A Charmed Life: Growing Up in Macbeth's Castle

by Liza Campbell

  Pa wanted to learn aikido, and in return Tia wanted total control over his life. Before you could say feng shui, Tia had moved in with us. He trained Pa very hard indeed. They would start with early-morning meditation that lasted an hour and was done squatting on their haunches. Then they ran a four-mile circuit of the valley, past the Thomases’, past Wylo’s house, through the meadow where the glider crashed, down the rhododendron-lined drive of Gelli Ayr and back past the church. When they got home, they stood on their heads for an hour before even starting on aikido. Tia dictated how much Hugh should drink, warned him off philandering, and even instructed him when he should abstain from conjugal sex.

  In a moment of frankness, Pa told Tia that one of the reasons for undergoing this tough new regime was that he had a secret phobia of knives. This was something he had never even told Cath about. Now, at last, he had found someone who would teach him to develop the courage he suspected was lacking. Hugh wanted to become an unarmed killing machine so that he could walk the earth fearlessly. He could normally only ever achieve this state by drinking, but this method tended to tip him from confidence into aggression. What he never grasped was that courage lies exclusively in the hands of the fearful. Because of this fundamental misunderstanding, my father never achieved the poise he longed for, no matter how much he trained. He also never managed to grasp that the central tenet of aikido was to be humble and to walk away from trouble, not to instigate fights.

  Adults must have seen something in Tia that children missed. To us, this guru had all the charisma of a traffic warden. When we eventually found out that his real name was Ronald Thatcher, we stopped calling him Tia and switched to Ron, but that was considered impudent, so it was Thatch thereafter. Emma and I would watch with vague disdain as Pa and Thatch, dressed in white judo kits, grappled with each other on the lawn. They spent hours looking fierce and chopping the air with their hands as they took slow steps in what looked like a strange version of Grandmother’s Footsteps. We grew to resent Thatch’s constant presence, and, later, that of his strangely silent, bewigged wife Val. Pa remained in awe. They moved in with us for three years.

  As Tia Honsai, dressed in his judo clothes, he was powerful, charismatic, commanding. As Thatch, in his tight blazer, he was pretty unprepossessing. Pa didn’t seem to mind, but he drove us mad with endlessly repeated anecdotes and – worst of all – his noodling on the Hammond organ. Aunt Carey nicknamed him ‘the Killer at the Keyboard’. As Tia, his followers were so deferential that they looked to him for guidance in every single aspect of their lives. As Thatch, the flattery of this attention would often lead him into pronouncing on business and financial matters – areas his gifts did not cover. Like many other spouses of his devotees, my mother was a sceptic. She could see that Thatch had a good influence on Hugh, but doubted his capacity to heal. She did not enjoy sharing her home with this guru when there was no departure date in sight, but was far too distracted by her desperately ill child to make a fuss.

  Laura was still lying like a shrivelled leaf in a Cardiff hospital. When Pa brought Thatch in to visit her, Cath could see that he was at a total loss. Later, when massive doses of cortisone slowly began to restore Laura to health, Thatch announced that it was he who had saved her. Cath reserved her gratitude for the nursing staff. Val was an unforthcoming companion, and while the men had a shared goal, my mother struggled to find common ground with her. Val had no role unless Thatch was making notes on a course of action he wanted a patient or pupil to follow, and then he would dictate to Val in gabbled Japanese. She scribbled things down, but no-one was sure whether she understood a word he was saying.

  Pa was under the impression that his improving aikido skills had given him curative powers. I viewed these embryonic abilities with the deepest suspicion, ever since he had tried to cure one of my asthma attacks using ‘an aikido approach’. During one half-term I was confined to bed at a family friend’s house when Pa came in. He stood me in front of him, told me to relax, and then punched me hard in the solar plexus. I fell to the floor shocked, insulted and gasping for air like a dying fish. My wheezes remained, and to them were added freshly bruised ribs.

  Hugh’s shortcomings as a healer aside, his climb through the belts was meteoric. By the time we moved to Scotland he was a black belt, three dan (like being a five star rather than just a plain ‘general’). We sometimes suspected that, as his teacher-cum-examiner and beneficiary of free lodging, Thatch exaggerated his star pupil’s skills, knowing that Pa responded to flattery. Pa’s anxieties ran deep, and a lot of them had to do with knowing all his ancestors and wondering whether he measured up to his forebears who had been conspicuous for their gallantry. Six MCs, fifteen DSOs and three VCs had been won between twelve men of the family during the Boer and First World Wars.

  Almost two hundred years earlier, the military excellence of John Campbell (the grandson of Joyless John) had earned the family an English barony, in addition to the Scottish thanedom. He was given the new title as reward for the pivotal role he took in repulsing the last foreign invasion of mainland Britain. But the phrase ‘the last foreign invasion of mainland Britain’ sounds rather more significant than the spool of events it describes. The affair barely registers, even as a digression, in history books.

