At the opposite end of the drawing room is a minstrels’ gallery reached by a concealed staircase. The space is cramped and narrow and the taller musicians would have had to stoop while they entertained with pipe and fiddle. I would clamber up there to get a bird’s-eye view of my parents chatting with their guests by the fire at the far end, and I used to wonder whether any of those old musicians would have ever given credence to a soothsayer if she had whispered to them that by the twentieth century, minstrels would be pulling in some of the highest wage packets on the planet.
One of the reasons so much of the house remained unchanged over the years was that, for generations, the family had spent the majority of their year in Wales or London and had only ventured north in the warmer summer months. The years of the Second World War were the first in two centuries that the Campbells had returned to live at their principal home full time. For in 1939, the War Office requisitioned a large chunk of the Welsh estate close to Stackpole and turned it into a bombing range. The local hamlet of Castlemartin was evacuated and blasted to ruins. The army set up artillery batteries on the cliff tops to practise firing missiles at offshore targets and notified my grandparents that troops would be billeted in the house. My grandmother Wilma retreated to Scotland with Hugh and his older sister, Carey. The north of Scotland was one of the places least touched by the war, but even though they lived some way beyond the back of beyond, Wilma worried that the Luftwaffe might spitefully select Cawdor as a random target, and she ran into trouble with the Home Guard for persistently flying a Red Cross flag from the top of the tower.
As the Germans swept across Europe, invasion seemed only a matter of dwindling time. My grandmother had always been an avid Francophile and spent her time composing poems of dubious merit in praise of the Resistance and her hero, General de Gaulle. Wilma was not a great fan of rural simplicity, and to her the French embodied a refinement that was sorely lacking in wartime Scotland. Later, she became convinced that once the Germans had seized Britain it would be left to Scandinavian fishermen to cross the North Sea and rescue the family from the shores of the Moray Firth. In preparation for this inevitability, she rehearsed Hugh and Carey until they could belt out the Norwegian national anthem in piping voices:
Ja, vi elsker dette landet,
som det stiger frem,
furet, værbitt, over vannet,
med de tusen hjem.
Elsker, elsker det og tenker
På vår far og mor
Og den saganatt som senker
Drømme på vår jord,
Og den saganatt som senker
Senker drømme på vår jord.
Yes, we love this country
Which rises up,
Rugged and weathered, above the sea,
With its thousands of homes.
Love it, love it and think
About our mothers and fathers
And the saga of past ages
That sends dreams to our earth,
And the saga of past ages
That sends dreams, sends dreams to our earth.
Singing it would be a token of their thanks and appreciation when they were hiding under herring nets in the hull of a trawler, heading for exile in Stavanger.
When the war was over, the army left Stackpole but held on to much of the land they had seized. When my grandfather was decommissioned, rather than pack up and return to Wales, he settled with his young family at Cawdor, only visiting Stackpole for holidays. A reverse of the long-held living arrangements.
My grandparents’ marriage was as brittle as a biscuit. Wilma was beautiful, but hopelessly spoiled. Her father, Vincent Vickers, was a rich, eccentric industrialist who had resigned his post as Governor of the Bank of England in protest at the continuation of the fixing of sterling to the gold standard. To illustrate this point, he used a gold bar as a doorstop where, he said, it was more usefully employed. He was devastated when his young wife died a year after the birth of Wilma, and she became the miniature substitute of his lost love. He doted on his only child; no gift or indulgence was ever refused. Even after Vincent remarried and started a second family, Wilma remained gazing at the world from pedestal height and it was considered a special privilege for her young stepsisters to gather around her dressing table before dinner to watch her brushing her fashionably bobbed hair and dabbing her long neck with eau de cologne.
