by Jean Findlay
Whether I fly with angels, fall with dust,
Thy hands made both and I am there.
At school he learnt and recited Gray’s Elegy so beautifully that his father gave him a copy of William Mason’s The Poems of Mr Gray – the start of his new library.
* * *
Nineteen-hundred was to be a year of changes. In August George applied for the post of Sheriff Substitute of Lanark – which included Glasgow and was the busiest and most important sheriffdom in Scotland – and was appointed in three days. Within the week Meg started packing up the house yet again. Meanwhile a wire had arrived from her brother in Uruguay to suggest Johnnie came home because, ‘he hates the country’.14 Johnnie arrived in August; taller, thicker-set, older in his carriage and more sure of himself. He told Charlie tales of his voyage across the world, ‘One day we had quite a fairy breakfast – we got among a lot of flying fish – they came slapping on the deck at your feet and you tossed them down to the cook and he sent them up as fast as they were fried – they were like awfully good herring.’15 Charlie was so pleased to have Johnnie back among them again that he spent his Christmas shilling on a box of chocolates for his brother’s twentieth birthday in January.
By Charlie’s eleventh birthday, the family was in lodgings at Lanark, and his father had started his new job. Charlie spent the day making a railway map, joining all the places he had lived and stayed in as far back as he could remember. All his life the family had moved from one rented house to another, painting, papering, refurnishing; in later life Charles never felt the need to own a house or settle, moving from lodging to lodging with equanimity. At the end of September 1900 he went back with his uncle and aunt Ray and cousins to school in Inverness, a second home, as he had known the Rays both separately and together all his life.
One Tuesday evening, just after returning to school in January 1901, Charlie heard the church bells tolling. News spread quickly: Queen Victoria had died. Everyone went into mourning: the teachers, his uncle and aunt and the boys were given black armbands. His mother wore mourning until May that year. He heard eulogies on the character of the late queen, the achievements of her reign, her greatness compared to all other monarchs in history, and her civilising influence on all corners of the globe. Meg wrote to tell him how George, as the Sheriff, had announced the new King at the snowy market cross in Lanark, wearing his wig and gown, standing beside the Provost, and how he had marched on to the steps of the County Hall where he read the proclamation clear and loud, ending with three cheers for the new King. The following year George was invited to the Coronation, but decided not to go because of the expense. At least that was what he told Meg – that it did not warrant an entire new set of court clothes – but George had other reasons for not attending. He strongly disapproved of the shift from Victorian values to Edwardian: a shift from tight-laced to bodice-undone. Victoria had represented self-discipline, work and achievement in Britain and abroad, while Edward VII was known as a libertine. The King would approach the altar to be crowned with Queen Alexandra, but the King’s mistresses would all be present in Westminster Abbey, sitting near the front, in stalls that soon became known as the ‘horse box’.
Meanwhile George and Meg could find no house in Lanark grand enough for Meg’s tastes and were given permission to look as far away as Glasgow; she eventually found a large mansion in Rutherglen called Gallowflat. From May to November 1901 Glasgow held an International Exhibition: it covered seventy-three acres and included an extravagant Oriental Pavilion, as well as numerous other foreign pavilions, one even had a dome topped with an angel wielding an electric torch. Electricity – heating and lighting – in industry and farming was a new excitement. The Exhibition also boasted concert halls, restaurants and cafés. To have such a spacious and comfortable house near Glasgow in the year of this Great Exhibition was a calculated dream. Meg had many guests, not only family, but titled acquaintances who admired her writing and who had been attracted to her exclusive ladies’ club in Inverness. But a sheriff’s residence was regulated in Scots Law and there were questions in the House of Commons, from the member for Falkirk, about why the Sheriff of Lanark who had traditionally resided in Lanark was now living in Glasgow. The reply from the Lord Advocate was that such matters were at the discretion of the Secretary of State for Scotland – Meg’s uncle Colin, knowing his niece’s predilection for the grand, allowed her a year of living her fantasy. It was short-lived, however. Not only was the house infested with rats, which Johnnie enjoyed killing with a shovel, but when the winter of 1902 set in, the water froze and the pipes burst like rivers all over the rambling house. Meg had to cancel many of her house parties and everyone succumbed to illness from damp.
