A Charmed Life: Growing Up in Macbeth's Castle

by Liza Campbell

  Clutching bulging paper bags, and not wanting to return home immediately, we would occasionally continue on to visit a family who lived at the bottom of the hill, a few fields away from a giant wreck of a house called Aberglasney. Bethan Jones was a little bit annoying and had hands with strangely crinkly palms, but she was our closest neighbour of the same age. She had a younger brother called Owen, who snivelled a lot and was even more annoying, and I didn’t like sharing my sweets with him one bit. The Joneses were the closest things we had to friends, but at the time they didn’t seem to be anything other than people who just happened to be the same age as us. The looming walls of Aberglasney were a bigger draw than the easy company Bethan and Owen offered. Pa said it was a shame about Aberglasney; that the owner was not able to look after it. I never knew what he meant by that – whether the man should repair it, or whether he should take a tip from Pa and hire a bulldozer.

  There was a muddy, feather-strewn pond in the Joneses’ farmyard with bossy, swagger-bummed geese and red-wattled Muscovy ducks loitering around its edge, all wriggling and muttering to one another. To stop them mugging our sweet bags we would fill a small bucket with grain and throw it out in a great semi-circle.

  Regardless of what time we visited them on a Saturday, their cat was always snoozing on the wall by their gate. Only its tail, giving a meaningful flick now and again, showed us that it was alive, well and perpetually tetchy. This was our only contact with cats because Pa was allergic to them. He loathed all cats, and cat owners too. They were fussy and suburban beside dog owners.

  Once, as we were mooching about licking liquorice stains off our fingers, we spotted our father driving by. He often just waved, but this time he stopped and showed us a large chunk of bark on the passenger seat. Pa said it was a bit unusual and he was taking it home to check it in his field guide. It was all part of his fixation with trees. ‘Hands up who knows what the name of this is?’ he asked, pointing at a silvery green area speckled with minuscule turquoise and red spots. He was always testing. The answer was ‘lichen’. We all put our hands up. Owen was leaping up and down as if he was about to blow his bladder, so my father chose him. ‘OK, Owen, you tell us,’ he said.

  ‘TRRRREEESKIN!’ Owen shrieked, with the same kind of certainty with which men roar ‘Goal!’ ‘Where’dew buy it then?’ he added, quite unaware of our stunned faces.

  ‘I bought it in Woolworth’s,’ my father replied with cardinal-like solemnity, dropping the bark back into his car.

  ‘Brrrrilliant! I’m gonna save up and buy one too!’ cried Owen.

  Pa gave him some small change from his pocket to kick-start the fund, and drove off. It surprised me that my father was so patient with him. If it had been one of us we would have got a poke in the ribs and our brains would have been compared to the size of an iron filing.

  To get away from Owen we would go and find Bethan’s Barbie, but it never lasted long. Three girls playing with one doll had its limitations, and eventually Emma and I would be rolling on the floor fighting. Bethan would heave us apart and we would head back outside.

  Whenever we were with the Joneses for any length of time, we were inevitably drawn up the hill to the tunnel of yews that led up to Aberglasney. We would frighten ourselves witless creeping around the derelict rooms and rotten staircase, never once daring to go as far as the second floor. A sudden creak, the flutter of a startled pigeon, and we would flee the building screaming at the tops of our lungs.

  But at the farmyard our greatest dread was to run headlong into Bethan’s father, who used to shout at us. He was a mean-tempered drunk who had thrown his wife out and installed a wig-wearing ‘fancy woman’ with more ‘compatible appetites to his own’. At least that’s what we had overheard Mrs Harris saying one day. I felt sorry for Bethan and Owen having to live with this couple, but we never dared talk about it, and whenever we did encounter Mr Jones we would wish them a hurried goodbye and leave. My imagination never stretched to thinking what it must be like for them always to be abandoned to deal with his temper alone. Maybe once in a while we could have asked them over to our house; but we never once thought of it.

  As for Aberglasney, it has now been restored and is heralded as having one of the great ‘forgotten’ gardens of Wales, but then it was the local Bates Motel.

  * * *

  He may have been our scariest neighbour, but at least Mr Jones had children. Pretty much everyone else we saw was a grown-up. Pretty much everyone else we saw worked for my father. Mr Teague helped my father run the estate, which seemed to mean that they met up, pored over charts, tapped pencils and said ‘Yerrs, yerrs’ in turn. Mr Teague lived in a wooden chalet-style house next to the Baptist chapel with its tidy borders of purple and yellow primulas. We never saw anyone going in or out of its peeling grey doors, and Old Mrs Thomas muttered that this was because they kept ‘ungodly hours’ – which made us think that the Baptist faith must be pretty odd and possibly even more dour than Presbyterianism, the church into which we were christened. I wasn’t completely confident that I could tell the difference between Mr Teague and my grandfather Jack. They were both gruff and distant and looked old in the same sort of ruddy-jowled, white-moustached way. We saw my grandfather a lot less often, so when in doubt, it was probably Mr Teague.

  Sometimes when he was driving us into the local town, Pa stopped off at the bottom of the hill to visit the estate workshop. Wylo, the head carpenter, and his assistant Zachariah would let us crawl under their workbench and gather up the ringlets of wood shavings. I wished that all men could be called Zachariah; it was such an exotic word, and what’s more, he understood our love of putty and would hand out small lumps whenever we visited. The heavenly smell always compelled me to pop it into my mouth. Anyone who has tried it will know that chewing putty is a shocking anti-climax. It tastes of nothing, in quite an uncompromising way.

  Then there was Stan, who cut the grass round our house with a tractor that pulled a gang-mower. He seemed very, very old, although he was probably only in his late thirties. His hands looked as if seedlings might be thriving in the creases of his knuckles. Stan hardly ever spoke and used a large yellow duster to blow his nose, but I liked him because he was kind and taught me how to ride a bike. He was the only person patient enough to keep pushing me until I learned to keep my balance. Whenever Stan, Wylo or Zachariah saw my father they pulled their forelocks and called him m’lord. And when they referred to him or Ma, it was as ‘his lordship’ and ‘her ladyship’, as if they were a small flotilla of privilege. Despite my parents only being in their twenties, everyone treated them with the utmost respect and cautious affection. Golden Grove felt like a wonderful nest surrounded by old people who had never been young, and would never die.

  The person who became the most constant in our lives was Edith Griffiths, who turned out to be the world’s most lachrymose cook and who stayed for ten years. Edith was in her fifties and lived across the valley with her father. When she came to work for is as a cook, she was leaving home for the first time. She was very short and had a pair of tragic brown eyes that swam with tears all day long like a heartbroken seal. Not a month went by without her appearing on her day off wearing her best hat and jet beads, ready for a funeral. If asked where she was going, the answer was always the same; only the protagonists’ names ever changed: ‘Alderman Williams/Barry-the-Taxi/Myfanwy’s nan/Dillys-over-by-Gronga has passed on,’ she would sniffle. If asked the cause, ‘Nerves,’ she would intone, and then add with some emphasis, ‘Shot to pieces,’ before stumbling off clutching her handbag in one hand and her best lace handkerchief in the other. Whenever we came into the kitchen, Edith would, without fail, jump and clasp her neck, gasping, ‘Holy Moses! You gave me such a turn!’ as if she had quite forgotten we lived there. This was an ‘OK’ kind of turn, but if we found her slumped with her apron over her white-haired head, weeping like a tap, it was a ‘bad’ turn.

  Edith was a desperately reserved woman and never explained what triggered the m
isery-go-round of ‘turns’ that ruled her life. It was incredible that her nervous disposition did not interfere with her cooking; she was very good indeed. I loved Edith, but she smelled funny, as if she had kept her sadness for so long some of it had gone stale.

  To my six-year-old mind, life was bursting with early joy. Edith was an enigmatic anomaly.

  Chapter 4

  Beware! Beware!

  His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

  Weave a circle round him thrice,

  And close your eyes with holy dread,

  For he on honey-dew hath fed,

  And drunk the milk of Paradise.

  S. T. Coleridge, ‘Kubla Khan’

  The crucial difference between Jack and Hugh was that while one was cautious and conservative, the other was a libertine. While Jack was taciturn, Hugh was outrageous, witty, attractive, sharp-witted and belatedly well read. These assets allowed him leverage to treat his sex life as if he were James Bond, in ermine.

  Born after the Wall Street crash, Hugh had six years of World War Two as a backdrop to his early youth, followed by the post-war decade of rationed austerity. Slowly, the years of peace accumulated, the country’s economy recovered, and liberal attitudes bloomed. Contemporary mores had long demanded as imperative male rectitude and female virginity. And then, ka-pow! The pill saw to it that everything changed. My father was up there being fabulous and going haywire with the frontrunners, while my mother had no appetite for free love whatsoever. As a young man in the early 1960s, my father typified easier times. He dressed like a Restoration buck, wearing scarlet velvet jackets with black frogging, floppy cuffs and outsize buckles on his belts and shoes, the heels of which were covered in red patent leather to match the jacket.

  Not long after we had moved into Golden Grove, when my mother was pregnant with my brother Colin, Hugh took off to Africa where he embarked on his first extramarital affair. On his return, he told Cath all about it, in great detail. He said he couldn’t resist the temptation because the woman ‘had a neck like a gerenuk’. It was hard to understand what he found attractive about an antelope with a neck the length of a camel’s compared to my beautiful mother who had a lovely neck of her own, but it is naive to think that having a peach at home will stop some people from gorging themselves on raisins elsewhere. The gerenuk started a trend. Eventually my father’s sex life had so many different strands and overlaps that it resembled an accomplished spirograph drawing.

  Once, when my father arrived home from a trip to London in the post-gerenuk period, he scooped me up in his arms and kissed me. I loved the way he smelled; it was warm and woody with a whiff of lemons. Years later I realized it was the smell of nicotine and red wine with aftershave on top.

  ‘I know where you’ve been,’ I said.

  ‘Where then?’ he said with a laugh.

  ‘You’ve been off kissing ladies.’

  I have no idea how I accidentally managed an insight so alien to a small child, but my father put me down, climbed back in his car, and roared off back to London without coming into the house.

  My mother turned as blind an eye as possible to his infidelities, and went on having babies, playing the piano and planting hundreds upon thousands of spring flower bulbs with a special tool like an outsize apple corer. When she was not busy arranging vases of flowers for our house or for ‘our’ church, she was fulfilling what she saw as the duties of her position: visiting the old people of the parish, bringing them Christmas boxes and keeping them company. She never ever let on to us that the goalposts of her marriage had been widened at one end only, but looking back, maybe her feelings did seep out. On the mornings she drove us to school we always sang:

  Early one morning, just as the sun was rising,

  I heard a maiden sing in the valley below –

  ‘Oh don’t deceive me, Oh never leave me,

  How could you use a poor maiden so?

  Remember the vows that we made at the altar,

  Remember the promise that you made to be true.

  Oh don’t deceive me, Oh never leave me…’

  Despite Hugh’s peccadilloes, Cath never once caused a public scene for the duration of their marriage. As a direct result of her forbearance, my parents remained madly in love for a long time. When we arrived in the library to visit them after our evening baths, they were often dancing cheek to cheek and barely noticed us. He always touched her as she passed and she always stroked his thick hair as he read her passages from whatever book he was reading. I must have been six or seven before I realized my father’s name was Hugh; he was only ever ‘darling’ to my mother, and she was Puddock (Gaelic for ‘toad’).

  My mother was full of softness and love, but she so adored having babies that once we learned to talk she was soon distracted because another baby had just been born. Pa had no interest in babies and only woke up to us when we could make him laugh. He was always friendly, he just had a very abbreviated span of attention, and with my mother tied up with us babies, my father could enjoy a bachelor life in London. On sunny days when he was at home he wandered around in Speedos, and it was our special privilege to be allowed to rub sun lotion into his back as he lay sprawled on a sun lounger outside the library. We would sit crosslegged in the grass beside him and bombard him with questions. Pa knew everything. He knew the name of every tree, he knew about politics and history and art, he drew pictures and he wrote a little picture book in which we starred. He could make us laugh until Ma thought we would do ourselves a mischief.

  My parents had a formal candlelit dinner every night, even when they were à deux. They always changed for dinner, often into matching outfits; he with a chiffon scarf tied over his black roll neck, she with hair extensions backcombed and sprayed into spun sugar. After our nursery supper of fish fingers and boiled eggs, we would chat to our mother as she had her bath, put on her make-up and chose jewellery from the lumpen collection of cardboard rings with op-art designs supplied by our cottage industry.

  Dinner guests were often bizarre. My father had a series of E-type Jaguars and he would get into spontaneous races with other string-backed driving-glove wearers on the seven-hour journey from London to Wales. If they pulled in for petrol at the same filling station he would often impulsively invite them to come and stay, ‘Any time!’ And they did. In droves. ‘Hey, man! We were the Jensen Interceptor that turned off at Gloucester! This is Boo, my wife. And Reinhardt. He’s a dude from Basle. We picked him up hitching to Dover, ’cept he was on the wrong side of the motorway. We’ve got some friends following in a Winnebago. They’ll be here soon.’ And so on. While I helped Edith stiffen leftover egg whites for meringues, I could hear the hectic laughter of our guests through the baize-covered connecting door as my father regaled them with his witty asides just out of earshot.

  Sometimes people would arrive asking for the ‘rabbit guy’, because Pa had once accidentally driven off with our pet rabbit Michele in his engine. On cold days my father would open up the bonnet of his car, check the oil and run the engine for ten minutes, so that it was capable of ramming speed by the time he got to the cattle-grid at the bottom of the drive. Michele lived in a cage in the garage. On that day, Emma and I had failed to secure the latch of her cage properly, and she hopped into the temptingly warm metal cavern. When my father pulled into one of his pit stops, he asked the mechanic to check the oil level. The man ducked under the bonnet to reach for the dipstick, but instead lifted out Michele by her ears, like a magician. Her fur was singed and her paws were burned, but amazingly, she was alive. Pa brought her home, but Michele went into a decline and after a few days we decided we should liberate her by way of an apology. We took her hutch to where the lawn met the field and opened the door. After a few moments, Michele emerged and loped off up the grassy slope without so much as a backward glance, until her burned rump finally vanished from sight.

  My father’s racing habits had a downside: he wrote off six E-types in succession. The crashes got steadily worse. It was as if h
e was destined to die that way, but it was going to be by instalments. Pa’s philosophy was that when in town, obeying a red light after midnight was a sinful waste of precious time, and in the country, when in doubt, take to the scenery. Typically he would crash at night, after dinner, while drunk. He modified hedges and then moved on to smacking into parked vans. For the next ten years, Cath extracted needle-thin splinters of glass as they slowly emerged out of his forehead after he had headbutted his windscreen.

  Hugh’s last Jag crash was almost fatal. After a heavy night, he set off to collect Cath from Swansea railway station. His car mysteriously spun off a straight, empty road, careened down a bank and did three somersaults, end over end, before coming to rest upside-down in a meadow. Pa got catapulted out through the sunroof and landed in a ditch with a fractured skull, five snapped ribs, a pierced lung, lacerations, a broken nose (for the seventh time) and two crushed vertebrae that left him a smaller man, with a pronounced hump. Cath waited and waited on the platform but he never came, and in the end she caught a taxi. On the way home, they pulled over to let an ambulance rush past. Only later did she realize it had been carrying her husband. For weeks, my mother ferried herself between the intensive care departments of two separate hospitals, one caring for her husband, the other her youngest child.

  Instead of spotting any correlation between the drinking and the crashes, my father came to an altogether different conclusion: E-types were rubbish and their suspensions dangerous. The crumpled and horribly foreshortened wreck of his E-type became the heart of a growing car collection, and thereafter he drove Ferraris. Their suspensions were clearly vastly superior because he only managed to write off one.

  * * *

  If our parents were alone, we had a custom of going down to the library after dinner in our dressing gowns for a glass of Coca-Cola. Those were the days: no crash helmets, no safety belts, universal smoking and caffeine at bedtime. My father’s nightly treat would be to let us eat the burned charcoal from the matches he had used to light his cigarettes, and on a lucky evening he would put down his drink and cigarettes to play hide and seek with us. It was during one of these games that I realized he had a genius for hoodwinking. I had counted to ten and was searching for him and Emma when I spotted the tips of his shoes peeping out from behind a curtain. I rushed up with a ‘Ha!’ to find only a plump moon soaring gracefully behind the windowpanes, and an empty pair of shoes.