In winter, we rose by starlight and did our before-breakfast piano practice by the light of candles. By nine o’clock, a sad red sun had crept bleakly over the horizon. Little of its light penetrated the deep-set windows of our school-room in the tower; we grew accustomed to holding our lesson books up above our heads, to take advantage of what small illumination there was, for even the shadow of our own shoulders was enough to make the text undecipherable. Strangely, none of us suffered from eyestrain; perhaps our pupils expanded in the gloom, like those of cats.
Blackest of all was the darkness inside the castle on the long winter evenings. No matter how many lamps were carried up from the lamp room, no matter how many candles were wedged, guttering, into polished candlesticks, there were still uncounted dark corners. Under tables, behind screens or carelessly-drawn curtains, and around the bends in the long passages, we children knew malignant goblins lurked. They lived, we believed, in almost every corner of the castle—anywhere, in fact, where it was dark. They crouched in unlit fireplaces, and under the half-opened lid of the big oak rug-box in the hall. They cackled up the echoing waste-pipe of the bath, and whined like hungry wolves in the draughts that whistled under the doors. On the backs of the scrambling rats they jockeyed satanic races, separated only by crumbling skirting-boards from my bedroom slippers, and bats—squeaking supersonically under their spurs—bore them vampire-like past wind-flurried casements. Though I was never frightened of the ghosts, I was scared stiff of the goblins, and after I grew too old to be cared for by a nanny—losing, at the same time, the comfort of a final tuck-up from my mother—going to bed in the winter was a waking nightmare. I had dinner with the grown-ups in the dining-room, but immediately after, as they settled down by the Big Drawing Room fire, I had to say goodnight and set out on the terrifying journey to bed. First, I went out of the brightly lit Big Drawing Room, through the subdued lighting of the Little Drawing Room, and into the passage. This was where the fear began, for, with two doors now shut between us, I could no longer hear the voices of the people I had left behind. I started to climb the spiral stairs. These were lit only by tiny oil nightlights, flickering at alternate twists of the spiral. One dark curve, one curve faintly lit, another dark curve—the stairs wound up and up. I reached my bedroom floor, and lit the candle which, in its saucered silver candlestick—complete with silver snuffer—I had picked up as I left the Little Drawing Room. At the rasp of the match, pointed ears pricked up, and small claws flexed with anticipation; the goblins who were waiting for me had woken, and I would not be out of danger until I was actually in bed. I crossed an empty, unused bedroom, and at last gained the comparative safety of my own room; quickly I closed the door and laid the sand-filled draught-excluder along the bottom to silence the moaning of the wind, wondering if I could summon up the courage to go to the bathroom or whether this would be yet another night when my teeth remained unbrushed. A trailing branch of ivy tapped against the windowpane, soot pattered down onto the pleated-paper fan that stood in the unlit grate. Somehow, my dinner dress was always a little small for me, a fraction tight; it had to be pulled off over my head, and this, I was convinced, was the moment when a goblin would get me; heart hammering, I tore off the dress before it had time to attack. My flannel nightdress—of the type known in the family as a ‘fore and aft’ because it was cut the same both front and back—was warm from the stone pig around which the maid had wrapped it. Safe in bed, I blew out the candle and resolutely shut my eyes.
Although inside the castle I was frightened of the dark, out of doors I felt completely happy. In the luminous nights of early spring, when the grown-ups thought I was safely in bed, I would slip out through a pantry window, squeezing easily between the iron bars, and run with my black Labrador through the woods. Under the towering beech trees, the dog would snuffle in the fallen beech masts as I paused, listening for the owls and the faint, shrill cries of the hunting weasels. Sleeping pigeons stirred in the branches, while in the undergrowth nameless small creatures rustled and squeaked, hurrying about their nocturnal business. The wind blew through the bushes, but here it was not frightening—it was a friendly movement of air, bringing messages of opening leaves, of drowsy, cud-chewing cows, and eddying hints of dampness from the river. There was only one place where neither my dog nor I would go at night; that was the Druids’ circle, a miniature Stonehenge halfway down one of the drives. There were three such circles on the estate, all probably raised in the late neolithic or early bronze age. The seven stones of the one near the drive—on the edge of a field still known as The Druids—stood as they had done for more than three thousand years, gaunt under the scudding clouds of the night sky, the ferns around them strangely stunted, as if their tangled roots enmeshed a distant memory of shuffling sandalled feet. Even in daylight, I avoided this place.