George eventually decided to buy a house in the hope of being finally settled. They found a red sandstone villa on the road leaving Lanark towards Edinburgh, with sweeping open views to the front and a loch and golf course behind for £1650. It was not a country mansion, but had practical benefits, being newly built, with integrated electricity. Still longing for grandeur, Meg decided that they could not move in unless it was extended by a new drawing room, a library and stables. They were to stay at the house they named ‘Edgemoor’ for sixteen years.
* * *
By May 1901, Mary and Tony Ray had almost finished building their new school on the sand dunes by the sea outside Nairn, to be called Alton Burn. Charlie visited it with his mother and the Rays and used his new Brownie camera to take photos of everyone in front of the rising walls including one with his tiny cousin Mabel perched on a window sill. By October the new school was ready for the autumn term and the twelve-year-old Charlie was sent off to Nairn by train, his first journey alone. Mary wired Meg to say he had arrived safely.
Alton Burn was in an ideal situation: one mile east of the town of Nairn, half a mile off the main road, down a sandy track towards the sea. There was a short drive curving between lawns and there stood the large stone school, three storeys high and two rooms deep. The classrooms were on the ground floor, the masters’ rooms, matron’s department and headmaster’s office on the first and, at the top, the huge space was divided into four dormitories, which at the beginning held only three to four boys each. The windows overlooked the gardens, a strip of gorse, the golf links and the sea. It was utterly silent. From his dorm, Charlie could hear each wave of an incoming tide. In the evening there were sunsets that dyed the sea and sky with orange reds and coloured the room with pink. The windows were the same height as the seagulls as they circled in off the sea.
There were fourteen boys to begin with, rising to twenty-eight, but always few enough for the accommodation to be spacious. There were electric lights, and bells for the servants, with two staircases, one at each end of the house, and bathrooms on the stair blocks. The school had its own water tower and, for 1901, was incredibly modern.
Alton Burn exists today very much as Tony and Mary Ray built it. It is a hotel perched on the golf links in front of the sandy beach. The same family that took it over from Tony Ray run it today and there are school photographs in the hallway. The bedroom cupboards are the same as those in which the prep-school boys stowed their games kit, Sunday kilt uniform and second set of weekday uniform: Eton collars, tweed jackets, short woollen trousers. There is an ancient deep sink with brass taps at the end of the stairwell. From the outside there are still twenty chimney pots although no coal fires remain inside. In 1901 twenty fireplaces were stoked by housemaids during the fierce winters, but summertime was generally sunny in Nairn, which was a popular Victorian resort, known as the Brighton of the North.
From his school desk in the bright classroom Charlie could see across the Moray Firth to the Black Isle. On a clear day every detail was crisp and brightly coloured. His translations from Latin and Greek were livened with a vivid sense of nature. On a fine afternoon Tony Ray would take the older boys golfing or swimming in the sea while Mary built sandcastles with the younger boys and her own two girls – ambitious sand buildings
imitating the structure of local Scottish castles. On nature walks they would identify trees, flowers and birds. Long-beaked oystercatchers and sandpipers landed on the lawns, and there was a sandy path along the links to Nairn, bordered on the land side by tall Scots pines. Years later, with his war wound limp, Charles would walk a similar path in Viareggio: sand and sea on his left, pines on the right.
The boys wrote and performed their own plays. They were also encouraged to write home often. Charlie’s letters show an early descriptive aptitude:
… heavy seas were leaving banks of brown foam two feet deep till the next gust of wind carried them away up the beach to the town. Wild seabirds hanging motionless in the air for a time then dropping swiftly onto the crest of a foaming wave and let themselves be carried in to land. Grimy fishermen wandering aimlessly about and talking together in small groups.16
The Rays’ small school was inspired by both nature and the curriculum. Charlie also wrote home about a skating party. They took the train from Nairn to Forres and drove by horse-drawn brake to the Loch of Blairs where they skated until lunch on a big circle which had been swept by the servants on the shallow loch. There was lunch in the boathouse – a large pot of soup which had been brought down in a carriage, with lemonade, chicken, potatoes and confectioneries. Someone said it looked like the backwoods of Canada. After lunch they skated until it was snowing too heavily to continue and instead of walking back they drove to his friend Alastair’s house, ‘one of the finest houses I have ever seen. Altyre is yellow with grey lattice work all over … We went to see the ponies and the beavers.’
