Chasing Lost Time

by Jean Findlay

  Even though he was the youngest by far, Charlie was allowed to stay up till the end, and savoured every moment. The next day he retold a joke he had heard at the party and when his mother commented on his delivery of the grown-up story, the expression on the faces of the audience and the storyteller’s manner, the five-year-old replied, ‘Yes, it comes back into my mind like sugar.’1 He already knew how to recall and embellish a memory and deliver it to entertain.

  Two days later the winter set in and the pumps froze just before the annual party given for the family servants. Charlie watched them melting the snow to use as water. These people were an important part of his life: Allison the groom, Mary the cook, Bell the gardener and three housemaids; they also invited the servants from the neighbours’ at Parkhill House. Miss Stephen, Charlie’s governess, was not at the servants’ party, she partied with the family and went wherever the children did. The next evening the boys were dressed in intricate fancy dress to go to the children’s party at Parkhill: John as a frog, Colin as a Turk and Charlie as a Japanese doll, carefully negotiating the icy driveway in his tight skirt and looking out at the starry night from behind white face paint and blackened eyebrows.

  April that year was hot and Meg went for a break to relatives on the Fife coast. On her return she found that Charlie had taken possession of the attic as a playroom. As she led him to bed he looked fondly at the attic door saying, ‘It makes me feel so happy when I see that door.’2 It was his first real work space. June again was warm and Meg wrote on the 24th, ‘The house is all spicy with wafts of honeysuckle from the porch. Lord Rosebery’s Government fell.’3 She remembered going to his parties in Cairo and described them to her five-year-old son, who liked to play behind the carved wooden harem screen which she had brought back from Egypt to decorate her drawing room. Until the age of eight, Charlie’s education was all at home: from his governess Miss Stephen and his mother who would read to him from whatever she was reading at the time. As a small child, he grew used to Stevenson, Milton, Wordsworth, Arnold, George Herbert and Ruskin. These were not the usual texts given to small boys to develop an interest.

  Each brother had his own speciality. John loved animals, he had ferrets, birds, rabbits, and newts, which escaped from his room and slithered all the way downstairs to the kitchen, making the new cook scream. The cat, Peter, and the dog, Dido, belonged to everyone. One day on a visit to Meg’s sisters in Edinburgh, the beloved Dido went missing. After a sleepless night his father put notices in the evening newspapers offering two pounds reward. That evening a very thin young man appeared with Dido, saying the dog had run into his shop, he had taken her home and she had ‘gruppit’ his children by the sleeve. ‘Do you like animals?’ he was asked: ‘Yes, mum, I like them well enough but I cannae afford tae keep them,’4 he replied.

  Charlie was beginning to recognise how poor the poor were, and how the huge gap between rich and poor allowed even a modest lawyer to employ a number of servants, and feel it was his duty to do so. At the turn of the century the largest single employer was domestic service: a cook’s wage was £12 a year while a sheriff earned £1000. In the towns and cities ragged children still begged and some went barefoot even in winter. The family were warned never to give money to the beggar children, but, moved by their plight, a cousin once gave a child a penny and the poor child was instantly set upon by the other barefoot children who hammered him till the penny was taken. In the absence of state welfare, many in the professional classes accepted responsibility and worked hard to alleviate poverty. George was on the board of the local hospital, pushing for reforms; and Meg led the local Girls’ Friendly Society – a euphemism for an organisation helping young women fallen pregnant or into prostitution. As well as providing practical supplies, she led it in an educational direction, reading aloud novels by Walter Scott, Elizabeth Gaskell and others which were both entertaining and parables for life.

  All summers were spent by the sea and in 1895 they travelled to Tarbert on the Mull of Kintyre, taking a steamer from Greenock and arriving late in the evening. They rented a large house for servants, guests and family on the sea front and the boys swam every day, rain or sun. Charlie won the diving competition for his age group and Johnnie the swimming. They fished and explored coves and islands by boat. The local people spoke Gaelic and sometimes the family would come across a spontaneous Ceilidh on the shore with singing rising into the sunset.