* * *
Jack Cawdor’s childhood, or lack of one, had left him stilted, formal and shy. After the First World War, he spent the rest of his twenties far away from his silent mother and society as a whole. In 1924, he set off with Frank Kingdon-Ward on an expedition to Tibet. Kingdon-Ward, a botanist, was diverted by every sprig and tuft that they passed. Exasperated by their deathly slow progress, Jack wrote, ‘It drives me clean daft to walk behind him … if ever I travel again, I’ll make damned sure it’s not with a botanist. They are always stopping to gape at weeds.’ In a placatory gesture, when Kingdon-Ward came across a previously unclassified iris, he named the plant after his young companion and gave him some bulbs to plant at Cawdor. Its descendants, a cluster of dishevelled yellow flowers, can still be seen, huddled against a wall in a corner of the garden. The objective of their voyage was to discover the hidden falls of the Tsangpo gorge, which no Westerner had ever seen. Tibetan folklore spoke of a mystical waterfall over a hundred feet high in a virtual Shangri-La. The walls of the twisting gorge were perilously sheer, but Jack and Kingdon-Ward managed to penetrate far enough to discover two new falls, though both fell short of the one they had hoped to find. They named one Rainbow and the other Takin, after a wild sheep they had shot there, but were unable to pierce a route further.
On his return, Jack met Wilma Vickers, and although she would have been far more impressed by attendance at the Sorbonne than by years spent clambering over barren mountain ranges, they became engaged. By now, even Vincent realized that his daughter had become a rather impossible young woman, and he checked to see whether his prospective son-in-law was absolutely sure he knew what size of handful he was taking on. Jack assured Vincent that he did, and married her in 1929.
He might not have known then what Vincent was anxious about, but Jack soon got the picture. When Wilma sat down to play a tune to assembled guests at Stackpole, if they dared talk, she would slam the piano shut and flounce from the room. Wilma was clever and artistic, but her lack of any country sense drove Jack mad. If they crossed a field, she would invariably try to open the gate by its hinges. As far as Wilma was concerned, only barbarians automatically knew how gates swung. The French would never trouble themselves with agricultural trivia, and neither would she. All that the couple really had in common was a virulent loathing of Catholicism.
Aunt Carey was born in 1930, a week before Jack turned thirty, and Hugh followed in 1932. Wilma had no mother, Jack had no father; neither of them had a template for their parental roles. The Cawdors muddled along together, but the relationship was strained from the start, and it deteriorated dramatically after their car hurtled into a telegraph pole outside Swindon. Like his son after him, Jack had a propensity to divert from the road with casual disregard for health and safety. Jack’s face was smashed up and for years afterwards he suffered excruciating headaches. Doctors were unable to help, and Jack’s children grew up in the shadow of his carbon moods. Hugh found solace in the nursery with his nanny, Miss Dunkerley. When the children had to go through to the drawing room they learned that keeping their relationship on a very formal footing lowered the chances of inciting an outburst. X-rays finally revealed a splinter of skull bone pressing into the top of Jack’s brain. An operation relieved the pressure, but it did not seal the fault lines that ran through the marriage.
Ten years after Hugh’s birth, Wilma got pregnant again in an attempt to fill the emotional pothole. When the new baby, James, was born, both parents adored him, but his arrival did not solve their problems; instead they vied with each other for his affections. The Cawdors resolved to stay together until their
youngest son was ‘old enough’, and in the meantime they maintained separate lives within the castle walls – an arrangement Jack had long been familiar with, thanks to the habits of his mother Joan. Not so Wilma. For her, the loneliness of their estrangement was alleviated only by long hours at the piano and extensive poetic outpourings. If her own muse wandered off, she would read volume after volume of verse, pencilling copious annotations in the margins. She lived far, far away in an iambic pentametric world of love and loss, and chain-smoked all the while, a long, elegant cigarette holder clenched between her teeth. For Wilma, no inhalation of oxygen was complete without nicotine content. There was ochre staining on her teeth, fingertips, the front of her hair, and even on the piano keys. When Wilma and her husband did meet up, she frequently fled in tears. During one encounter, Jack stamped so viciously on her foot with his steel-capped hobnail boot that he broke her toe. In her loneliness, Wilma would report Jack’s crimes to her two older children. This practice had the diametrically opposite effect to the one she desired. She found no partisans, and Hugh in particular began to despise her. He had until then found Jack unreachable, but now a rudimentary bond was forged as they stood in an unspoken alignment against Wilma.