At night Charlie would think of his own family at home and even invented a family tree to rival in complexity the real ones that George loved drawing up and showing to his son with great seriousness. He wrote to his mother, teasing his father:
I made out a list of the descendants of Charles Ludmore, and showing how Father might easily become Lord of Ludmore, Welt and Stigham. I sent this to you after making a copy for myself, but what I sent was lost in the post. Another lost letter explains how Grizel Plunkett (daughter of the late Zedekiah Plunkett) a baby, is now in possession of those estates as well as of Loosewave, Fendomit, Glenshowie, and will on his death own Baldido in Fifeshire. However she has died of a fit of catalepsy to which the Stigham family are subject.17
In this happy state at the family prep school, Charlie amassed a collection of comic postcards: the first from his father with a picture of a judge in a wig with a hammer saying, ‘I have just time for one Sentence…’18 which playfully excused him from further correspondence. George was now exceptionally busy acting as sheriff or judge in the Glasgow courts, and becoming more distant from his son.
Meanwhile his brother John was enrolled at the Glasgow Veterinary School. It was hoped that his passion for animals would give him the determination to overcome the academic challenge – and it did: although he failed Chemistry first time round, he sat the exam again immediately and passed. The train from Glasgow to Lanark took under an hour and this enabled John to be at home as much as possible in order to ride his new horse. But he was not at home for long: before spring, he was packed off to Buenos Aires again to see about getting a job.
In April 1903 Meg and George celebrated their silver wedding anniversary. Charlie woke them at 6 a.m. to congratulate them, then ran up and down the stairs bringing presents from all the relatives: salt cellars, napkin rings, a pen tray, a paper knife, a sweet dish – all made of silver – and from Charlie himself, a silver cream jug with a verse of his own about their anniversary typed out and folded inside. Before he went back to school for his last term at Alton Burn, Charlie and Meg drove out in the dogcart to pay a visit on a neighbour at a house called Harperfield. As soon as they were seated in the drawing room, the governess told them that the children were all suffering from whooping cough: the Scott Moncrieffs fled in terror of anything that might prevent the next phase of Charlie’s life – the Winchester scholarship.
CHAPTER 3
Winchester
Scott Moncrieff is the kind of boy, who is quite happy in bed if he has plenty of literature, only it must be literature.
Montague Rendall, housemaster at Winchester, 1904
On a hot Friday in early July 1903, Charlie and his mother caught the train from Glasgow to Euston and took the tube to Earls Court where they stayed the night with his uncle Kenneth, one of Meg’s many brothers. Meg was sick from the journey and, more nervous than her son, she suffered from neuralgia for the next few days. On Saturday they arrived in Winchester where Charlie was to take the entrance examination. They drove into the heart of the fine old city, past high walls crowned with drooping snapdragons, yellow, white and red, and under a gateway into the narrow Kingsgate Street, where their lodgings were in the oldest house of all, with an overhanging timbered front wreathed with creepers. While Meg was ill, Joanna Ballard, another aunt on Charlie’s father’s side, came to entertain Charlie. For the next two days she nursed Meg with military efficiency and explored the ancient town with her nephew.
At Winchester King Alfred, scholar, statesman and lawgiver, began the work of recording Anglo-Saxon history, and his translations from Latin laid the foundations of Anglo-Saxon prose. Winchester was the nursery of the English language. Charles and his aunt visited the cathedral and saw the graves of Saxon kings: Cynegils and Adulphus, Cenulph and Ecgberht. In Winchester in 802 Ecgberht was crowned king of all England and issued his famous edict, abolishing tribal distinctions and decreeing that all within the one nation should be known by one name, English. Charles, however, didn’t feel entirely English. He had spent a summer two years previously tracing his own ancestry on a large piece of canvas, back to the half-brother of Mary Queen of Scots, the illegitimate Earl of Murray; not content with that, he had added the descendants of all the kings and queens of England and Scotland around the outside of the canvas with their relationships to each other ending with Queen Victoria and Edward VII. He had placed himself confidently in the history of Britain.