* * *
In the summer, when the globe, like a seesaw, had tilted under our feet, everything changed, and instead of the endless nights there were apparently endless days. My elder sisters played tennis till nearly midnight, the plack-plack of the balls reaching me where I lay curled in my hammock between two trees of an avenue of limes. We all slept out of doors in the summer, as if to squeeze the ultimate drop of enjoyment from the brief warm weeks. With tents and hammocks, we established our summer territories on the lawns around the castle, watching from the snugness of woollen blankets the dawn follow the dusk with only brief twilight hours between. We went to sleep to the soft sound of an owl’s flight as it skimmed over us, searching the grass for mice, and woke to the distant cries of migrant oyster catchers, homing in to their nests by the river.
In summer, the river turned from a threatening torrent, jagged with ice, into a cool, inviting stream. We paddled in the shallows or, secretly stripping off our clothes, swam naked in the salmon pools. The fish, which scattered if we splashed the surface of the water, had no fear if we entered quietly; under water, in the brown-stoned sun-speckled depths of the pools, fish and swimmers circled each other, mutually curious. The cart horses browsed and drowsed hock-deep in the uncut grass of the water meadows, resting in the interval between plough and harvest. We treated their broad backs like sofas, lying on them, reading, through the long afternoons. The leather bindings of the books that we filched from my mother’s library adhered conveniently to the warm hides of the horses, their faint mustiness mingling pleasantly with the scent of clover and the dubbined, stable smell of the horses’ work-worn halters.
Late summer was the season of the Highland Games. Each district had its Games—a mixture of pageant, sports, and fair, eagerly looked forward to by everyone except the local policemen, who, between directing the traffic and frustrating the schemes of the gypsies, always had an extremely testing day. The proceedings opened with a parade of the clansmen, dressed to the nines in kilts and bonnets and plaids and any bit of old regalia they could lay their hands on. My father would have none of this; he looked on it as exhibitionism and leaned morosely on his tall shepherd’s-crook stick, radiating disapproval, as the pipers, followed by the clansmen, marched around the ring.
Then came the sports—races and high jumping, long jumping, hammer throwing, putting the shot, and tossing the caber. This caber was a pine tree, stripped of its branches and bark; the competitor had to grasp it by its root end, heave it in the air so that, balanced on his hands, it stood as upright as it had done in the forest, and then toss it in such a way that it made a complete somersault, its topmost end skimming the ground before it landed again on its lower end. There was wrestling, when the quarrymen took on the sheep-dippers, and dancing competitions, when—claymores crossed on the chalk-dusted boards of the boxing ring—tartan-clad stalwarts leaped and whirled in the intricacies of the sword dance. Outside the arena, the gypsies set up their swings and coconut shies, their candy-floss stalls and fortune-telling booths. Tartan-shawled, the women hawked ribbon-tied bunches of lucky white heather. Brown eyes bright with cunning, they noted into which pocket the farmer slipped his
wallet, and passed the message on to a confederate at the crowded entrance to the tea tent.
Coming home triumphant, bearing in one hand the first-prize rosette gained by one of our dairy cows and in the other a bouncing gas-filled toy balloon, we would be greeted at the front door by the dogs, who had, much to their disappointment, been left behind. Three or four dogs usually lived inside the castle, and they had an endearing habit, which they passed on from generation to generation, of grasping a skirt hem or a coat-tail in their teeth and running along beside the wearer like a four-footed trainbearer. Each family homecoming turned into a procession as, led by my father with his kilt edge grasped in the jaws of his black Labrador, we were each escorted into the castle by a tail-wagging, hem-carrying dog.
