A Charmed Life: Growing Up in Macbeth's Castle

by Liza Campbell

  Unlike my mother, Pa scared me sometimes. One evening I thought I was alone in the library, having failed to notice my father in the room as I took some sips from Emma’s Coca-Cola. My mother would have scolded me with a few well-weighted words, but Pa gave a little cough, and when I turned round he sprayed me full in the face with the contents of a soda siphon. Totally shocked and soaked from head to foot, I burst into tears, not because my nightie was wringing wet, but because the punishment felt so out of proportion to the crime. Later on, when I looked back on this incident, it was a jagged rock in an otherwise calm sea of childhood, viewed from the forbidding continent where our family had washed up.

  * * *

  Our Welsh valley was a parochial backwater, but even here it was the height of the 1960s. The sounds of Donovan singing ‘Season Of The Witch’ were always floating from the speakers, and we ran around the house shouting ‘groovy’, ‘psychedelic’ and ‘swanky’. I wasn’t totally confident that I knew what psychedelia was. When they showed it on the television it seemed to be blobs and swirling circles that made your eyes go blurry, and then things went into a kind of spiral and a girl wearing white kinky boots and matching hat spun dizzily while waving her arms like reeds in a musical gale. My father said psychedelia was about colour, but our television was black and white.

  Watching telly brought the world beyond Wales into our nursery: Neil Armstrong on the moon, Animal Magic, Jackanory, and the Beatles growing beards.

  ‘I love John!’

  ‘You can’t have John, he’s mine.’

  ‘I love Paul then.’

  ‘Nope, he’s mine too. You can have Ringo.’

  ‘OK, Emma.’

  ‘But only for this week.’

  There were anti-Vietnam war protests, The Persuaders, Jason King, The Singing Tree and Woodstock – ‘It’s just bad acid, man!’ For me, though, the seminal experiences of the late 1960s were fruit-based. They peaked one Christmas when pomegranates came to our local town of Llandeilo. Although they are not instantly recognizable as totems of the Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out culture, they encapsulated thrilling modernism to me. When my father teased me, saying pomegranates were a new invention, I believed him. They were like turnips designed by a graphic artist. The outside gave no hint of the sweet-scented wonders within. When broken open they revealed a mass of translucent jelly-pips, like fuchsia tadpoles. They promised so much, but the energy you burned getting into them was greater than the goodness they bestowed – a bit like the 1960s. Nevertheless, no-one could deny that of all the fruits, pomegranates were the most psychedelic. Cherries, on the other hand, were groovy. I was always on the look-out for semi-detached pairs to wear as earrings. Avocados were swanky, especially if Edith placed a prawn on top of the Thousand Island dressing. Women were demanding equality, burning their bras and embracing political activism, but my 1960s revelations were confined to the seasonal stock in the local greengrocer’s.

  The only upheaval was when Emma got sent away to boarding school in Dorset at the age of eight. In the year she was gone I found relief from her temper, but I missed her desperately. Even though all our games were interspersed with her flying off the handle, she was terrific company and I adored her. I tried to play with Colin, but he was only four and a poor substitute. Whenever I tried to force him into a desperate dash around the back of the garage in search of our many make-believe children who had been cruelly abducted by pirates, he would stray off in express contradiction to my plot commands. His omnipresent tissue veil only added to my frustrations. ‘You’re meant to be a DOCTOR!’ I would shout in despair as he forgot all about our thrilling crisis and shuffled aimlessly in a flowerbed.

  Pa bought a gypsy caravan for us to play in; he had bought two at auction and gave the second to Boojum and Alexander. Theirs turned out to be haunted. Ours had a tiny bunk, no bigger than a horse’s manger, and a couple of miniature wicker chairs. We spent hours fiddling around playing gypsies. I was the mother; Fred and Colin were my children, but they doubled as blacksmiths. Off-cuts of pastry doled out by Edith served as our lunch, but doubled as horseshoes. Father Cinelli came over on a special visit to see our caravan. He explained that in the States they had only had covered frontiersmen wagons, not gypsy ones. I knew that we would be dead meat crossing Pawnee country. Only a bunch of sissies would paint theirs in primary colours with stencilled flowers on the shutters.

