The hockey party was such a success that all through the Christmas and Easter holidays parties like it were given in the neighbouring castles, the sticks being moved around to whichever laird was to be host to the week’s game. Their summer equivalent, though on a smaller scale, was the tennis party. Resigned to the impossibility of persuading my father to spend money on anything that he personally considered inessential, my mother had sold some of her treasured books to provide a hard court; this gave my sisters a distinct advantage over other girls, whose parents’ grass courts hardly had time for their first mowing before they were again threatened with snow. On Sunday afternoons, white-trousered young men, home from Oxford or Cambridge, would climb out of strap-bonneted sports cars and, to my eyes looking impressively sophisticated and elegant, would sip homemade lemonade under the lime trees that flanked the court as they waited their turn to exhibit their prowess before the admiring girls. Occasionally, the proceedings were enlivened still further by the arrival of foreign young men, sent to Britain to improve their English. The hard tennis court served a double function—in winter it could be flooded, and used for ice hockey; those of us who were too small to join in pushed each other about the ice on wooden kitchen chairs, hugging the encircling netting.
In winter we also went skiing. Even the most watery sun would, when its rays were reflected by miles of unbroken snow, provide enough light to guide us as we searched the lofts for skis. These skis were long, heavy, and rigid—not mountain skis but trekking skis, made for traversing the flat wastes of the Arctic. At the ski runs, we strapped them onto our heavily-nailed winter boots and, having read more about Switzerland than about Scandinavia, precipitated ourselves down the slopes. Nobodytaughtushowtoturnorstop—wejustplunged downhill until we either reached the bottom or fell.
But to reach our ski-runs, we had to journey again through darkness—the darkness of the pine-forests on the lower slopes of the hills. Little snow and still less light penetrated the bushy tops of the closely-planted trees, while underfoot the fallen pine-needles of past years, deepest green rotting into black, muffled the sound of our steps. We might have been swimming in some subaqueous cavern, the sky above the tree-tops roofing us like the surface of water seen from deep under the sea.
Soon after three o’clock in the afternoon, the sun began to sink and, as if to make up in the last half hour for its shortcomings during the day, nearly always produced a magnificent sunset. Hurrying home, we would see the western sky spattered with orange and vermilion, the undersides of the clouds ablaze with scarlet. Pink and grey and clearest lemon-yellow, the high cirrus filaments streamed in the upper reaches of the air. Sombre against the gold of the horizon, homing rooks cawed their way to their untidy nests in the village beeches. Ahead of us would stretch another seemingly interminable winter evening.
Once the wooden shutters were unfolded over the windows, and the heavy curtains—velvet, brocade, or flowered chintz, according to the category of the room they decorated, all both lined and interlined to keep out the cold—were drawn, we were, as far as entertainment was concerned, thrown back on our own resources. Except on Sundays—when the only recreation allowed was making clothes or toys for the orphanage—we played cards, favouring the noisy grabbing types of games, in which the adroit use of an untrimmed finger-nail could ensure the capture of a coveted card. Or we clustered round my elder brother, as he moved the cat’s-whisker of his home-made wireless from place to place on the crystal, and begged to be allowed a turn with the head-phones so as to hear, for a magical instant, the crackling sound of an infinitely-distant voice, or the tinny notes of a far-away, other-world piano. Sometimes we joined the grown-ups in the Big Drawing Room, to make our own music—my mother playing the violin, my nearest sister the piano, and my elder brother the flute; my second brother, anxious to take part but as yet without his future musical ability, played a tin whistle, his small fingers splayed resolutely over what he hoped were the right holes.
From the lofts we hauled down hampers of outdated clothes, and disused screens faced with damask or embossed wall-paper or collages of Victorian or Edwardian pictures, carefully snipped from long-vanished magazines. We dressed up, and using the screens to form wings, backdrop and front curtain, acted plays which—because we had written them ourselves—had parts for everyone, including the dogs. A poker sword flashed as a Greek hero, inviolate behind a breast-plate conjured from a silver-sequined Lanvin bolero, did battle with a monster—its height alarmingly increased by the sable muff that rested on top of its ears—for possession of a wilting maiden, lashed to an Andromeda-rock chair by the ribbons of her bizarrely over-long Molyneux balldress.
