A Childhood In Scotland

by Christian Miller

  When we were slightly older we sometimes managed to slip away to the cinema; in the afternoon all seats were reduced in price, which meant that we could lose ourselves in fantasies of Tarzan or Ben Hur for about the cost of two small bars of chocolate, or approximately a fortnight’s spending-money. And once a year we were all lined up for a group photograph; frozen above unaccustomedly-neat clothes, our mutinous faces—recorded on sepia paper—revealed only too clearly what we thought of the ordeal. An early photograph shows me with one cheek unnaturally bulged, my elder brother having instructed me to push my tongue into it at the moment when—head concealed under a square of black cloth—the harassed photographer besought us all to watch the birdie. On the way home, the car would be halted, and the chauffeur—stiff-limbed in his heavy serge uniform—would climb out to light the head-lamps. From a snug nest among the fur motoring-rugs I would glimpse his face, momentarily lit from beneath by the flare of matches, and when later the car swept between the square granite pillars of our front gates I would do my best to feign sleep, hoping for the luxury of being carried upstairs to bed.

  Our parents never went on holiday with us. For my elder brothers and sisters, just being at home from boarding-school was considered holiday enough, but my nearest sister and I were sent to a small seaside town for a fortnight of each summer term. Our governess went with us, as did our lesson-books. Installed in a boarding-house run by the retired butler and cook from another castle, we put up with punctilious morning lessons before being walked—always in an orderly way—to the sea-shore.

  This sea-shore was a never-ending source of delight, for not only could we build sand-castles on its damp golden inlets, but in its rock-pools we could watch a great variety of marine life. Scrambling carefully over the seaweed-draped rocks—so as to avoid stepping with bare feet on white acorn-barnacles or coolie-hat-shaped limpets—we would peer eagerly into the pools that had been left behind by the ebbing sea. Small crabs scuttled sideways, paused, stood for an instant on tiptoe, and scuttled on again; sea anemones—blue, green, pink or red—waved their feathery tentacles in seductive search of plankton or prawn; five-armed scarlet starfish stalked unsuspecting cockles; transparent shrimps tested the hardly-moving water with almost-invisible antennae, and from caverns only inches high the tentacles of tiny octopuses reached gropingly for prey. We laid streamers of bladder-wrack on jetties and jumped on them to pop the air-sacs, or filled our sandcastle-buckets with the wet shells of tellins and periwinkles and whelks—which looked disappointingly dull when dry. As we hunted for cuttlebones to carry home to our sisters’ canaries, we might spot far down the shore—where the rocks ended and flat sand began—a solitary turnstone scurrying on busy red legs, first hastening inland and then seaward as it followed the edge of the advancing and retreating waves. Once we saw the Atlantic fleet leave a harbour on the opposite side of the firth; in line astern, magnificent and sinister, the great grey ships prowled out to sea. And on another day, when the skies—as grey as had been the warships—precluded games on the beach, our governess hired the local taxi and took us to Culloden, which lay not far behind the town.

  This grim moor, the scene of the final defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie, seemed never to have shaken off the anguish of that terrible battle. Even without closing my eyes, I could imagine the ragged, desperate ranks of the highlanders, struggling with their outdated swords against the solid, musket-armed ranks of the English. The wind, cutting coldly over the treeless upland, seemed to carry within it echoes of the screams of the fallen, and even the twisted heather seemed to smell, when I touched it, less of blossom than of blood. It was indeed a terrible place, to which I never wanted to return. Jolting back to the boarding-house in the old taxi, I remembered that we still had, in the castle, the sword that my ancestor had carried at Culloden; it hung on a hook on the spiral stairs and had last been worn at Buckingham Palace by my grandfather, when he accompanied my father and mother to court shortly after their marriage.

  Even on holiday, we were not encouraged to make friends with other children. In the stunted jungle of gorse and broom that splayed over the beach-edge dunes we played mettlesome games of hide-and-seek with children who, because their names remained unknown, had for us all the mystery of a band of leprechauns. Emerging at length from our games—to find our governess knitting, oblivious, beside a breakwater—we would trail back to yet another boarding-house luncheon of mince and blancmange, never speaking of the playmates whose companionship we had so warily enjoyed.

