge shoots, and the killing of capercailzie—those huge blackish-grey birds that haunt the higher fir forests—and of snipe and woodcock and hare. Rabbits, classed as vermin, were shot year-round, hunted out of their burrows by the ferrets that lived in the dog kennels. These ferrets, very nearly as savage as their wild cousins the weasels, could bite their way out of most containers, and were carried to the warrens in small, strong wooden boxes, which the keepers placed in the canvas-and-netting game-bags that they wore slung over their shoulders. Picked from its box by the scruff of its neck, a ferret would be pushed down a rabbit hole, and moments later a rabbit would bolt out and be sent tumbling by a blast of shot. The ferret, following the rabbit in eager, undulating leaps, was caught and returned to its box, where it would scratch and mew in frustration until lifted out for the next burrow. The more intelligent ferrets caught and devoured a rabbit underground whenever they got the chance; this was considered rather disloyal on their part. Even the gentle roe-deer were shot—not for sport but because of the damage they did to the crops. Nobody would have minded if they had simply eaten their fill of oats and turnips and gone on their way, but they trampled the grain they did not nibble and in the turnip fields wandered from row to row, taking single bites that let in the rain and ruined twenty roots for each one that they consumed.
When the men tired of killing birds and beasts, they turned their attention to fish. The wide river that flowed almost under the walls of the castle teemed with fins; one had only to dangle a line from the bank or to wade, rubber-booted, through the clear, stone-floored shallows to be almost certain of hooking a silver-scaled salmon or a wriggling brown-speckled trout. Before we were judged old enough to hold a rod, my sister and I contented ourselves with trapping minnows and sticklebacks and mysterious Sargasso-sea elvers in the ornamental burn. Or we went to the upland loch, where a boat was kept, and we could linger in the autumn evenings, poised as if on a sheet of glass, while trout rose secretively in the dusk and the midges browsed on our unprotected hands.
The loch had an island, on which there was a ruined stone summerhouse. Underneath, steps led down to a damp and echoing cavern; before the invention of refrigerators, my ancestors had had the ice of the lake cut into blocks and stored here, resurrecting it the following summer to chill their sorbets and trifles. It lacked only a genie to be Aladdin’s cave; we hid a shining new copper penny there, confident that before our next visit it would be transformed into gold.
The abundance of game on the estate did not, of course, escape the notice of poachers, against whom the gamekeepers waged an incessant and, at times, bloody war; because the poachers were often local men and feared recognition by a vigilant gamekeeper, they wore masks—a habit that gave them an aura of sinister mystery. The most frightening of the poachers were not, however, the ones who worked by night but the pearl poachers, who operated in broad daylight. The river that ran past the castle held freshwater oysters, which produced quite large pearls. To find these oysters, one had to wade through the shallows carrying a glass-bottomed wooden box, which, when lowered slightly below the surface, allowed one to see clearly under the water. Thieving as they did for monetary gain, and not, like the game poachers, for food, the ragged pearl poachers—mostly strangers to the estate—were a menacing breed.
One bright day in late spring, my father was dressing to go to Edinburgh. Normally, for a journey so far south, he would abandon the kilt that he wore at home and put on an ordinary trouser suit, because, although Edinburgh was the capital of Scotland, to us northern highlanders it ranked as lowland, and in the lowlands we wore English clothes. We called ourselves ‘Scotch’ (never ‘Scottish’), and we referred to men who wore kilts in Edinburgh—or, horror of horrors, outside Scotland—as ‘damn Scotch’. Men who got married in London wearing highland dress were also ‘damn Scotch’, and so were people who (except at the Caledonian Ball in Park Lane) danced reels south of the border. Whether from politeness or a less commendable feeling of superiority, we never criticised the dress of foreigners, in which category we included the English. They could wear tartan whenever or however they liked.
But this spring morning my father was putting on not an ordinary suit but a medieval uniform of hunting green, for he was going to Edinburgh to take up his duties as an Archer. The Royal Company of Archers, a sort of part-time regiment, formed the King’s personal bodyguard in Scotland, and was elected from Scotsmen who had distinguished themselves in one way or another.
The uniform consisted of trousers and a tunic of green cloth, trimmed with a black braid on crimson velvet. Round the waist was a black leather belt, the gilded buckle inscribed with the royal crest; from the belt hung a short sword of the type used by the Romans, and, next to the sword, an arrow-wiper. Nobody seemed to know whether this was to be used before the first shot, so that no particle of dust should impede the arrow’s flight, or to remove blood after the arrow had been retrieved from the corpse of an enemy.
When he was dressed, my father slung a bow case, also trimmed with gilt and velvet, over his left shoulder, and on his right hip he fastened a St Andrew’s Star. Finally, he put on his head a highland bonnet, with a white-and-green silk cockade and an eagle’s feather secured with a gilded badge.
