A Charmed Life: Growing Up in Macbeth's Castle

by Liza Campbell

  As a baby, Laura contracted an obscure illness and suffered an extreme, almost fatal reaction to medicine she had been prescribed. Her skin fell off as if she had chemical burns. She and my mother lived for months and months in Cardiff hospital as she wavered on the threshold of death. On the few occasions we were allowed to visit, she lay still and saucer-eyed, too emaciated to shut her eyes, with every vein visible, like an Ordnance Survey map. She was too weak even to support her blankets, so a wire cage enclosed her wasted body, its stomach with the hard, swollen look of starvation. Cath’s life went on hold and we saw little of her. Laura was saved by huge doses of cortisone, administered less in confidence than in desperation. It was another year before she regained her strength. The short-term side effect of the treatment was a downy covering of hair from forehead to feet. The long-term effect left her stone deaf in her right ear, and with a constitution that saw itself as a welcoming committee for every passing virus.

  It was not until I was eleven that I began to register the younger three as individuals, but by that time I had been away at boarding school for four years and I only met them in the holidays.

  * * *

  My parents had a peculiar social life in Wales, where there were virtually no other young couples around. Guests were relations and imports rather than neighbours. Aunt Carey and her husband Uncle Peebles were frequent guests, stopping off on their way to and from London with their children Boojum and Alexander and their dog Potting Shed. They lived in a pretty house that had been in the grounds of Stackpole at the edge of the warren; now it was just at the edge of the warren. Carey had met Peebles at Oxford, where he would wander through the quads in a top hat with a pet mouse that ran round the brim. He was German, very tall, very droll and marvellously noble-looking. When I appeared with a runny nose and rheumy eyes to kiss him hello, instead of saying ‘Are you ill?’ he would say, ‘Dear child, I suspect you are prey to some fell disease. Try not to pass it to Potting Shed, he is already in an autumnal humour.’ Aunt Carey and Pa adored each other and they sat and drank and cackled over what Aunt Carey called ‘effluent society’; they both smoked so much a pall of smoke hung over the entire library.

  Our cousins were both pale, rather serious, and flaming redheads like Aunt Carey. Boojum’s hair fell in a heavy apricot-coloured curtain, while Alexander’s and Carey’s had the colouring of iron oxide. Boojum wasn’t her real name, which was Hero; the nickname was inspired by the final line of ‘The Hunting of the Snark’. Alexander was the same age as Colin, but instead of playing he spent most of his visits at loggerheads with his father over whether the Cenomanian subdivision was part of the late or early Cretaceous period, and much else. When cajoled into joining us outdoors, Alexander would come reluctantly, and only if we were prepared to build a decent replica of the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the sandpit. Both children would frequently baffle us with their exchanges. ‘Hither my Boojum and tell to us why you look so effulgent today,’ Alexander would say. And she would bat him off: ‘Alexander! Stop it and leave me alone. You know I am propelled into a bombazine gloom by the loss of my book.’

  ‘What book, pray, Boojalisse?’

  ‘The one on meteorites.’

  The only other guests to come with a metronomic regularity were Uncle Bill and ‘Uncle George’. Uncle Bill was my mother’s older brother. He had contracted meningitis as a toddler in Egypt and it had left him with a child’s mind in a burly adult body. He had a head full of wonder and brass-band music. We could hear him as he marched up and down his bedroom for hours. Bill worshipped Hugh. My father, who was normally intolerant of fools, adored him in return and spent hours explaining how things worked and helping Bill spell words he found difficult.

  Uncle George was not our real uncle, or any relation at all, but a middle-aged man who would rent out his flat in London for months at a time, then call up people like my parents and say that he was ‘on his way’ from the Cloudsley-Shovells in Bath to the Webbs in Cardiganshire and might he ‘stop off for a couple of days’ on his way between the two? Only once he had secured an invitation with us did he call up the Webbs and say, ‘I’m staying at Golden Grove on my way to the Leylands in Cheshire. Might I stop off with you?’ And so it would go on, until he had belayed his way around the country. My mother said Uncle George wasn’t married because he had ‘never got over’ a girl in his youth. It was her stock explanation for any man who was unmarried. Gayness did not light up on her mental dashboard.

  My father would often make known his impatience with people solely motivated by social ambition, while in fact providing an easy target for one of the most avid. Uncle George was a nightmare: snobbish, waspish and unpredictable in everything except that he would be staying double the length of time he had initially proposed. His sharpest critiques were directed at the people he had just come from. ‘It’s all very well inviting the Bishop of Worcester to lunch – at least his knowledge of opera compensates for his leftie views – but it was a total faux pas to have that cheap Littlefair woman. Total slattern. She has made it her business to fuck everyone – pardon my French, girls; run along, and don’t you listen to your old Uncle George – everyone I tell you, from Genesis to Deuteronomy! And yet she’s still not bagged a husband! You have to laugh. My dear, I’m afraid I cannot. Abide. A social climber. She didn’t even know how to pronounce chablis properly! Did you say champagne, Hugh? I say, yes please, raaath-err! A splash of bubbly would be diviiiine.’ And he would excitedly clack his false teeth together. When the time came to extend his stay, he would start, ‘Cath, did I tell you that Hermione Webb rang? When? Oh. It must have been … while you were … out.’ And pizzicato now: ‘She said she had a frightful, um, lumbago, and might I come, uh, aftertheweekend, uh, ratherthan-tomorrow … such a bind. You don’t mind d’you, Cath? Darling?’ Eyes bulging with sudden nerves, then relaxing again as his board was guaranteed for a further three days. ‘Girls, come over here! You look diviiiine in those Spanish dresses; now, do the flamenco for your Uncle George. What d’you mean no? Dance, I tell you!’ Still I refused, and he grabbed me as I tried to run off. He held me in a tight avuncular squeeze, laughing a cloud of halitosis, and I swiped him with my castanet. He retaliated by biting me ‘affectionately’ on the stomach, but because he misjudged the thickness of my ruffles and wasn’t fully in command of his dentures or his temper, he left a weal that turned into a grey-yellow bruise.

  Uncle George became my sworn enemy.

  * * *

  Like our parents, we too had a dearth of normal childhood friendships. We were the posh lot on top of the hill, separated from our neighbours by the meaningless titles we children didn’t even know were our prefixes. It was a mutual stand-off: my parents would have welcomed other children, but other children brought their parents with them, towards whom they were reflexively resistant. Those parents, in turn, didn’t want to risk being seen as brown-nosing by having the toffs’ scab-covered kids over to play. It didn’t matter. We were always busy building some den or other and I was never aware that we were isolated, until I heard about other people’s childhoods and watched my own children’s.

  Sweetly ignorant of every adult dynamic, we had a childhood in Wales of diminutive rural adventures. Although we were loosely segregated from our parents, if something thrilling happened during the day, we were not excluded. One of my most vivid childhood memories is of my father rushing into the nursery in the middle of lunch one day and saying, ‘Come quickly! You can have your ice cream later!’ It was very avant-garde not to have to finish up the food on our plates (a trial that could extend indefinitely into the afternoon if it was liver or spinach). Edith, the cook, was overseeing our eating in the absence of a nanny, since the last one had suddenly packed her bags and left. ‘We’re going to see a glider that’s crashed by the river!’

  Emma rushed from the table, knocking over her chair in excitement, but I was a little more apprehensive. Were we being bundled into the car to go and see a mangled corpse? My father didn’t say,
so I stared at my lap as we turned into the watermeadow on the far side of the river. There was no blood and no body. The glider had only a cracked nose cone and a bent wing, and a slightly dazed pilot wandered about as Wylo and Zachariah, the estate carpenters, Father Cinelli, the vicar from our church, his daughter Rebecca and the postman all gawped at him.

  As we stood there, my father turned to us. ‘Why didn’t it blow up when it crashed?’ He always asked us questions like this.

  ‘Because he’d run out of petrol?’ I suggested.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Did it hit the water and wet the engine before it landed?’ I tried again.

  ‘Because he was just damn flipping lucky?’ said Emma.

  ‘No! Because a glider glides, it has no engine. You have a brain the size of—’

  ‘An iron filing. I know!’

  If it had no engine then I couldn’t understand why he thought it might blow up, but he got snappy if we went on and on asking questions, and besides, Father Cinelli had just come over. Father Cinelli was an Italian-American who had come to our church on a pastoral switch with Reverend Bowen, a very dull man who had taken his rainy Welsh message to Father Cinelli’s parish in Cincinnati. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that we had got the long straw. Father Cinelli was a marvel. He was happy to shout and laugh and clap in the pulpit with such uninhibited enthusiasm, it was contagious. Rebecca, his teenage daughter, was the most beautiful human being on this earth in my opinion, and years after the Cinellis had left us I begged my mother, unsuccessfully, to call our new baby sister Rebecca, instead of Laura, in her honour.

  ‘Hey there, gang! Will you be coming to church this Sunday, Lord Hugh?’

  ‘Lord Hugh’ was not the right address. My father stiffened imperceptibly. He would never dream of saying anything to Father Cinelli because he was American and was not to know that in the arcane world of title rules, using the title alongside the Christian name and calling him ‘Lord Hugh’ implied that Pa was the younger son of a duke.

  ‘Of course we’ll be there,’ my father said.

  ‘Can I get you to read the first lesson? It’s the Pharisees.’

  ‘My pleasure.’

  Father Cinelli beamed, and then turned his attention to us. ‘Will you be coming to Yankee Doodle Sunday schoodle, girls? You betcha battam dallar you will!’ he answered for us.

  ‘How’s Martha?’ Emma asked.

  The previous Sunday had taken a dramatic turn when Martha Lampeter fell to the floor screaming during the last chorus of ‘Lord of the Dance’. There was a great kerfuffle, and Martha, pale as a seagull, was led out of the church wailing, ‘My eyes! My eyes! They’re burning!’ It was very shocking. Were we witnessing a religious phenomenon, or was it arson? When Emma and I discussed the mysterious episode in the car on the way back home we agreed that neither of us had seen any sign of flames. We felt a bit cheated.

  ‘Martha’s much better!’ Father Cinelli replied. ‘She has a pair of pink glasses now. She looks real perdy. We should all be sure to tell her that.’

  During Father Cinelli’s tenure, the congregation swelled and swelled. Then suddenly he was gone, and the return of the piglet form of Reverend Bowen sent our theological enthusiasms into freefall.

  * * *

  Every day Emma and I, armed with small aluminium churns, were sent to fetch milk from the farm at the bottom of the drive. We liked to run down the hill windmilling the pails around our heads because the return was always slow to avoid slopping, and we had the cattle-grid to negotiate. We would clamber up the farmyard gate that smelled of creosote and watch Mrs Thomas, the farmer’s wife, jacket belted with orange twine, whistling instructions to her collies. As she brought her herd into the yard, all mooing and mounting one another, their steaming haunches jostled our legs. Sometimes a slobbery nose would rub a slick of drool across our wellies, as if the world’s largest slug had just come gliding by. Once the cattle had all passed, we would hop down and snake our way through their steamy pats, up past the silage pit and the hay bales to the milking parlour. Whenever calves were penned there, we would stick our hands through the bars and let a sandpapery tongue vacuum up our fingers.

  Sometimes we would be invited into the house to have tea with Old Mrs Thomas. It would take a few minutes to get accustomed to the darkness of the place; any light entering the room had to penetrate a lattice of geraniums cluttering every windowsill. The floor had speckled lino, which was strange for a sitting room. I concluded it must be because the Thomases always came home with mud on their boots. Actually there was one rug, small, circular and red, but it sat in the corner, under the television.

  Old Mrs Thomas could always be found in the same place, sitting by the fire in a wing-backed chair with an antimacassar draped over its back. She had a pretty face, soft and wrinkled. Her long white hair was held off her face by a dark ribbon. She wore a flowery housecoat, caramel tights made out of some sort of lagging, and, to my fascination, fluffy slippers during the day. It all seemed very exotic, especially when she put on an apron and disappeared off to make tea. We never had tea at home. They even had sugar lumps, something else we never saw. If we were quick enough with our spoons after she’d handed over the cup, we could fish out a cube and eat it before it disintegrated into hot, sweet slurry. Old Mrs Thomas would settle the tray down and serve up, asking, ‘How many lumps, bach [dear]?’

  ‘Five, please.’

  ‘All right then, but only if you ask in Welsh.’

  ‘Pidwa, please, Mrs Thomas.’

  ‘You’ve only asked for four, bach. It’s Pimp if you want five.’

  At home, children drinking tea was a bit common; lumps of sugar were definitely common; so were pastries and antimacassars; and hair oil was the bitter end. Anything genteel was odious. To my father, a knife was a tool and a weapon and should be grasped as such. There was no greater crime than to approach your cutlet as if writing a letter. A napkin was for brusquely swiping food from the face, not for dabbing at it with one finger dressed up as a ghost. Sticking your little finger out when holding a cup was frowned upon. So were chewing gum, poodles, alsatians, corgis, cats, trifle, custard, the words Mum, Dad, phone, partake, cheers, cheerio, bye-bye, coo-ee, super, by the by, don’t mind if I do, dwelling, garment and fabric, the names Vernon and Paul, plus Essex, Kent and the Midlands, monkey puzzles and most ornamental conifers, any talk of money, and the colour mauve. Anything from Japan was cheap, plastic and inevitably dreadful. (Plastic, like elastic and drastic, rhymed with yardstick.) Nobody said any of these things explicitly; the unwritten guidelines sank in by osmosis – except for sticking my finger out while holding a cup. Even though I would be teased and scolded whenever I was spotted doing it, my little six-year-old finger just seemed to operate autonomously and would eventually always steal away from its companions.

  * * *

  On summer days, the loud echo of woozy music heralded the arrival of the ice cream van, but my father forbade it from ever coming up our drive. It was torment to listen as it circled the lanes around our hill, without ever arriving. It wasn’t us eating the sugary by-product of whale blubber on sale that Pa minded, but the quality of the soundtrack. We knew it was this because he would crank up the volume of Herb Alpert playing on the stereo to drown out the van, and because on Saturdays we were given a little pocket money to spend on sweets at Mrs Harris-the-Post-Office. Over the gate above the house, across the switchback of the Thomases’ cattle pasture, and then a difficult choice: left through the lych-gate and into the gloom of the ivy-choked churchyard, or right, past the neighbouring farm to the Thomases’, with its three ferocious collies. Even though this church was the closest one to our house, it wasn’t ‘ours’ and it emitted a gentle menace, unlike ‘our’ church across the valley below Gelli Ayr. The dog route was usually preferable to the graves, although they barked and snapped; each dog seemed to live in the belief that some imaginary glass boundary kept their teeth away from our flesh by a few inches.


  In any case, this farm held voyeuristic attractions. Some years earlier, the farmer’s teenage son had suffered terrible groin injuries in a shooting accident while hunting rabbits. He had crawled under a hedge and then pulled his loaded gun through afterwards, barrel first. A twig snagged the trigger and blasted him at point-blank range. The grownups’ hushed mention of ‘groin’ seemed annoyingly vague. I longed for a glimpse of the boy looking wan and romantic, staring out from an upper window, but he was never there. It was my first realization that something profound and permanent can happen in an instant, and, worse, never be undone. It took a while longer to realize that life doesn’t deliver a single such instance, but an endless series of them.

  Mrs Harris and her post office had escaped off a page of Beatrix Potter. The post office itself was in the front room of her cottage. When we pushed open the front door, it knocked a little bell that alerted her to change from a grandmother crocheting doilies by her fire into a crisp postmistress doing her bit to keep the cogs of country business oiled. Her tight grey curls and knobbly hands were the only things visible behind a dark panelled counter with old-fashioned scales and weights and a brass-embossed till that went ‘ca-ching!’ On the far wall was a mass of pigeonholes filled with Parma violets, sherbet tubes that looked like little fireworks with liquorice fuses, and pink shrimps, which were the closest things to edible polystyrene. Above were glass jars containing a huge selection of gobstoppers, cough candy, bull’s eyes and pear drops.