  Father Cinelli looked in on us through the door, gave a low whistle, and then turned to Pa. ‘You can understand why they had such a problem with incest,’ he remarked. And they walked off into the house to have a pre-lunch gin and tonic.

  ‘What insects?’ asked Colin, taking the tissue away from his face and looking round.

  ‘Not insects, silly,’ I said haughtily. ‘Incense. It’s a holy thing.’

  ‘Uh-hunh-huh,’ said Fred, and fell down the short ladder, leaving a blue wellington boot behind at the top and the skin off his elbow at the bottom.

  I joined Emma at Hanford boarding school a few weeks before my eighth birthday. I had never stayed anywhere without my parents, or rather, they had often stayed away from us but I had never stayed away from them. I went into shock when my mother drove away. Emma came to my rescue, and although she fell short of my desire for us to amalgamate, she did at least take me under her wing.

  The school was a lovely place, run by teachers bustling with enthusiasm for their subjects. The headmistress, known to us as Mrs C, was a marvellous figure with purple tinted hair that would fade to a pale lilac over the course of a few weeks and then, with the help of her home-dyeing kit and a casual approach to any guidelines concerning the strength of the mixture, the shade got zapped back up again. She seemed as old as Mrs Noah, but whenever Pa dropped us off at the start of term she would get strangely kittenish and play with her amethyst curls.

  Hanford was fanatically horsey. Our previous contact with livestock had been limited to the Thomases’ herd of Friesians, and it became obvious that while neither of us had a problem with cattle, we were, like Pa, both violently allergic to horses. Emma developed hay fever and asthma in her first term, and as soon as I arrived I followed suit. My mother said it was another case of me copycatting, but however much I admired Emma, I did not enjoy sneezing until my nose bled, or the interminable nights spent propped upright by pillows, able only to think about the next breath I was going to snatch. I suspect it was more to do with a genetic predisposition, coupled with a dusty Jacobean schoolhouse in a damp Dorset valley where we all walked around covered in horsehair. Winter terms were bogged down by asthma, and as soon as the weather warmed up we were in the grip of hay fever. Whenever we went out on early-morning rides my eyes and nose would be streaming and itching within minutes of mounting. When I couldn’t resist it any more I would claw at my face with a gloved hand, which only ever made matters worse. Snot would be strung between my nose and my hand, my hand and the reins, and the reins and my hat, like vile bunting. Pa suggested I stay away from horses, but at a school like Hanford that was a bit like telling a waiter not to touch the plates.

  Mrs C ran the school with her two adult daughters. Rose, the elder of the two, was a wounded swan of a woman who had ‘gone peculiar’ at a previous juncture and now only spoke in an inaudible whisper. She wandered around with downcast eyes, one arm on permanent duty supporting her prize-winning marrow-sized breasts. Rose taught us art, and her beloved companion was Jack, a tame jackdaw that sat on her shoulder. He was a vicious, girl-hating bird. When he wasn’t using Rose as his slow-moving chariot, he would lie in wait at the far end of the long, narrow kitchen passage and launch himself at us, tearing out hanks of our hair as we ran the gauntlet trying to fend off his scything beak and talons. If he missed, he would do the avian equivalent of a handbrake turn and dive-bomb us again from the rear, trying one more attack before we reached the sanctuary of a swing door. Somewhere in the school grounds there was the chicest nest in birdkind, lined with the human angora of little girls’ hair. The strands of sauce
-coated human hairs we regularly found in our food were known as Lotte’s Trademarks in honour of the school’s Polish cook – although the hairs were just as likely to be ours, as the ceiling beam above the kitchen table was one of the jackdaw’s favourite perches.

  The food was consistently bad. To distract us from the taste of the cooking, everything, especially the puddings, had exhilarating titles. We had the traditional Spotted Dick and Dead Man’s Leg, but then things branched out into Thames Mud and Frogs’ Spawn, and reached their imaginative zenith in a horrid confection of cornflour and jam, eagerly anticipated simply because it was called Tragedy in the Alps. When we complained, Hugh wrote back that we were naive suckers and that they could have served up custard-covered balls of putty if they had called it Humpty Dumpty’s Post-mortem.