Just as he was checking his appearance in the looking glass, one of my brothers burst into the room and gasped out that there were pearl poachers in the river. My father rushed for the door, grabbing as he ran the nearest weapon to hand, which happened to be his Archer bow. We all raced to the riverbank where, sure enough, we spotted three poachers, hunched up over their glass-bottomed boxes as they moved through the shallows of the opposite bank.
‘What the devil d’you think you’re doing?’ my father bellowed.
The poachers looked up, at first truculent and then bewildered. Accustomed to dealing with tweed-clad gamekeepers and even occasionally with kilted lairds, they clearly did not know what to make of this tall, wild-looking man, dressed in green and brandishing a bow almost as tall as himself. They stared, and then turned and fled.
My father glanced downstream to assess the distance tha
t lay between him and the moorings of the flat-bottomed boat in which he usually crossed the river, knew that if he went to get it the poachers would escape, and, not to be deprived of the pleasure of an arrest, leapt fully clothed into the river. Dogs and children plunged after him, barking and yelling. Like a pack of otter hounds we thrashed across the water, fell on the poachers, and marched them ignominiously off to the village hall, which, in an emergency such as this, did duty as a jail. Then suddenly my father realised what he had done to his uniform. The wet tunic wrinkled over him like a snakeskin on the point of being shed, while the scarlet of the velvet trimmings was streaking the green with pink. The bow case dripped, and water-weed dangled from every one of the gilded buckles and badges. But he only laughed; proud and fierce though my father might be, he was never self-important.
The pearl poachers had been ragged, but so, too, were we children. Practically no attention was paid to what we wore during the daytime. One new set of male or female garments was bought whenever the eldest boy or girl grew out of what he or she was wearing; as there were two big boys and two big girls, this meant that the elder members of the family had, at least, the correct clothes for their sex. The boys always wore kilts and the girls either tweed or tartan skirts. But my nearest sister and I, at the tail end of the family, had to wear whatever fitted us. This was all right when the handed-down boy’s garment was a kilt, but not so good when it was grey flannel trousers or striped football socks brought back from a boarding school in England. Rough hand-knitted jerseys, their snagged stitches cascading from neck to hem, were gathered around our small waists by large dog collars, the brass labels of which proclaimed our names to be Rover or Thunder or Trust. When we got larger and one collar would no longer do, two collars were buckled together to make the belt. On our heads we wore ancient felt hats discarded even by my frugal father as being too shapeless to wear; they looked like wilting mushrooms and were decorated around the brims by mangled collections of fishing flies. On our feet, in winter, we wore heavy black boots made by the village shoemaker, their soles almost solid with nails; in summer, unless the weather was particularly bad, we went barefoot. During a cold summer we wore tennis shoes, but these were not replaced when our feet grew; instead, a section of the canvas was cut away to allow our toes to poke out.
In contrast, our evening dress was very formal. When we graduated from the nursery to the schoolroom, substituting for a bedtime snack of milk and biscuits a five-course dinner with our parents, we stopped wearing the short skirts of our babyhood and put on long dresses that might have come out of the family portraits that gazed down on us as we ate. There was one dinner dress of which I was particularly fond, a grass-green velvet, with a wide lace collar. True, it was the only one I had, and it had been worn before me by all my sisters, but I knew it to be the most beautiful thing I had ever put on. To give it variety—for I wore it almost every night for a year—I made wreaths from the troughs of hothouse flowers that stood around the Big Drawing Room, crowning myself with a different selection each evening. Remembering how much we were discouraged from any show of vanity, I sometimes wonder how I got away with this. Perhaps nobody noticed.
My brothers, who during the day looked more untidy than the village children, came down to dinner in immaculately-pressed scarlet kilts, lace-edged shirts and velvet jackets, the silver buttons of which were embossed with our family crest. Into the tops of their tartan stockings were stuck cairngorm-crowned skeandhus—ridge-backed knives capable not only of killing a man but of ripping him up in the process. The silver buckles on their shoes flashed when, late as usual for the meal, they swung themselves down the rope of the spiral stairs; they dashed into the anteroom just as my father was finishing his piece on the xylophone.
My father’s xylophone stood in the anteroom, along with the silver-lipped letter box, into which all the family dropped their outgoing mail—unstamped, of course, for all the details of life, such as the stamping of letters and the putting of toothpaste onto toothbrushes, were attended to by servants—and the gong, which was beaten by the butler to tell guests when it was time to dress for dinner and later to announce the meal. Father had inadvertently bid for the xylophone at an auction. Finding he could not avoid paying for it, he had brought it home, and, true to his own teaching that nothing in his house should be wasted, he had learned to play it. Or, rather, he had learned to thrash it with a hammer. He had no musical sense, which pained my mother, who had a good ear and considerable talent on both piano and violin. The only tunes he knew were the barrack-room songs of his army days, and these were what he played, helping his performance along by shouting the words.