  The boarding-house had a small back garden. Used as we were to having almost limitless space around us, its Lilliputian confines fascinated us. With paces no longer than heel-to-toe we explored the miniature rockery, on the winding paths of which we could—within the length of a single fallen sunflower—unwind the golden road to Samarkand. The pebble-ringed goldfish pond stirred easily into a Charybdis whirlpool, on which Odysseus, lashed to the match-stick mast of a walnut-shell barque, cried in a shrill six-year-old voice for succour from his gods. From the shade of an apple-tree came the muted tapping of fork against basin as the elderly cook, watching us with a benevolent eye, beat the remnants of a pink jelly into a supper-time mousse; enclosed in a lapped-larch fence, her garden was at once magical and secure, in many ways more suited to the fantasies of a child than the sometimes menacing grounds that surrounded the castle.

  * * *

  My mother, who didn’t do do many of the things she might have been expected to do, did others that were quite surprising. There was no hairdresser in the village—the local girls, planning to go to an evening ‘social’, would walk about all day with their hair in curlers, by tacit agreement invisible—so my mother cut the hair of all her family, including that of my father. A rug in the Big Drawing Room was rolled up and an old sheet put down in its place; armed with one pair of straight scissors and a second—with blades like a comb—that cut alternate strands, she would seat us in turn on a delicate gilded chair and, snipping with bravura, reduce our locks to something approaching civilised length. She made all the woollen knee-length socks worn by my father and my brothers, incorporating into their tops elaborate designs of cables or, for the evening, tartan; she could ‘turn the heel’ of these socks without looking, and often worked on them when reading some classic book to my elder brothers and sisters while—for the good of their postures—they lay flat on their backs on a hard parquet floor.

  My mother had learnt to read upside-down at the age of four; her sister, two years older, was being taught by a governess and my mother, thought to be too young to join in, had been seated on the far side of the table, ostensibly colouring pictures but in fact absorbing, in reverse, everything that her sister was being taught. Soon she had gone on to working out rudimentary Latin from the headings of psalms, and later, aided by foreign governesses, she rapidly mastered French, German and Italian. A keen reader not only in these languages but also in her own, she lost no time, after she married my father, in starting a village library. Housed in a room of one of the cottages near the shop, this was largely stocked with books from her own shelves, and was much patronised by the people of the estate who, with little else to divert them in the long evenings, read avidly.

  When we were ill, mother would read to us by the hour or, as convalescence advanced, teach us to knit or crochet. Even my elder brother could knit—it passed the time for him when later, as a subaltern in the army, he fell on his head at a point-to-point and was forbidden for several weeks to read. She would always climb the spiral stairs to say goodnight to us before she went in to dinner; blankets pulled up under our chins, we would watch her glide in, her serene face lit from below by the glass-shaded candle in her hand. Before kissing us she would turn our pillows, so that our warm cheeks rested against linen that was both smooth and cool. She always wore a double row of pearls, and a diamond butterfly or diamond arrow pinned to the front of her dress; often there would be a diamond crescent tucked into her abundant hair, and always she smelt of lilie
s-of-the-valley.

  I was too young to go with her to the evening meetings of the Women’s Rural Institute, a monthly gathering of the women of the estate, but I loved going shopping with her, for she had engaging habits such as taking with her, when she went to buy a teapot, a bottle of water, so that she could make sure that her intended purchase would pour in a drip-free curve. It was fun, too, to help her give out the linen or the stores. The linen was kept in floor-to-ceiling cupboards in the housekeeper’s room, and each department of the castle had to give her a written-out list of its needs. The shelves of the cupboards, like the drawers that held my father’s clothes, were all neatly labelled; Sheets—double linen; Sheets—sides-to-middle; Bathtowels—visitors; Bathtowels—dogs and boys. These last were the bath towels that consisted more of darns than of original cloth; they were allocated to my brothers’ bathroom and were also used for drying the dogs when they came in wet from shooting. My brothers said they didn’t mind sharing towels with the dogs but did rather object to the dogs being put before them on the labels, even though, more than a hundred years before, a distant relation of ours had been overheard ordering her servants to ‘put on the porridge for the pigs and bairns’—the pigs, as more useful, coming first. The label ‘sides-to-middle’ on the shelf of sheets meant that the sheets were ones which, having been worn out down the centre, had been ripped in half and the two relatively strong sides sewn together by hand, making a serviceable object which—because of the joint that now ran down the centre—was not very comfortable to lie on, but which could be used for several more years.