  Meg was both relieved and delighted that her sister Mary’s wedding to Tony Ray, the schoolmaster and her one time admirer from Blair Lodge School, was during the holiday that year. On 3 September they travelled for the day to Morningside, Edinburgh, to be with the large extended family on this important occasion which kept her dear friend in the close family. While the couple sped south to Normandy for their honeymoon, Charlie’s family returned to Tarbert and were still by the sea for his sixth birthday on 25 September. In the evening he appeared with Miss Stephen wearing a necklace of bright red rosehips she had made for him. He opened the six presents which had come by post and cut a bought cake which was a ‘triumph of Tarbert confectionery’. His big brothers, aged fifteen and seventeen, toasted his health each with a foot on a chair. ‘He looked on with a sort of mystical pride and said “Thanks” with perfect grace.’5

  Seaside marked the summers of his childhood, and Christmas Day was still celebrated by the reading of Milton’s ‘Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’. The family met in Meg’s room, warmed by the fire and lit by many lamps. When it came to Charlie’s turn to read that year, he turned his head away from the book and recited his ten verses by heart. He had learnt them as a surprise present to his mother. (He never forgot them and recited them each year for the rest of his life, even when he was alone.) His present from his parents was a set of wooden boats with magnets to draw them, which he called ‘Tarbert Alive’ and absorbed his attention totally: his father told him that twenty-five years before, their cousin William Dundas Scott had been partner in the firm that designed the Cutty Sark. After breakfast John and Colin skated to Linlithgow, eleven miles away on the river while Charlie played at home on his sledge, tumbling like a black beetle in the snow.

  Indoors Charlie was already enjoying reading and writing on his own. In April 1896 a Remington typewriter arrived in the household for the first time. It was used by Meg for her journalism, by Colin for his final school essays and by Charlie aged six to copy the first poem he ever composed:6

  I

  My love lies bleeding in my arms,

  My trembling arms are bled with tears,

  My love lies bleeding in my arms,

  My love my only dear.

  II

  My child lies kissing in my arms,

  My infant here is safe,

  From harm,

  In my arms.

  The influence was clear: Meg read all her stories to her family before sending them off to Blackwood’s, including a searing melodrama of the death of a child, based on one she had watched while in Egypt. Charlie’s particular sensitivity to the painful scene brought it to life in this first poem.

  That summer the whole family took their holiday on the Normandy coast, north of Caen: they stayed at Langrune at the Hôtel du Petit Paradis which consisted of rooms directly off the beach, with white scrubbed wooden floors, sand blowing under the door, and simple furniture. On the feast of the Assumption the streets were filled with processions of girls in white, singing, and there was a fête with dancing in the evening. On Sunday Meg stayed inside and had her private Protestant service with the children while George braved the Catholic church and came home with colourful tales that encouraged the recalcitrant Meg to visit churches throughout the holiday: one day she came upon a woman throwing her crutches on the altar and crowing, ‘La Sainte Marie m’a guérie,’7 with a dramatic joy incredible to a Scottish Presbyterian. They explored by train the seaside towns of Trouville, Dives-sur-mer, Cabourg, Courcelles and Bernières.

  Unknown to them, the young Marcel Proust w
as on holiday with his grandmother that year at their favourite summer haunt, the Grand Hotel at Cabourg. Proust was twenty-six, as yet unpublished, living the exacting social life of Paris-by-the-sea, meeting the young girls in the bloom of youth that he would later evoke in Within a Budding Grove, and exploring the Guermantes genealogy. This was the only time his path crossed unwittingly with that of his future translator. Charlie was now approaching his seventh birthday which was celebrated back in rainy London at Cheyne Walk, the home of Sir Colin Scott Moncrieff, Meg’s uncle from her Cairo days, who was now Under-Secretary of State for Scotland.

  The following January, 1897, a letter arrived from the Lord Advocate offering George the post of Sheriff of Inverness. It was not happy news; Charles did not want to leave Weedingshall where they had lived peacefully for ten years with friends and close relatives nearby. However, he was strongly advised to take the promotion. With characteristic forethought, he wrote two letters, one accepting and one declining the post, and walked with them both to Falkirk, leaving the ultimate decision to the last minute. He returned with both letters unposted. Dithering was an established Scott Moncrieff trait. However, a decision had to be made and before the end of the month the family had moved to the snowy north, living in rented rooms, while Meg and George looked for a house.