  * * *

  Behind the classrooms was a long yew hedge. Its hollow interior was divided into house sections that were occupied on a first-come-first-served basis at the start of term. Everyone else, when not riding real horses, was busy ‘being’ a horse and whipping themselves fiercely over home-made cavallettis. Some people’s yew houses were stables where these human horses could come for imaginary hay and a bit of lungeing. I was going through a religious phase and had a chapel rather than a house. One holiday I was asking Pa what his favourite books were, and he said the Bible was a fantastic piece of literature. I took my copy out to my chapel and resolved to read it from cover to cover. I found it heavy sledding. After a while, as I leafed through I began inking out every reference to ‘Satan’ I could find. When the job was done I realized that rather than obliterate Satan’s presence, the dozens of prominent blue scribbles had highlighted it, and now the blots scared me even more.

  I could no longer go near my Bible, so I turned from my religious calling towards autopsy, which involved finding dead animals and poking at the maggots with revolted fascination. Until one day we found Miss Rose Canning’s Jack. His head had been staved in. For school life this was as close as we had come to a murder mystery. I decided to bury him, then panicked, dug him up, and took the corpse to Mrs C. I knew that Rose was like Edith our cook and was likely to have the mother of all turns. An investigation began into the death, but seeing as Jack had attacked almost every girl there, Hanford was a school full of suspects. At half-term I told Pa the story and was taken aback when he laughed uncontrollably. After this, I knew that if I could only give all my stories a gothic tilt I had found a way of making him happy.

  * * *

  Boarding at Hanford prompted the inescapable realization that there were wrinkles and bulges in the space/time continuum. Clocks ticked slower, lessons stretched into the foreseeable future, and a week felt like a whole season, especially when the children who lived nearby got to go home and sleep in their own beds every weekend while our mother was far away and completely preoccupied with a sick baby. On Saturdays, we clambered into the branches of an old cedar tree from where we could watch a steady stream of cars come down the drive and pick all the other girls up. Our afternoons passed watching black and white movies of brave sailors searching for periscopes in the North Sea while impossibly brave heroines sensuously exhaled clouds of cigarette smoke.

  In the evenings, one girl had the special privilege of mixing Mr Sharp the maths master’s gin and tonic and delivering it to him as he performed his pastoral duties. The reward was a glass of Coke with a slice of lemon. Mr Sharp had thick, wavy hair, a roguish twinkle and a famously short fuse. I worshipped him; he reminded me of Pa, who was a gin drinker too.

  Sundays were more formal, with chapel followed by letter-writing home – two pages minimum. I recently came across a badly spelled list that I had used as a prompt.

  1. Send more pape and stamps

  2. Nearly fell of the tree

  3. Got your letter

  4. Had a slipper fight

  5. The incest in the chapel gave me the wheezes

  6. Emma’s better

  7. Have a nice time in Ireland?

  8. Made a hole and stired up earth and made a trap

  Looking at it brought home just how young we were to be living away from home – and how wearisomely dull my letters were.

  Ma was scrupulous in her duties and wrote to us a couple of times a week with details of the home life we had left behind. Pa’s letters were far more sporadic and thus unfairly prized. They were half jokey and half lecture. Our messy handwriting was a running theme. One letter complained of my spelling being ‘completely gerschmurgled’ and accused me of writing lines that were so slanted that I must have been writing on the deck of the Bismarck. The same letter ended with a poignant PS – that he realized he’d forgotten my birthday: ‘oh damn’. I think that a lot of the time we weren’t particularly on Pa’s mind, but when we were, he made spontaneous gestures that were often doomed to failure. Twice, Pa turned up out of the blue skies to visit us, piloting his own helicopter. It caused a tremendous stir, but on neither occasion were we there. By the second half of each term we had set about courting girls who lived near the school who might, just might, invite us out. To learn on our return that we had missed Pa’s visit was much worse than not seeing him for months on end, and we were both stricken. Once was bad enough, but after the second time Emma and I were so traumatized we had synchronized asthma attacks. The worst thing was the certainty that after a double disaster he would never bother to try again. The second worst thing was that our recovery coincided with exams. The only cheering moment was a timely letter entitled ‘Instructions from devoted, loving Papa for Exams’. It contained an eight-point plan for surviving exam time, exhorting us to brush our hair to lift the morale, to read the ‘kwestions’ and to try not to pick our noses. Finally he forbade us to pad out our ‘ignorance with scronk’, before signing off, affectionately, ‘Good luck and I love you, vastly. Bless you.’