  The heads of the departments—Nanny, the butler, the cook, and the head housemaid—also presented lists of other things that they needed. Each list was made out in a small note-book, so that my mother could—if she wanted—check back to see that no extravagance was taking place, for extravagance in any form was frowned on. The store room—later made into a ground-floor bathroom—from which these were given out was lined with shelves, holding enough dry goods to stock a small shop. Commodities such as sugar were bought by the sack, soap by the hundredweight, and candles by the gross, but if mould grew on top of a pot of jam, it was simply scraped off and the jam, after a quick re-boil, was transferred to a clean pot; wafer-thin ends of soap were collected and melted down for washing the floors, and old envelopes specially saved so that their backs could be used for writing down messages. But in the cornucopian abundance of the store room I forgot all economies, and, happily busy, counted out boxes of matches, or dribbled a golden stream of syrup from a gallon crock into a lidded Meissen jar.

  Caring, as she did, so much for the welfare of the people around her, it was ironic that one of my mother’s personal burdens was that there was virtually no place on the estate where she could be sure of privacy from them. Indoors, servants entered all rooms except bedrooms without knocking; outdoors, the ‘policies’, as the grounds around the castle were known, were laid out for effect rather than seclusion, so that as soon as she went outside she could be seen from a distance of about a mile. The kitchen garden was laid out in squares, so that no matter which path she took she was sure to be in view of a gardener. Go up any of the three drives, and she was fair game for the squirrel eyes of the village children, sent by their mothers to search under the beeches for kindling-sticks. Even the furthest fields and forests could conceal farm-hands and gamekeepers going quietly about their work, the clatter of their tackety boots muffled by plough-furrow or bracken. She could never be sure of being alone.

  In desperation, she asked to have a secret garden. For several years my father managed to find excuses for not making one—the foresters were too busy, or the weather was wrong for sowing—but finally he gave in, and trees were felled to make a secluded oblong of lawn in a coniferous wood beyond the tennis court. Two garden seats were bought; one was placed at the end of the main path but the second was recessed into the garden’s flanking firs, and on this she could actually rest with an almost-certainty of not being overlooked.

  At the entrance to her garden my mother planted a briar rose. It was never trimmed, and soon developed the tangled enchantment of the Edmund Dulac roses that bowered my storybook’s Sleeping Beauty; its small leaves smelled, when crushed between finger and thumb, like the expensive soap used by our exotic American aunt. My mother’s garden always seemed to me to be lit by slanting evening sunlight, and filled with the soft coo-coo of drowsy doves.

  Apart from her secret garden, only one other place was felt by my mother to be safe from watching eyes. This was a shady yew-enclosed spot just outside the small door by which she usually entered the high-walled kitchen garden. The head gardener, the garden boys, and all the main traffic of the garden went in and out by large double doors at the end of the farm yard, but my mother’s door, reached from the front drive by a narrow path crossing a small rustic bridge, was so clandestine that I was convinced—wrongly—that it had been the model for the one depicted in The Light Of The World; after my father died, my mother confided to me that on the rare occasions when he went with her to the kitchen garden they used to pause in this small green haven, and kiss.

  The kitchen garden provided not only all our vegetables and fruit, but also the flowers that were used to decorate the castle. In cold weather, terracotta pots planted with begonias, chrysanthemums, cinerarias, euphorbias, fuschsias or pelargoniums would appear from the green-houses, to be inserted into china or brass cache-pots or massed in lead-lined jardinières in the Big Drawing Room, the Little Drawing Room, the passages and the hall. In summer my elder sisters—the Girls—would drift to the kitchen garden in their sprigged cotton dresses and straw sun-hats, carrying flat wicker baskets which they would load with lupins and dahlias, roses and antirrhinums, calendulas, delphiniums, nigellas, scabious, phloxes, verbenas—anything and everything that was that day in perfect bloom. A sheet, similar to the one put down for hair-cutting, was spread, and on top of the grand piano in the Big Drawing Room and on other points of vantage they would construct extravagant pyramids and peacock-tail fans of flowers. My eldest sister was particularly good at flower-arranging; great sun-bursts of sweet peas, their colours flowing from deepest pink to rose to mauve to purple to blue, grew as if by magic under her fingers, scenting the rooms of the castle with a languorous midsummer sweetness.

  This sister was also very skilled at embroidery, the backs of the canvases on which she worked presenting a neatness hardly distinguishable from that of the fronts. My second sister, doll-like in her rounded prettiness, was given to pinching and slapping anyone smaller than herself; perhaps a presentiment of how the Fates were going to squander both her looks and her talents was already brushing her naturally sweet nature with a nettle of baffled resentment. The sister who came next to me in the family—the other Child—was too close to me for me to see her clearly. I loved her unquestioningly and, although when we grew up we could no longer be much together, my feelings towards her never changed. My second brother—the younger Boy—was a more misty figure; away so much at school, he appeared to me mainly in the role of satellite to the elder Boy. He came and went, conscientious, stubborn, and busy about his own affairs; I had to wait until we were both much older to learn and appreciate his many admirable qualities.

  Of all his children, my elder brother presented the greatest challenge to my father, for he was exceptionally intelligent, gifted not only academically but also in the worlds of sport and music. My father, diligent but not intellectually clever, could see only one way to deal with this outstanding, rebellious boy, and that was—in the parlance of those days—to ‘break his spirit’. Sent to Eton but not allowed by my father to take up the scholarship that he had won—for in my father’s days at Eton scholarship boys, known as ‘tugs’, had been looked down on by the boys whose fathers could afford to pay fees—my brother was continually thrashed both at school and at home. He was even thrashed for leaping to the defence of my mother, when a local dignitary spoke rudely to her—deference to a senior member of th
e male sex, it seemed, ranking higher in my father’s scale of values than a boy’s natural loyalty to his mother. Destined to die in action in the second world war, my elder brother led a life that was, in many ways, sadly misunderstood.

  * * *

  When I was about six a telephone was put into the castle; its number, as befitted the first instrument in the neighbourhood, was 1, and I was terrified of it. Whoever was nearby when it rang was meant to answer it, but if I was alone when it made the little preliminary click that presaged a ring I would bolt from the room, praying that nobody would see me go, for whoever then had to run to answer it would be justifiably annoyed. The instrument stood upright, like a candlestick, and as well as the usual bottle-shaped listening-piece had a second circular one, to be pressed to the other ear of anyone who, from lack of familiarity with the apparatus, insisted that the voices that came over it were impossible to hear. This second ear-piece also allowed two people to listen to the same caller, an advantage in the eyes of my father who, outraged at seeing telephone poles march across his land, felt that if two of his family were listening for the price of one he was somehow getting his own back on the telephone company.

  The telephone was a great blessing to my mother, who previously, if my father was late in returning from a journey, or even from a day out, had simply had to watch and wait until he appeared. My father’s dog shared these anxious vigils with her; it seemed to have a mysterious intuition of his return, jumping onto a window-seat and looking eagerly up the drive long before the time when it could have heard the engine of the car. Telegrams travelled fast, and if my father was delayed in daytime he could usually let my mother know, but the suspense—even with the dog to keep her company—must have been nerve-racking in the hours of darkness.

  Over a great part of my childhood there hung an aura of darkness. Not a metaphorical darkness of poverty or disease, for we were by most standards rich and by any standards healthy, but of real darkness—the actual physical lack of light. Although far south of the Arctic Circle, the district had much in common with the lands of the midnight sun, which meant, of course, that for half the year the days were extremely short.