  By February they had found a house called Viewmount, just below Inverness Castle which housed the law courts where the Sheriff worked. Perched on a steep hill, it had a charming oval hall decorated with lacy plasterwork with eight doors leading off, and above it an oval gallery with eight bedroom doors. The dining room looked down through a beech wood to the River Ness and the Moray Firth. Their dog, Dido, came with them but Johnnie’s pony was left behind. John thought that the steep garden at Viewmount was ideal, however, for grazing a goat. He still collected animals and had some ferrets, which were banned from the house while his cats and birds were allowed inside. Now in Inverness he declared he wanted to keep bats. Soon he had sent off for a parrot from London which arrived in a cardboard box on the train having frustratedly pecked out all its green tail feathers. He spent all his pocket money on pets, but was generous with them. In April he presented Charlie with a cage of two white rats: Colin saw Charlie in the hall with one on his shoulder, ‘frightened of John if it fell off and frightened of it if it didn’t’.8 John also told Charlie that the oval hall at Viewmount was an ideal place for keeping ‘any Beast that you fear’, because you could stay on the upstairs gallery and throw food over the handrail, then retreat quickly behind your bedroom door. Instead of a beast, John next bought a pair of pigeons, but was soon heard bargaining with his mother, trying to sell her the pigeons for the dinner table as they were not good enough for homing. With the money he wanted to buy a real pedigree homer. It was already clear that his love of animals would direct his future life.

  Colin, the eldest, was more academic. In March 1897 he won a Classical Scholarship to Queen’s College, Oxford with a yearly value of £80. Charlie was impressed with his brother’s ability to raise money. When he was at home, Colin would cycle long distances on rough roads, or go to smart parties for boating, tennis and croquet with elegant girls. He seemed a more distant companion to Charlie than John and his lively pets. Left alone often, Charlie liked to read or write poetry, rushing to show his mother when he discovered something he liked in his Golden Treasury. He loved and imitated Longfellow. In April 1897 he made himself a bow and arrows, running behind the trees in the garden murmuring scraps of Hiawatha-like verse. When asked to learn Shelley’s ‘Skylark’ by heart by his mother he did it as a labour of love. Then one evening he went to his mother with his latest discovery, Whitman’s ‘Come up from the Fields, Father’ and read it to her with feeling. He kept his own notebook of poems, transcribed in laborious pencil. Aged seven, he read As You Like It and declared, ‘It’s a very good play, so well plotted out. But no real woman would think of doing the things that Rosamond and Celia did.’9 He was surrounded by ladylike, literary women, and appeared an expert on their gender.

  * * *

  By midsummer 1897, nearly eight years old, he had begun to go to a day school in Inverness run by Herr Waack, an elderly German who believed that seeing beauty in nature, music, and poetry, was as important as arithmetic and grammar. The first day at school entailed a botany lesson, and his homework was to collect ‘things’ in a tin to study in class. He was also taught astronomy and one entry in his diary of that year read, ‘Saw Plough N.W. Must remember Acturus between N.W. and S. Cassiopeia W. To S. W.’10 He enjoyed living at home and the eccentric Herr Waack, but in October of the following year, aged nine, Charlie left to board at Inverness College. His mother remembered him looking handsome in his new green coat and waistcoat with silver buttons and tartan kilt. With Charlie’s departure Meg lost a loving and companionable son – the house seemed empty without him. However, as he was a weekly boarder, he was home at weekends; she could also visit him whenever she liked and would drop in for tea without warning after a wet shopping trip. Both Charlie and Johnnie went to Inverness College: Johnnie eight years Charlie’s senior, was finishing his education, while Charlie was starting at school. At the end of that year Charlie brought home his first school prize, coming top of a class of nine of whom he was the youngest.