  As consolation for our long absences from home – and because we were considered, if not more housetrained, then less feral – we were allowed to join our parents for supper in the dining room during the holidays. To stop us fidgeting in our chairs at the dining table my father offered a reward to whoever could keep still for five whole minutes. Emma struggled and gave up quickly. I stayed stock-still. I remember thinking, ‘I can do this for ever! I will do it for ever if he wants me to.’ Being motionless, that’s what I was good at. I used to long for my father to place the statue bet because I was unbeatable. Once, when Emma had been sent out of the room for being insolent, I asked if I could freeze on my own for him. Pa agreed and said he’d be back after a pee, and not to cheat. The minutes ticked by. A shaft of light lit up the tips of my hair. A bluebottle clattering against the windowpane to my right would occasionally come dive-bombing across the room. I did not flinch; my father might be peeping through the keyhole to catch me out. My feet began to tingle a little. It got worse, and I gingerly wiggled my toes inside my shoes, but stared fixedly at the facing wall. I needed a distraction, and it came: my father’s dog Wasp was outside and had started barking excitedly. Maybe it was a visitor. I wanted to look, but Wasp’s barks came from the window directly behind me and I would have to break my pose. Finally the sound of the barks moved around the corner of the house to a window I only had to slide my eyes to look out of. My father was there, throwing a stick, taking Wasp for a walk. He never looked back. He’d forgotten all about the statue deal. I stood up to go to the window and shout angrily, but my ankles were so numb I took one step and keeled over.

  * * *

  One holiday we came back and were surprised to find that there was someone new living at Golden Grove. For once it wasn’t a new baby; it was a grown-up. He was introduced to us as Tia Honsai, a martial arts expert. Pa had met him at a party thrown by a property tycoon called Felix Fenston. He said that Tia’s eyes had ‘bored’ into the back of his head and he had spun round and said, ‘I must know who you are.’ And Tia had proceeded to mesmerize him. By the end of the evening, Pa was his latest devotee.

  I was expecting to meet a
wise old Japanese man with white, waist-length moustache strands, but Tia was middle-aged with a greasy quiff. He was not even Japanese, he was Welsh, and Tia was not his real name. It was Ronald Thatcher. Like many self-styled gurus, Tia was a bit of a showman. Later, as his powers waned, there was a small pinch of charlatan too.

  The way Tia told it was that he had been born in the industrial sprawl of Cardiff, but as a teenager had stowed away on a merchant ship destined for the Far East. The ship was far out to sea by the time his hiding place was uncovered, so the sailors let him stay on board after punishing him – Tia maintained they had keel-hauled him – and he was put to work in the galley. When the ship eventually docked in Japan, he disembarked and wound up at a small city dojo, or gym, where he became apprenticed to a martial arts grandmaster who taught him aikido and how to speak Japanese. Like t’ai chi, aikido is a defensive fighting form that aims to convert the energy of an attack to the defender’s advantage. Tia became a superlative fighter and was encouraged to develop his control of chi – the inner energy force – and harness it as a healing power. Years later he returned to England, found work as a bodyguard, started up a small dojo in Hammersmith and began to get a name as a healer. His clientele gradually became grander and wealthier, and by the time Hugh met him he was quite well known.

  My father was immediately and utterly in Tia’s thrall. With Jack Cawdor as remote as Pluto, it was not so surprising that Hugh might crave an approachable father figure. The only framed picture Pa kept on his desk was a grainy photograph of Tia. The shot had been taken during an international randori tournament, when individual contestants take on pairs of opponents. Tia is standing with his feet apart, his top is gaping open, but he has a passive look as he gazes downwards. The man to his left is sprawled face down on the floor. The man to his right has both legs in the air and is a second away from crashing onto the canvas. On the reverse of the photograph is a small typewritten note listing the two men’s injuries, including several broken bones apiece.