Charlie’s entrance exam began with the Latin translation, at which he triumphed. The next was Euclid which he found ‘fearfully stiff’ although he was back on form for the history exam and Greek translation in the afternoon. There were another three days of exams with candidates from the original hundred being knocked out each day. Names of those still in the competition were shown on a list in the window of Wells bookshop where the last remaining parents gathered on Saturday 11 July – for Charlie a day never to be forgotten. His name was there, among the thirteen scholars, and on seeing it he ran alone to the cathedral to pay homage beside the grave of William of Wykeham, the founder, five centuries before, of one of the oldest public schools in England.
Montague Rendall, who would be his housemaster and a future headmaster, spoke to Charlie’s mother. His translations of Latin and Greek gained the highest mark of all the candidates that year. The thirteen-year-old had an instinctive facility of expression. He had translated Ovid’s Metamorphoses with an almost adult understanding, derived from his absorption and memorising of so much great poetry since a very young age:
Everything is changed but nothing perishes. The spirit wanders, going hence, thither, coming thence, hither and takes possession of any limbs it pleases. With equal ease it goes from beasts into human bodies and from us into beasts, nor in any length of time does it fail. And as wax is easily moulded in new shapes, nor remains as it had been before, nor keeps the same form, but yet is itself the same; so do I teach that the soul is ever the same, but migrates into different shapes.1
Charlie’s own metamorphosis would shortly begin.
After a family summer at the beach and shortly before his fourteenth birthday, 25 September 1903, Charles – no longer Charlie – was taken to Winchester by his father to begin his first term. ‘I have left him,’ George wrote, ‘in an earthly paradise which I am glad to think he fully appreciates.’2 In fact the converse was true: Charles had just left Eden. Winchester was not simpl
y crumbling stone walls and honeysuckle; it had a darker underside. Charles was probably far better off in the homely, creative atmosphere of Alton Burn than at Winchester, where he was expected to conform to hundreds of years of tradition. His individuality would be tested to the full.
* * *
Officially known as Collegium Beatae Mariae Wintoniensis prope Winton, Winchester College was founded in 1382 by William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester and Chancellor to both Edward III and Richard II. The first seventy poor scholars entered the school in 1394. It was founded in conjunction with New College, Oxford, for which it was designed to act as a feeder. Older than Eton, Winchester had a tradition of scholarship and privilege. The nine official public schools recognised in the Public Schools Act of 1868 provided the country with its ruling class, and a scholar at Winchester was deemed the academic cream.
The seventy scholars lived apart from the other students in a medieval stone keep in the central court, called College, or Coll. They ate like courtly knights at ancient oak tables in a stone hall hung with dark portraits of former headmasters and wore gowns to distinguish them from commoners. They lived in the same dormitory that exists today, and slept in communal rooms in mixed age groups. They also studied together, the idea being that the older boys could help the younger ones if necessary and the younger could ‘fag’ for the older boys – make tea and run errands. Prep time was known as ‘toy time’. Desks were known as ‘toys’, and, to complicate matters, books sent from home were also known as ‘toys’. A lot of time was spent erecting bookshelves and arranging toys.
Charles, as a Scot, had an historical prejudice against the English to overcome, while the English boys had an inbuilt indifference to Scots and an assumption of superiority over any other race. Lucky then that Charles Law, another scholar and another Scot, soon became a close friend. The son of Bonar Law, who later briefly became Prime Minister, Charles Law also came from a hard-working Scottish family. At Alton Burn Charles Scott Moncrieff had been the best at every subject, and his father was known as a respected judge, but now he was surrounded by huge academic competition and socially was considered ordinary. His parents, though comfortable, earned their own living, and their wealth was nothing compared to the truly rich of Edwardian England. At Winchester there were members of ruling families like the Asquiths and others admitted to Edward VII’s royal set: the frivolous, the witty, the heirs to material and social achievement well beyond the experience of Charles’s family. A typical luncheon party for twenty among the very rich could cost £60, when the wages of a maid were £10 a year. The sisters and mothers were debutantes born to a life of leisure; a very different path from Charles’s mother.