  Religion played a large part in the boys’ life. Yet it was a complex relationship: Meg was critical of the Church of Scotland of which her husband was later to become an elder and she wrote a précis of the sermon each week in her diary, finding that the further north they moved, the more the sermons dwelt on punishment for sins and eternal hellfire. She could see that the sensitive Charlie was thoroughly frightened. One bright Sunday in April 1898, Meg didn’t go to church but instead sat in the greenhouse reading Paradise Lost to her son. The great epic where Hell is also Pandemonium, and Satan a real character with recognisable human qualities, was more suited to their temperaments, not to mention the War of the Angels, which inspired rather than scared them. The following Sunday Charlie was once again at church with his father, who held more orthodox beliefs in Hell. On his return the boy disappeared into the greenhouse and could be found under the plants copying out what Meg called the ‘more dubious parts’ of the Bible including the Apocrypha. She noticed that he had made a synopsis of them and he told her, ‘Ezekiel is such a marvellous book. It tells so much about God.’11 He then regaled her with the tale of Bel and the Dragon, an addition to the Book of Daniel accepted by Catholics and not Protestants, a criticism of the worship of idols involving sacrifice, secret passages, danger and mass carnage. It was clear he was no longer frightened. Meg was a liberal thinker and felt that the gloomy Calvinism she encountered at the kirk would repel her sons from faith, and she encouraged other approaches to Christianity.

  Colin had now gone up to Oxford to study divinity with the intention of joining the Anglican clergy, a choice that even his strict Presbyterian father accepted. Johnnie was also moving on. His uncle Robin, based in South America, had found him a job and he was being kitted out for the journey, parading around the house in his new riding clothes. Charlie went to one last party with him at a nearby grand house with the Misses Gordon who were dressed in high fashion Japanese kimonos; he danced a cotillion as well as reels, reminding him of his appearance as a Japanese doll at his first fancy dress ball at Weedingshall. It was hard for Charlie to say goodbye to his adored big brother, so good at manly activities, shooting and training animals and riding bareback. The family would be very different without him, and Charlie would lose his companion at home.

  The rest of the family took a cottage in Kincraig for August and September – with Peter the cat and Dido the dog. Dido was old and sick and George was forced to put her to sleep with chloroform. Charlie, aged nine, was very upset. He organised the funeral, digging a hole in the heather and lining her grave with the purple flowers. He wrote eight perfectly scanned verses for the dog he had loved:

  …

  She lived to a tremendous age


  She reached full 13 years

  You may be sure this poet’s page

  Is well bedewed with tears.

  His scansion did not miss a beat till the last one, which fell intentionally short:

  …

  But now we leave her far away

  This is no time to fret

  But surely, til eternity

  We never shall …12

  The following summer Inverness College suddenly closed and Charlie’s uncle and aunt, Tony and Mary Ray, set out to fulfil a long-held dream to found their own prep school. They rented a house in Nairn for the start of term and Charlie and eight other boys, all of them ex-Inverness College pupils, took up residence as boarders. Mary had two little girls of her own, Lucy and Mabel, cousins to Charlie and an integral part of the school household. Tony had been a brilliant classics scholar at Oxford and had had fifteen years’ experience teaching at boarding schools. His aim was to prepare boys for the great British public schools. There is a portrait of him in ex-pupil David Thompson’s childhood memories Nairn In Darkness and Light:

  When the formal part of each lesson was over, he read aloud to me, often with passionate excitement, shouting during the dramatic passages, whispering the emotional and sometimes bursting into tears, which embarrassed me greatly although it strengthened my love of him … In my reading he treated me as a man, stretching my intellect and emotions far beyond the limits that my previous teachers had set as suited to my age.13

  Tony Ray was an inspired teacher and treated the boys as equals, believing there was nothing in literature they could not understand. He was not a disciplinarian; Charlie saw him as a second father, not as absent as his own; one who wore plus-four tweeds and smoked a pipe, often seen still smoking from its nest in his jacket pocket. Tony encouraged Charlie’s enthusiasm for poetry and at the start of the new century the boy copied these lines from Herbert into his poetry notebook, showing an advanced spiritual understanding for his age: