A Charmed Life: Growing Up in Macbeth's Castle

by Liza Campbell

  Chapter 3

  I said to Heart, ‘How goes it?’ Heart replied, ‘Right as a Ribstone Pippin!’ But it lied.

  Hilaire Belloc

  When Emma and I were very young, our parents lived at Stackpole. The house stood near the sea in Pembrokeshire. The coastline there is made up of coves and caves and limestone cliffs pierced by swallow holes that boom like gigantic didgeridoos when the surf hits them at high tide. Erosion of the limestone had produced any number of spindly, natural arches. Surely, it was these flying buttresses of nature that inspired medieval cathedral designers. In some places the arches have collapsed, leaving freestanding stacks out at sea where puffins nest.

  We lived a gentle afternoon’s stroll away from St Bride’s Head. The cliff there had a steep flight of steps that led down to a minuscule chapel perched limpet-like above the waves. The interior was bare but for two benches carved from the rock. It was where sailors had prayed before they left home, where families mourned them when they didn’t come back, and where the wreckers waved their lanterns from the unglazed windows, luring unwary ships on a moonless night.

  I have few authentic memories of living at Stackpole, but one stands out, implanted by a photograph. In the picture I am sitting on a cannon, looking a little wistful, holding a balloon on a stick, and wearing a smocked dress for my third birthday party. The cannon was one of a pair that flanked the carriage porch at the entrance to the house. Once there had been half a dozen or more positioned around the terrace, but over the centuries, twittish forebears had failed to resist the urge to shove them down the precipitous slope into the lake. One by one, the cannons had hurtled down to sink into the deep, lily-tangled silt with an almighty splash.

  The house stood on a promontory above a series of immense lily ponds, half a mile from the sea. An eight-arched bridge with elegant balustrades spanned the water. It led to a vetch-sprinkled warren dotted with ash trees, all wind-blasted into sloping topiary, and beyond them to Barafundle bay. A high wall enclosed the beach and kept it private for the family. As at St Bride’s Head, there was a flight of flagstone steps down the cliff, built to make it easier for Victorian ladies in their long, hooped dresses. On clear days we could see Lundy Island and the coast of north Devon beyond.

  Whenever he joined us at Barafundle, Hugh spent hours constructing sand-volcanoes, but it was never apparent whether they were for him or us. Clumsy fingers were not allowed near the building site. We would be sent off to collect sea grass and dry twigs. When we had found enough fuel, it was packed into the tunnel at the base of the conical chimney and lit with the hot embers from his cigarette. Smoke would suddenly belch satisfactorily out of the volcano’s ‘crater’. I assumed that we would be eating smoky sandwiches and sandy bananas on this beach for ever. I would have been happy to, but our stay at Stackpole was brief. No-one had bothered to tell us that not only were we Highlanders, but our exodus to the north of Scotland was inevitable and merely a matter of time.

  * * *

  The Stackpole estate came into our family through the marriage of Sir Alexander Campbell to a Welsh heiress in 1689. Like many love matches, the union came about by the slimmest of chances. So inadvertent was their meeting that it fuelled the couple’s sense that some divine power had not merely pulled strings, but had hauled on bloody great hawsers – as if Cupid’s arrow had become a heat-seeking Sidewinder on their hearts’ behalf.

  In those days, travelling overland to London from the Highlands was an arduous journey of seven hundred miles down the spine of the kingdom. Consider these: the Grampians and the Cairngorm mountains, the hills of Lammermuir and Lauderdale, the forests of Strathord and Redesdale, and the North Yorkshire moors. The names may conjure up bucolic idylls, but in reality it was league after lonely league of bumpy tracks that took a traveller only as far south as York Minster. Aside from the invisible risks from those who might spray their fellow stagecoach inmates with consumptive spittle, a seventeenth-century demographic would have shown these remote areas to be encrusted with brigands. Although a further distance, it was considered quicker and safer to go south by sea from the west coast. Accordingly, when Sir Alexander was called upon to attend to business matters in London, he crossed the Highlands along the natural corridor of Loch Ness and set sail from Fort William.

  The journey went without incident until a ferocious gale blew up as his boat navigated the Irish Sea. After near catastrophe off St Bride’s Head, the crew was forced to put into Milford Haven for repairs. While the sailors replaced caulking and patched damaged sails, Alexander sought accommodation. Knowing his stopover could be lengthy, he sent word to a fellow student from his university days, requesting temporary lodging. Sir Gilbert Lort lived near Fishguard, a little way along the coast from Milford Haven. He welcomed this impromptu visit from an old friend and Alexander duly arrived to stay at Stackpole. The visit became somewhat extended after he was introduced to Gilbert’s only sister, Elizabeth. When Alexander finally resumed his journey to London, he despatched his business with all haste and returned to Wales, where he proposed and they were married. His brother-in-law never married, and when he died suddenly it was without heirs of his own. The Lort estate went to Elizabeth, and thus passed into Campbell hands.

  A second, even more auspicious Welsh marriage followed. Alexander and Elizabeth had a son known as ‘Joyless’ John, but despite his unpromising nickname he found himself an even richer heiress, Mary Pryse. Her dowry added thousands of acres of Carmarthenshire and Cardiganshire to the Pembrokeshire estate. The family’s landownership swelled to more than a hundred thousand acres in combination with the Campbell Scottish lands. This afforded, among other things, the creation of an opulent new Stackpole from the bones of the old Norman manor. Wales might be a country in need of a roof, but Scotland is a country that needs not only a roof but urgent attention to its central heating. Their new estates and the weather gradually drew the Campbells south.

  * * *

  Stackpole remained unchanged after Joyless John’s renovation until things got rather out of control when the Victorians came along. The family indulged their wealth on feverish building projects. With a rivalrous eye on a neighbouring house undergoing similar enlargement, they started to heap wings and frontages onto Stackpole, until the previous structure was all but submerged.

  When the Victorian Campbells had finished with Stackpole, with cash and energy to spare they went to work on another pile they owned in Carmarthenshire called Gelli Ayr (the name is pronounced to rhyme with ‘deathly pyre’). The house had been owned by the head of the Vaughan family until 1810, when he, as Hugh put it, ‘spitefully bequeathed it to his best friend, John Campbell of Cawdor’. The Vaughan family disputed the will for thirteen years, but with no success, which must have been bitterly frustrating because once the Campbells had finished embellishing it with gargoyles Gelli Ayr ended up large, long, and in an unpromising dark granite, like a feeble homage to St Pancras station. No-one was pleased with the result and it was scarcely used. The one happy outcome of this misbegotten building venture was that Cawdor remained fairly free from their meddling.

  With their wanton additions to Stackpole, the Victorians had created Stygian courtyards where the abundant Welsh rain made it easy for damp to take hold. Later, the soldiers billeted there during the Second World War supplemented their rations by cultivating tomatoes on the flat roofs, causing further damage and rot. In the swirl of excitement of being the master of all he surveyed in Wales, my father decided to refashion Stackpole into a more manageable size when I was about three years old. He applied for a grant to strip away the extraneous Victoriana, but it was turned down. In a fit of caprice, he ordered in a demolition crew. Stackpole was flattened. Worse, he sold the rubble as foundations for Milford Haven Oil Refinery, a hideous monolith that now blots the Pembrokeshire skyline for miles around. The wrecking ball went back to the stockyard, but metaphorically it never left. Hugh not only had a destructive streak, but he had fallen for the great myth – that a de
structive streak was romantic. Towards the end of his life the path he had carved underwent a road-widening scheme.

  Stackpole had been in our family for almost three hundred years. My grandfather Jack, whose childhood home it was, never uttered a word to his son about its abrupt end. When my father had finished, the old stable block with its clock tower was all that remained, along with a plaque set into the ground on the terrace where the cannons once stood. The inscription reads:

  The Stackpole Estate was cared for by the Cawdor Campbells from 1721–1972.

  The words always put me in mind of a conversation I once had with some Kenyan park rangers who were telling me about an elephant poacher they had recently captured. When I asked what had happened to him, they said, ‘Oh, he died in our care.’

  With Stackpole reduced to its component parts and the gothic sprawl of Gelli Ayr on a long lease to a farming college, my father needed to provide a new family home. The house he built was called Golden Grove, the English translation of Gelli Ayr, and it stood on a hill on the opposite side of the valley from its Welsh namesake.

  Golden Grove had an elegant interior thanks to mahogany doors and marble fireplaces ripped from Stackpole, but outside it had a Lego-like quality, with columns that were both ostentatious and slightly measly. The outstanding impression on arrival was of a giant brick shoebox. But this box was our home, and I loved, loved, loved it. It overlooked the serpentine curves and oxbow lakes of the River Towy. The landscapes were breathtaking. To the east was the ruin of Dynevor Castle; to the south-west, Paxton’s Tower was a turreted outline on the horizon; and due west, on a neat, tussocky knoll near the river, were the ruined walls of Dryslywyn Castle. These were our views, but the fields and woods that swept down to the little bridge that crossed the Towy made up our immediate universe.

  Initially, the most pressing problem of my childhood was not my bad old dad – he only had a walk-on part during my early years – it was that I wasn’t sure where my sister ended and I began. Emma was eighteen months older than me. For half of the year she was two years older, but six months later, Aesop-like, I narrowed the gap to one. Her hair was thick, dark, and kept in a bob, while mine was fine and blonde and seldom cut. She had a right hook; I was a southpaw. Emma was bold, whereas I was timid. My interior world was suffused by anxious monologues rather than calming muzak, while hers seemed to be filled with exhortations to war. Emma looked like our father, while I looked like my mother, and our temperaments seemed to mirror theirs. When cross, I fell silent and sulked. There didn’t seem to be room for any other reaction because Emma was prone to wild tantrums at the least provocation. It was as if she was beholden to some arbitrary inner code that, when accidentally contravened, drove her to express herself with untrammelled savagery. It was thrilling to witness, but it baffled my mother and myriad nannies who passed, sometimes slowly, sometimes at top speed, through our lives. The spark could be anything, but was most often clothing. A dress she had been happy to wear one day became the object of the most violent loathing the next. I had pretty passive wardrobe habits – dressing was a matter of course that I didn’t question – but with Emma, it was like throwing matches at a munitions dump. For a long time we were rather proud to think we were unruly enough to drive so many nannies off, but when it transpired that Hugh came into their rooms as a matter of course, we realized that there were factors beyond Emma’s irascibility.

  My mother Cath had wanted her first child to share her elder sister E’s birthday, 14 March. She jumped up and down in a bid to induce labour, but Emma resisted. My mother finally got things going after knocking back a bottle of castor oil. But Emma’s birth had nothing whatsoever to do with castor oil. It was obvious to me that there was a cosmic logic to my sister’s arrival on 15 March. It is the Ides of March, the only day of the year that comes with the prefix ‘Beware!’

  I longed to find a connection of equal glamour for my own birthday, 24 September. I was envious of all those significant dates like Valentine’s Day, Halloween and winter solstice. It was only a small consolation that it wasn’t called September Fool’s Day. But why not ‘Subtle September 24th’? Or ‘Moody September 24th’? Then I learned about sex. I was overjoyed to discover, after calculating with a stringently exact nine-month gestation period, that in order to conceive me my parents had had slightly disgusting but undoubtedly devout and sacred congress on Jesus’s birthday. An embarrassing number of years later I was crushed to discover that thanks to a grasp of numeracy which it would be boastful to describe as remedial, I had somehow overlooked that Christmas Day actually falls on 25 December. It meant that my parents had had slightly disgusting and no doubt perfunctory post-present-wrapping sex while covered in stray bits of sellotape one goddamn day too soon. It was no goddamn good to me at all.

  I adored my sister. She, in turn, loathed me. My admiration for her manifested itself as slavish aping that drove her round the bend. We lived on flimsy truces. Our customary amber status went red at least once a day. And then there were the terrible occasions when my mother lost her head and thought it would be charming to dress us identically. This pushed us to battle stations. Automatically. Always. The top floor of the house had a long, cork-covered passage. Emma would look at her dress and then look at mine. Her lips would pucker. Seconds later I would be knocked to the floor and dragged along the length of the passage by my hair. By the time we hit the stairs we’d be going at a fair lick. I went down them headfirst so many times that one of my front milk teeth died and turned black. She was a primal force. Emma knew where she began and ended. She didn’t care where I began, and the most satisfying outcome would be for my end to be at the bottom of a deep pit.

  To be fair, I could be a pain in the arse, and Emma wasn’t the only one who found me exasperating. The worst incident happened when, at the age of five, I bullied a girl called Hannah who sat next to me at Miss Gibbons’s. I can’t remember any details other than that it involved demanding sixpence while menacing her with a rubber. After school I went home and spent my time digging up worms for dissection, and clean forgot the quarrel. After school Hannah went home and reported me to her parents.

  The next morning Miss Gibbons called me to her study. Whatever I came up with clearly did not wash because when we were called to assembly she ordered me to join her on the dais in front of the entire school. Through the window to our left I could see a man afloat on the Towy far below. He was circling downstream in a coracle, like an upturned ladybird. Miss Spencer, the deputy head, gave me a sharp prod and reminded me in a whisper to pay attention. My ears began to grow hot, and I knew I had done something truly awful when Miss Gibbons pointed her ruler at me and said, ‘School! This. Is what. A black sheep looks like!’ I was unfamiliar with the idiom and it amazed me. I liked lambs, especially the black ones, but I could only think, ‘Look like a sheep? I do not!’ I was sent home with an advisory note for my parents to punish me further if they saw fit. My father read it and looked at me sternly. ‘Don’t lie, don’t cheat, and be loyal,’ he said, before picking me up and kissing me on the ear. As he did, I whispered plaintively, ‘They said I was a black lamb,’ and he laughed until the tears trickled out of the corner of his eye and he had to put me down to blow his nose with his big spotted handkerchief.

  ‘Am I?’ I persisted.

  ‘No! Not unless you betray the people you love. Only that can turn you into a black sheep.’

  ‘And if I am a black lamb then you are a black ram.’

  By now my childish pedantry had begun to bore him, and he said, ‘Surely it must be time for your sheep dip. Let’s go and find your mother.’

  It was to be expected that Emma surge ahead in terms of mastering childhood skills, but because our age gap was so small, every now and again I hit a milestone first. These rare feats were met with panicked whispers. I was not to breathe a word about learning to tie my shoelaces and must never let on that I could tell the time. Otherwise who knows what Emma would do? I realized that the grownups were just a
s alarmed by Emma as I was. Achievements must be veiled, but, unclear as to exactly what qualified for secrecy, I decided that pretty well everything was safer stashed beneath a bushel. There came a point, much later on, when we were all keeping secrets from one another, and for the most part they were the same ones.

  * * *

  Even though we were two of five children by the end of my parents’ hectic nine-year breeding programme, Emma and I viewed ourselves as distinct from the others. We lumped our three younger siblings together as an amorphous cluster, referred to as ‘the Smalls’. We were unaware at the time that there was a further subdivision within the Smalls. Years later it transpired that Colin, the next one down from me, had been an island adrift in the middle of the family. I was three years older than him, while Fred was three years younger. Fred and Laura were even more tightly jammed up against each other than Emma and me. I failed to notice Colin’s isolation partly because I was too busy losing battles against Emma and partly because I hardly ever saw him properly. His solemn daily habit was to get a tissue and carefully separate the layers until he held a single membrane. He would then wander about for the rest of the day with the tissue stuck to his face by nasal suction. He kept his head tilted slightly back to keep the ‘pockie’ in place while he exhaled. He was able to see enough through the diaphanous gauze to navigate, but was faceless and silent to the rest of us. It was as if a snoozing sunbather had turned into a trundling zombie. Perhaps one explanation for Colin’s behaviour was that he had undiagnosed tinnitus. The private conclusion he reached, at the age of five, was that the constant rustlings in his head were his thought processes, and although they were abstract, their noise constantly preoccupied him.

  Fred was silent until he was nearly four, except for two words: ‘hopper’, which meant any building or container, and ‘unhuhuh’, which covered everything else, but as a rule meant ‘tractor’. His nickname was Fredbox. This caused him problems when he first went to school as he assumed his surname was Box. The teacher was equally sure that he was a Campbell, but Fred would have none of it. He was so doggedly sure that the teacher eventually called Cath to double check that she hadn’t divorced my father, married a Mr Box, and then divorced him to remarry my father. Our mother explained the nickname to the teacher, who explained it to Fred, but it cut no ice with him. Fred would only answer to Box.