We invented many ways of passing the long evenings, but above all, we read. Not having learnt to read until I was seven, I was something of a disgrace in the family; it didn’t seem to occur to anyone that the process of learning was, for me, complicated by the fact that I was being taught by a French governess who, herself confused by the inconsistencies of such English words as ‘cough’, ‘ought’ and ‘bough’, had scant patience with a child who seemed incapable of distinguishing between, for instance, a simple French word such as ‘il’ and the figure eleven. I1 … 11… I1 …11 … no matter how hard I tried, I could see no difference between the two pairs of symbols and, believing me to be not only stupid but also stubborn, my governess refused to explain; her ebony ruler, shaped like a skinny rolling-pin, tapped first the French reading primer, then the arithmetic book, and finally—with petulant force—my knuckles.
Finally, however, I learnt—and immediately became passionately addicted to books. like a clothes-moth concealed in a chest of blankets, I devoured everything within reach and, our nursery books being limited to Beatrix Potter, A.A. Milne, and a few volumes of fairy stories—all of which, from having had them read to me, I already knew by heart—I quickly moved on to the ones that had survived from my mother’s childhood—Robin’s Ride, My Neighbour’s Shoes, Mademoiselle Pourquoi, The Dove In The Eagle’s Nest, Les Malheurs De Sophie, and a stirring epic called Detained In France, which had, appropriately enough, been given to my grandmother for her birthday when, in 1870, she and her parents had been pinned down on the far side of the Channel by the Franco-Prussian war. Then it was the turn of my brothers’ out-grown favourites—The Trail Of The Sandhill Stag, Two Little Savages, The Call Of The Wild, and Scouting For Boys, but soon exhausting the possibilities of building fir-branch tepees and of following paw-marks through the muddier patches of the woods, I turned my attention to my mother’s library in the guard tower and worked my way doggedly through Dickens and Kipling and Scott, interspersed with Dante’s Inferno—illustrated in chilling detail by Gustave Doré—and bound volumes of Punch.
I read anywhere and everywhere; curled up in my father’s big arm-chair—whose high back, designed to keep off draughts, formed an effective barrier against interruptions—in the bath, on horseback, in chapel (the book disguised inside the Jesus-decorated dust-jacket of my bible), and up trees, but especially in bed at night. Our candles were blown out early and we were forbidden to re-light them, but carefully-hoarded pennies could buy batteries for electric torches and I read nightly with my head under the blankets, ears alert for the footfalls of grown-ups who, if they came in unexpectedly, might spot the tell-tale glow; it was, in fact, rather more comfortable to read with the blankets pulled over my head, for in winter the cold in my bedroom was so severe that even to have my fingers above the covers could be quite painful. Dying torch-batteries had their usefulness prolonged by periods of rest—two minutes of reading, with the faint light fading to nothingness, followed by a minute with the torch switched off, during which it miraculously regained its strength. Then two more minutes of reading, eyes racing over the page before the words again became invisible. Then another minute of recuperation, and finally the despairing moment when no amount of rest would revive the battery, and there was no alternative but to drop the book on the floor and wait for sleep.
As a
variant to reading, I wrote. Seated at my birthday-present desk in the deep embrasure of the schoolroom window—the walls of the castle were, at this level, about six feet thick, so the desk fitted easily between room and panes—I would fill exercise-book after exercise-book with adventure stories, the plots modelled on those of John Buchan and Robert Louis Stevenson. With no direct knowledge of the outside world, I drew my backgrounds from random facts gleaned from books of travel and geography, and when, made rash by the excitement of creation, I showed my work to grown-ups the inevitable inconsistencies made them laugh. Discouraged, I abandoned writing, and did not attempt it again for nearly forty years.
The acquisition of the necessary knowledge was made especially difficult by the fact that, outside the schoolroom, I was rationed to one question a day. Our reference books were limited and, lessons seldom covering the subjects that really interested me, I was torn by the daily decision of whether to ask, for instance, why the moon waxed and waned, or whether to squander my precious question on, perhaps, the welfare of an absent dog. Sometimes I inadvertently phrased an unimportant remark in the form of a question, and on subsequently presenting a carefully thought-out query, would laughingly be told that I had already used up my day’s ration. It was indeed laughingly—not harshly—that my parents refused to answer me; they looked on my curiosity as mildly amusing, but also as something that should not—because it was a nuisance to grown-ups—be indulged.
The convenience of the grown-ups was all-important. No doubt my father and mother felt a normal parental love for us children—my mother, in fact, once refused an invitation to visit America with my father, believing that both of them should not be such a long sea-voyage away from home at the same time. (She admitted later that she was almost sorry that none of us had fallen ill while my father was away, so she could, in fact, quite safely have gone with him.) But in spite of their undoubted concern, three of the twelve indoor servants—if one can count a governess as a kind of servant—were employed for the sole purpose of making sure that my parents had as little as possible to do with us.
In my entire childhood, for instance, I only once remember my mother giving me my bath—if it was Nanny’s afternoon off, then the nursery-maid was always there to check that the water was hot enough—but not too hot—and that my rubber sponge was liberally lathered with Pears transparent soap. (Natural sea-sponges were never soaped; the coarse-pored ones, as big as footballs, were used to splash water over one’s body, while the small fine-pored ones were used to wash one’s face.) My mother, who genuinely cared about the happiness of the servants, spent much time and trouble on making sure that they were well looked after and contented. Indeed, she confided to me, when I was older, that what she had really wanted was to have retired eventually with my father to one of the modern bungalows that had been built in the suburbs of the county town; there, she thought she could have managed without domestic help, and it would, she imagined, have been heaven—after so many years spent trying to sort out her servants’ personal problems—to have been preoccupied with nobody’s worries but her own. But meanwhile, such were the customs of the day that it never seemed to have occurred to her that all the time and energy she spent in caring for the servants who in turn cared for her children might perhaps have been more rewardingly spent in caring for the children herself.
On Sundays we saw slightly more of our parents, because we went with them to church. Our family had a different religion from that of the people who lived on the estate, for we belonged to the Episcopalian church, whereas they were Presbyterians. Once a month a fat itinerant minister with dyed red hair visited us and held a service in our damp private chapel, but on three Sundays out of four we went to the Presbyterian kirk in the village.
By the time I was born, the kirk had been in continuous use as a place of worship for over seven hundred and fifty years; its bible, the tattered-edged leaves yellowed with age, belonged to the days of Charles 11, and its communion register went back to 1630. When I was still quite small, restoration work on it revealed a perfect Norman arch, but—oblivious to its history—we children preferred the kirk simply because the form of service held there incorporated ad lib prayers from the minister; mostly these were intercessions on behalf of sick or bereaved members of the congregation, but there was always a hope that the minister would pray for the salvation of a sinner, especially if the sinner’s identity was not too difficult to guess.
If bored by the length of the sermon, my father would pull out his fob watch. This—hung on a gold chain which, threaded through a button-hole, spanned his waistcoat from pocket to pocket—was of the type known as a ‘repeater’, and when a button on top of its winder was pressed would chime not only the hour but also announce—by one, two or three notes of a higher pitch—the quarter hours. If the minister ignored this discreet but clearly audible reminder my father would leave our front-row family pew and ostentatiously poke the coals of the iron stove that was the kirk’s only heating or, if the weather was warm, fetch a hook-ended pole from the vestry and noisily adjust the sashes of the tall arch-topped windows. Perhaps he felt an unconscious sense of unity with the congregation that had listened in this same kirk to the sermons of John Wesley, who wrote in 1766, after his third visit, ‘I spoke exceedingly plain; yet the hearers did not appear to be any more affected than the stone walls.’