In the front hall, my father would throw his bonnet onto the head of one of the carved angels that flanked the fireplace. These angels cropped up in the most unexpected places; in minuscule they stamped themselves from my father’s signet ring onto the sealing wax of his confidential letters, and even appeared, their folded wings discreetly concealing their nakedness, on the boxes of Edinburgh rock sold in the village shop.
This shop was the centre of the life of the village, which, unlike an English village, had no pub. Anyone who wanted to meet anybody else did so in the shop, and as the owner resented having it jammed with non-buyers, people used to spread out their purchases as much as possible. The women who lived in the granite cottages of the village would drop in three or four times a day, buying first a small cube of lard, and then a bag of sugar, following this up with an ounce of tea and perhaps, if there was some bit of gossip that they particularly wanted to spread, by the purchase of a halfpenny stamp, for a railed-off corner served as a post office. A bell tinkled each time the door was opened, and if one was waiting outside, the opening door let out not only the sound of the bell but also a delicious smell compounded of soap, brown sugar, lamp oil, cheese, lead pencils, boiled sweets, binder twine, Indian tea, boot polish, cocoa, and Elliman’s embrocation.
Apart from the main shop, there were only two other stores in the village. One belonged to the baker, who, in addition to making the bread for the neighbourhood, cooked many of the Sunday dinners. The wives left joints of meat at his store on their way to the kirk, and he put them in his bread oven; an hour of the service followed by half an hour of sermon saw even the biggest joint done to a turn, ready to be carried home for the meal.
The third store belonged to the shoemaker. In his low-roofed workshop he sat crouched over the iron lasts, teaching his son how to shape uppers and soles, to hammer and stitch and polish. The villagers’ Sunday shoes might come from a factory in the south, but the ones they wore on weekdays grew, like much of their food, right under their eyes.
The people who lived on the outlying farms and who could not easily get to the shops had their needs met by the ‘fleein’ pedlar’, a wizened old man who drove a horse-drawn caravan filled with merchandise. He had lined the inside of the van with shelves, on which were stacked all kinds of goods. Broomheads and balls of string and bags of knitting wool hung from the roof, jars of brightly-coloured sweets were wedged upright between sacks of lentils and dried beans, and spools of sewing thread were tucked down between packets of canary seed and throat lozenges. Rolls of checked gingham and flower-printed calico stood upright in the corner, surrounded by tins of scouring powder and bars of cheeselike yellow soap; hairpins and celluloid combs nestled beside rat poison and corn solvent.
Occasionally, the pedlar invited me to go with him on his rounds. I was never quite sure that I ought to accept his invitation, because although life in the country was so safe for children that they could—and did—accept lifts from total strangers, trips with the pedlar were such fun that I felt sure that, if I asked permission, someone in authority would find a reason to forbid them. So I simply took a chance on not being found out, and clambered quickly into the back of his van.
Travelling in the van was like being inside a shaken-up kaleidoscope. As it jolted its way over the rough roads, the stock on the shelves jumped and revolved, rattling and changing colour as first one side of a tin and then the other came to the front. Half deafened by the clatter of the galvanised buckets and basins and washbowls that hung on the outside of the van, I sat precariously in the back doorway, sucking a yellow-and-green lollipop and enjoying the sight of the road reeling away behind. I welcomed the pedlar’s gift of the lollipop, for, although it would only have cost me twopence, my weekly pocket money was threepence, and of this one penny had to be put in the church collection. The remaining two pennies I could spend as I liked, provided I saved enough to buy Christmas and birthday presents; the twopence was rarely available for sweets.