When Jack and she finally divorced, Wilma went off to live alone in Somerset, a county randomly selected, where she had no friends. As soon as his first wife was gone, my grandfather married for a second time. Betty Gordon Cumming was a very busy local widow whose only son William had long been Hugh’s best friend. After her first husband died, leaving her with three young children to bring up, and before settling exclusively for Jack, she entertained him and two other local lairds with such metronomic regularity that they were known as Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner. One of these was the Earl of Moray, who lived at Darnaway, a castle not far from the Blasted Heath where Macbeth’s witches lurked. One day, in a fit of sudden and inexplicable madness, the Earl of Moray took a sword and docked the stone tails off two handsomely carved lions that flanked his front door steps. Then he strode into his bedroom and shot himself. Betty, who had been in the adjoining bathroom, heard the explosion and rushed in to find his mutilated corpse. People said that out of her trio of lovers, Moray had been the favourite, but Betty never spoke of her feelings, and after his death she took a pragmatic view and married Jack, the richer of the two remaining lairds.
Competition with his two rivals may have intensified his ardour, but what really appealed to Jack was that Betty was the antithesis of Wilma. She was a far less interesting woman, but she was tough and self-reliant. She may have had a tongue that could clip hedges, but she was crisp and efficient – a homemaker. While Wilma’s idea of looking after guests was playing a fugue on the piano and giving her opinions on Rimbaud, Betty saw to it that they were shown to their bedrooms and that there were flowers and bath towels when they got there.
Betty’s competence gave her the domestic clout to modernize Cawdor. She rebelled against Jack’s tolerance of the cold that extended indoors as well as out, had all the upstairs fireplaces blocked up, and introduced modish ‘log fire effect’ heaters with crinkly red cellophane backdrops. While Jack’s first wife had exquisite taste, his second’s was slightly suspect, but after she had redecorated the guest bedrooms, her interest in updating other aspects, like the kitchen, ran out of steam. She had little interest in food. In those days, the kitchen at Cawdor was at the furthest end of the house. Everything was wheeled the length of a football pitch on hospital trolleys. This guaranteed that the food arrived in the dining room at ambient temperature. The cook had never really spread her imaginative wings since the days of war rationing. Menus were very plain – barley broth, boiled beef, braised cabbage, the dread haggis. Not that Betty cared: she had no sense of smell, little sense of taste, and the appetite of a gerbil. When there were no guests to entertain, rather than sit down for lunch, Betty far preferred to be out taking cuttings from the herbaceous borders, with an apple to eat and The Archers for company.
She was an accomplished gardener and threw her energies into the large walled gardens that lay on either side of the house. The lower garden that had been made from parts of the old curtain wall was filled with rows of runner beans, onions and artichokes, and tomatoes grew under low glass frames. Under vast sheets of netting lay fraises de bois, gooseberry bushes and raspberry canes, and along the inside walls were espaliers of red- and blackcurrants. Betty added flowerbeds of gladioli and pin-cushion fat dahlias for use in the house. In the top garden, she laid out four large oval rose-beds in the fashion of the time: lurid, thorny atolls, each within a lagoon of woodchips and a reef of horse manure. Wilma had been a talented gardener too, but she wafted rather than weeded. Afternoons would slip by with secateurs in one hand, a trug in the other, with Wilma reciting poems and absent-mindedly snipping at a few tiger lily stems. Her successor could prune and tie an entire rose tunnel in the same amount of time.
Betty was also something of an expert knitter and was only interested in making things that required at least four needles working in tandem. When she came to live at Cawdor she became a one-woman production line of ornately decorated kilt socks. My grandfather would have been the envy of a sock fetishist, with a never-ending supply in every shade of the spectrum. She got Jack – a man with ultra-conservative dress habits – wearing, from the knee down, turquoise, cyclamen, cadmium, bright purple and palest mint.