‘Drunk last night, drunk the night before. So drunk last night, couldn’t get through the door,’ he howled in happy abandon, out of tune, while a line of guests, be-laced, be-furred, and glittering with diamonds, waited patiently to go in to dinner. My mother would pluck at his sleeve. His playing made her extremely nervous, but there was no way of persuading him to give it up. To my father, those sessions at the xylophone were invigorating—the equivalent of the southern before-dinner cocktail.
Surprisingly little drinking went on in the castle, for all that it was near the whisky-distilling part of Scotland. Wine was served at dinner, and last thing at night, just before everyone went to bed, the butler brought in the silver grog tray, with its load of whisky, brandy, soda siphons, and lemonade. At this time, the men usually had whisky-and-soda, while the women sipped lemonade. In the north, for a woman to be seen drinking whisky would have caused a minor scandal, although there were, of course, exceptions. Out shooting, if it seemed that through sheer exhaustion she might hold up the day’s sport, a woman was occasionally revived with whisky-laced coffee. A woman in childbirth might also be given whisky—not if it was an easy birth but if the pains had gone on for several days and nobody could think what else to do.
Medical attention at births was not sophisticated; all the women of the estate, including my mother, were attended—if, indeed, they were attended at all—by a former veterinary surgeon. Perhaps he had taken supplementary exams and qualified as a proper doctor; perhaps he hadn’t. Nobody was quite sure. Rumour had it that he had made the change from animals to people because people were easier to diagnose—they could tell him where the pain was. Because there were six of us—conveniently grouped, and with reliable keepers—he used us children like laboratory rats, to test products about which he was uncertain. Luckily for us, the drugs in his dispensary were basic and uncomplicated, so we suffered no great harm, although I did resent being given the newly fashionable halibut-liver oil. ‘I hear this is vairy guid for the bairns,’ the doctor announced, holding up to the light a bottle of yellowish hue. ‘But I canna get any o’ the village bairns tae sup it—they say it fair maks them reech. Noo, m’lady, if yon youngest one of yourn wis tae tak it, she could tell me if t’wis reely aa that bad, eh?’ And he smiled grimly at my glowingly healthy face. Nobody had any idea how concentrated it was, and for the next two weeks I was given a large soupspoonful of halibut-liver oil after each meal. I howled and retched and ran despairingly around the dining-room table, pursued by my mother carrying the hated bottle. I stank of fish—my hair, my hands, my clothes—until, finally, my mother reported to the doctor that perhaps the village bairns had been right after all; it really was undrinkable. A year or two later, the same oil came out in measured drops sealed in capsules.
The doctor was one of the very few men who could get away with teasing my father, and in return he tolerated my father’s libellous remarks about his medical skill. I remember him surprising my father once in the act of tying me up into a brown-paper parcel, to find out if it would—in theory, at least—be cheaper to send children to London by train or post. The doctor watched with interest while my arms and legs were secured with string. This part was easy, for, convinced that my father really intended to post me, I was paralysed with fright; but the next stage, when my father had to fit a square piece of paper around a mor
e or less circular child, was more difficult.
‘Hoo aboot sendin’ ane or twa tae the orphanage, if you’re that determined tae thraw them oot?’ the doctor said, putting a helpful thumb on a knot that my father was struggling to tie.
‘Good heaven, man, they’d be better off in a byre,’ my father retorted with spirit. He took a keen interest in the welfare of the local orphans, but because the doctor was on the governing body of the grim grey building in which they were housed he never lost an opportunity to attack the administration. Half suffocated inside the brown paper, I struggled helplessly.
‘If you’re nae wantin’ tae hae me back tae sign a death certificate, mebbe you’d better mak some holes in yon parcel, tae let in the air,’ the doctor said, and quickly slammed the door behind him.
* * *
My father’s own childhood had been extremely harsh. The elder of two brothers, he had been rejected by his mother, who idolised the younger boy. Many years later my own mother told me that when she had accepted his proposal of marriage he had wept, so unable had he been, up to that moment, to believe that anyone could love him. He confided to her that his earliest memories were of hiding his head under his pillow so as to conceal his misery when—as always happened—his mother kissed his brother goodnight and then left the room without even approaching his own bed.
His father also treated him with the utmost severity; neither parent ever gave him a present either at Christmas or on his birthday, and when at the age of 13 he went to Eton his parents neither visited him nor allowed him to come out for such school festivities as the cricket match between Eton and Harrow, which was held annually in London and to which all the boys traditionally went. Nor did his life much improve as he grew older, for although he joined a dashing regiment—the 12th Lancers—his father gave him no allowance, with the result that although his brother-officers liked him and nicknamed him Remedy (short for ‘Remedy-for-the-blues’), he was continually teased about money; his friends, knowing the size of his father’s estate, simply could not believe that he had no income other than his pay—in those days very small—and they looked on his refusal to order wine with his meals as a sign of eccentricity.
A Childhood In Scotland Page 7