Present-giving, on this budget, called for much ingenuity. Several weeks before Christmas I would stake out a secret territory into which the other children could not come, and start to make presents. I mounted foreign stamps, steamed off my father’s letters, for my brothers, hoping against hope that they were not ones already in their collections. I made needlebooks from scraps of flannel for my mother and sisters, and peppermint creams—icing sugar mixed with essence and white-of-egg—for my governess. Everything had to be constructed with minimum of outlay, and I grew adept at annexing apparently useless trifles that grown-ups discarded. Did I spy a pearl button on the wornout shirt with which the chauffeur was polishing the car? I ran for my scissors—it was just what I needed to fasten a needlebook. Did nobody want that magazine in the waste-paper-basket? The picture on the cover would make a lovely calendar, stuck on cardboard, a laboriously hand-written list of dates attached below by a length of coloured knitting wool. Once the sister nearest to me spent weeks secretly making a wardrobe for the clothes of my doll, Cuddly. She contrived it from a cardboard grocery-box, carefully painted to look like wood, with matchbox drawers, boot-buttonhandles, and a looking-glass made from flattened silver paper. It was a present that I greatly treasured.
Perhaps it was just as well that we led a rather isolated life, because when we did visit other children I was always amazed at the variety and newness of their toys. Even if our parents had been hard up it would only have needed the sale of some small valuable from a room but rarely entered to have given us children not only the new bicycles for which we yearned (ours were only prevented from falling apart by much diligent maintenance-work carried out—under the direction of my elder brother—in a bark-strewn woodshed) but also many other longed-for delights. My parents paid so little attention to their smaller possessions that many were not even displayed; once, when a member of the royal family was coming to tea, my father suddenly had the idea that it might be nice to add to the decoration of the rooms through which she would pass and, rummaging in one of the safes, unearthed a few dozen ‘objets de virtu’. He went from room to room, distributing these on suitable table-tops; my mother, the overlapping front of her tartan skirt held up like an apple-picker’s apron, tiptoed round behind him, collecting them up again: the expected visitor, a discerning antiquarian, had the reputation of expressing such warm admiration of things that caught her eye that the owners would be left with little alternative but to offer them to her as gifts.
But although they were by nature generous, my parents would never have considered selling so much as an unused snuff-box to buy playthings for their children. Children, everyone agreed—everyone, that is, but the children themselves, who were not consulted—should not be brought up to think that life was easy.
Nobody seemed to find it incongruous that, while imposing this financial discipline on his children, my father himself travelled as casually to the Rockies to hunt bear, or to Norway to fish for salmon, as he did to the next county to shoot grouse. He bought his cigarette-cases at Asprey’s, his London suits in Savile Row, and was as much at home in St James’s Street as he was on the moors. My mother’s jewelry was dazzling; she couldn’t possibly wear it all at once and was occasionally agreeably surprised to find, tucked into the drawer of a jew
el-case, a sapphire bracelet or pair of diamond earrings that she had, in her gentle, unworldly way, forgotten that she possessed.
My father was never ostentatious. Normally, he wore little of value except for a gold watch and chain and a signet ring, and although he was fussy about his stockings—he would never wear any that had been darned—his daytime clothes were usually old. The blue and green of his hunting-tartan kilt was faded, and the collars of his shirts—already turned inside out by the servants—were worn through on the second side as well. His jackets, patched on the elbows with squares of leather, sported darns on the lapels, where barbed fishing flies had been temporarily parked and overhastily withdrawn.
He did, however, keep a tidy tweed jacket—with buttons made from intricately-twined leather thongs—to wear on formal occasions, and his scarlet evening kilt, venerable rather than old, was always impeccably pleated. As well as the jackets he was then wearing, he still had the khaki one that he had worn at the battle of Festubert, in the 1914–18 war, when he had so very nearly lost his arm. Blackened with blood, this hung in a glass-fronted cupboard in the billiard-room, next to the satin coat of my great-great-great-grandfather, who had been the unwitting cause of women first being allowed to enter the Houses of Parliament. A Member of Parliament, this ancestor had been entrusted with a fund set up for widows, and had handled it so unskilfully that when he was finally taken to task, some of the women who had suffered from his maladministration were allowed into the Chamber—previously barred to females—to listen to his arraignment.
A Childhood In Scotland Page 11