* * *
My father had a classic establishment education: Eton (where he failed to flourish outside the shooting team) was followed by Magdalen College, Oxford. He was at Oxford at the same time as his sister Carey and neither breathed a sober breath for the entire duration of their stay – a time that was curtailed for Hugh when he was sent down before graduating for a resplendent lack of work. He went on to the agricultural college at Cirencester, where they taught him the bones of land management. He dodged National Service and qualified as a chartered surveyor. At some point, slightly behind schedule, he had an educational epiphany. He became a zealous autodidact and immersed himself in books and encyclopedias. He was artistic: he could draw, he had beautiful handwriting, and he had an academic fascination with the English language, architecture and anything to do with trees. When the government came up with the chirpy slogan ‘Plant a Tree in ’73’, my father took pride in planting a million. If only all his passions could have been this wholesome.
Whatever the range of Hugh’s personal interests, as was the case for the twenty-four thanes who preceded him, Cawdor and Stackpole were always going to be the main focus of his life. Pa inherited Stackpole and the Welsh estates in 1957, upon his marriage to our mother, Cathryn Hinde. Cath was the middle daughter of an army general, blonde, slender and blue-eyed. She was in the British ski team and doubled for Vivien Leigh in the ski scenes of an atrocious B movie called The Deep Blue Sea; but it was the actress Joan Fontaine whom she more closely resembled. The similarity was so uncanny, it always made watching the movie Rebecca a rather unnerving experience.
My grandfather Jack had desperately stiff communications with his children, and when my mother was first a guest at Cawdor she was amazed to hear Hugh and Carey working out the topics for discussion with their father over the forthcoming meal. Usually they talked about one local matter and then debated something current from the newspapers. This stilted form of interaction extended to all aspects of their relationship. When the gift of the Welsh estates was handed over to Hugh, it was without instruction. Jack assumed that his son would have an innate understanding; after all, no-one had told Jack how to go about the running of the place and he had still been a schoolboy when he inherited the whole thing. His own father’s decline in the seclusion of a sanatorium had left Jack fatherless for years before the fact. Having had no guiding hand, he had no idea how to be one himself.
* * *
A year after their wedding, Ma was in the final stages of her first pregnancy when they were summoned to Scotland from Wales. My grandfather Jack wanted her to give birth to the male heir
of the next generation at Cawdor. The baby turned out to be my sister, Emma. Perhaps there was a concealed gasp, but her gender was accepted with good grace and there was a muted celebration.
Eighteen months after my sister’s arrival, my parents repeated their pilgrimage to Cawdor for the birth of their next child. There was no precedent, or even mental preparation, for a second daughter. My birth was greeted with undisguised consternation. Jack was up a ladder in the garden when he learned the news. While digesting the bulletin he lost his balance and fell into a flowerbed, breaking an ankle. From his hospital bed in Inverness, he sent a message to my father. Devoid of congratulations, it simply said, ‘Call the baby Elizabeth or Carolyn.’ (These were the proper names of his second wife, Betty, and his daughter, Carey.) In an effort to appease Jack for this second chromosomal faux pas, my parents complied and I was christened Elizabeth.
It was not until years later that I learned what turmoil my birth had caused. After it, my mother bought a pile of self-help books with titles like How to Conceive a Baby Boy and Conception: Sex Determination Made Simple. She followed salt-free, low-potassium diets, followed by high-potassium, salt-filled diets, in a desperate bid to ensure a boy-child. Three years later and pregnant once more, my mother put her foot down and stayed in Wales for the birth. She could not cope with yet another pre-natal trek to Cawdor with the possibility of a traumatic aftermath. Instead of the new heir arriving into an ancient four-poster, my brother Colin was born in the rather less charismatic surroundings of Carmarthen hospital. She did the same for the births of Fred and Laura. After umpteen Campbell births at Cawdor over the centuries, mine may prove to be the last.
A Charmed Life: Growing Up in Macbeth's Castle Page 4