On summer Sundays, the door of the kirk might be left open, giving me glimpses of patient dogs, waiting outside for their worshipping—and worshipped—masters. Fidgeting on our too-upright pew, I would while away the time by studying the memorial stones of my ancestors; set high into the granite walls, these stone pages chronicled not only their lives but also the circumstances of their deaths.
One recorded the brief life of a midshipman, lost at sea. Always lonely, I wished that he could have been my friend, not fully realising that, had he survived the shipwreck, he would by then have been about 140 years old. like the young men who, shortly before my birth, had died in the 1914–18 war, he seemed to live on, disembodied, in a mythical aura of perpetual youth.
Sailors were something of a rarity in my father’s family, in contrast to that of my mother; on her side, as well as the great-great-grandfather who commanded the fleet to which Napoleon surrendered, I had a great-grandmother who had been brought up on a battleship. Her own mother (the result of a union, unblessed by the church, between one of the daughters of George 111 and a highland gentleman at court) having died when she was a baby, her father—at that time a captain, although later, like the other great-great-grandfather, an admiral—took her everywhere with him on his ship. My own mother remembered her well—she was, of course, my mother’s grandmother—and often told me how that little girl’s great joy had been to stand in the prow of her father’s ship as, all sails spread, it cut through the waves. The drone of the minister’s voice mingled stupefyingly with the buzz of a bumble-bee, trapped on the inner side of one of the kirk’s plainly-glazed windows, but in my imagination both sounds were drowned by the roar of surf and the hiss of wind through taut rigging.
Against the eastern end of the kirk a high-walled roofless enclosure, once part of the chancel, had served until the time of my grandfather as a family burial-ground. Once, finding the key of its small, iron-studded door—which had somehow got attached to a bunch labelled School Trunks And Ferret Cages—I turned the lock and leant fearfully against the darkened timber. The door creaked open, revealing a shut-in wilderness of withered leaves, abandoned birds’ nests, and weeds grown eerily, unnaturally tall. I did not linger to study the grave-stones.
Outside in the main church-yard, other time-eroded grave-stones, moved from their original places to make room for subsequent generations of the dead, stood ranked in line against the south wall of the kirk, their weathered inscriptions only decipherable when the sinking sun, slanting across their surfaces, gave fleeting definition to the fast-vanishing incisions.
Friday was another day on which we saw more of our parents,
because it was market-day in the county town. Until 1720 there had been no road between the castle and the town, but now there were two, and my father drove the Daimler in to attend to the business of the County Council, of which he was a diligent member, and to meet his friends for luncheon at his club. My mother went so as to leave a lengthy shopping-list at a superior grocer, who supplied goods that she could not get from the village shop, to do other more amusing shopping, and to lunch with her friends at the women’s club, conveniently situated over the grocer’s shop. We children were dragged, sick with fear, to the dentist; the water in the locality was very soft, and though my mother tried to add extra lime to our diet we often had holes in our teeth. Dentists, in those days, hurt, and as we were not allowed even to mention this to the dentist the strain of pretending to be brave added to that of enduring the pain.
We were also dragged, hardly less reluctantly, to the dancing-class. The floor of the room in which we were initiated into the arts of curtseying, bowing, pirouetting, chassé-ing and setting to partners was polished to a glassy smoothness, making it difficult for me, in my elastic-banded dancing-pumps, to keep my balance. Pink-faced with embarrassment, I slithered round the room, acutely conscious that my handed-down dancing-dress fitted me only where it touched. My partner, a freckle-faced imp whose father shared with my own the dubious reputation of being the two worst child-beaters in the county, got rid of his pent-up hatred of dancing—and possibly also the unconscious resentment he may have felt towards his father—by lying down in the middle of the floor and screaming.
A Childhood In Scotland Page 9