  John’s portrait hung in the front hall of Golden Grove and every time a new guest enquired who he was, we would listen to Pa telling them the story of what had happened in 1796, when France was still in the grip of revolutionary zeal and an atmosphere of alarm was sweeping England. It was feared that the dastardly French republicans planned to launch an attack across the Channel and spread their anti-monarchist message through the land. Sure enough, in February that year a small fleet of French warships set off with an ambitious but sketchy plan to sail up the Severn estuary and destroy Bristol. As they slid over the horizon towards the English coast, the French fleet overhauled a merchant ship laden with madeira. Having captured the shipment but with little cargo space of their own, they were inspired to empty prodigious quantities of the booty into themselves. A sharp easterly wind blew them drunkenly off course, and on 22 February they ended up sore-headed at Fishguard, where John Campbell captained the local militia.

  Thirteen hundred French soldiers, armed with ultramodern flintlock muzzle-loading muskets, leapt ashore. With their intended target a hundred miles behind them, they boldly took Pencaer Peninsula. Until that day this bare Pembrokeshire headland had no strategic significance whatsoever, but it was at hand, and Bristol was not. There was not a great deal for the French to triumph over at Pencaer other than some sheep and a few trees. Wondering what to do next, they decided to fan out and foment some insurrection. This failed. News of the invasion had swept through the little seaside communities and the local militia mustered with all speed. After escaping a French ambush, John Campbell, a handful of professional soldiers and his troop of six hundred yeomen engaged the enemy on a beach. The invaders outnumbered the Welsh force two to one, but their misfortunes were still on the wax. The local wives, daughters and mothers rushed to the surrounding cliff tops to watch over the fate of their loved ones as they formed up against the enemy on the beach below. In those days, Welsh women wore traditional outfits of red flannel dresses, cloaks and black stovepipe hats. The French mistook the tall-hatted silhouettes gathering on the heights above them for reinforcements, and promptly surrendered.

  The death toll was six on land and sixteen on the French ships, plus John’s horse, stolen and eaten by the prisoners as he attended a celebratory dinner with the local governor. Nineteen of the captured muskets were presented to John. They still hang in a fan-shaped display opposite the Tree Room on Cawdor’s main staircase. And although Fishguard is long forgotten as a military encounter, it did have one significant repercussion. When word spread that the French were on English soil, a run on the banks for gold caused a dangerous shortage of cash. To bring the situation under control as rapidly as possible, the Bank of England issued paper money as a substitute f
or the first time.

  While this all seemed interesting on a very small family scale, none of us felt particularly emotionally connected to John Campbell’s actions beyond the thrill of the story. Hugh, on the other hand, identified far more closely not only with John but with all our other martial forebears. Thatch’s great importance to Hugh was to help him bear the weight of this burden of memories. Hugh wanted to be sure about his own mettle, and he gradually began to put his training into practice. Yet the uses to which he put his skills were all rather less orthodox than Thatch had in mind.

  Chapter 5

  Up the airy mountain,

  Down the rushy glen

  William Allingham, ‘The Fairies’

  Our parents travelled extensively while we lived in Wales. I have a box of postcards that say ‘Hello darling! We are in Wengen!/Kashmir!/Madeira! We have seen an ibex!/a rococo church!/Uncle George!’ As children we hardly went anywhere at all. Five small people getting lost at airports was too much of a logistical headache. Apart from Barafundle beach, our excursions were confined to a couple of trips up to Scotland every year.

  The drive north was a marathon, with suitcases, fishing rods, children and a dog. My parents always chose to drive through the night as it was just too awful to spend eleven hours driving while we were awake. It was a shrewd plan, but it never worked. We would set off in the early evening, dressed in our nightclothes to advance the idea of impending slumber. It had, of course, the opposite effect. Home life was pretty quiet, so climbing into a car dressed for bed was enough to get us insanely hyped. We waved at every car we saw, and once we were at least twenty miles away from home we were allowed to stick our tongues out if they did not wave back. Sometimes we wrote notes and pressed them against the back window, hoping to electrify the occupants of the cars that came up behind us. Our favourite was Pleas Help! My Brother Has Turn In To A Dog!’ And we would point dolefully at Hugh’s dog, Wasp.

  As soon as the sun had gone down, the back seats were folded flat to form a makeshift bed. Wasp slept across the end, crushing our feet. It was impossible to sleep as our bed became an instant lunar landscape of biscuit crumbs. We bickered our way north. I would whine about the discomfort until I was told to get up on all fours and give the bed a thorough sweep. ‘You’re behaving like the Princess and the Pea, missy,’ my father would say, an impatient edge to his voice. He was right, but only up to a point: it wasn’t like sleeping on a single pea, it was as if a catering pack had detonated. The journey was unbearably long and unbelievably boring. The one solace was passing through endless Midlands suburbs at night. I loved catching glimpses into homes whose occupants had been generous enough to forsake net curtains. The dark outlines of the houses, the warm glow of the lights within that revealed a captivating flash of strangers doing simple domestic acts, like ironing, laying a table, playing with a cat, or staring out of an upstairs window with their hair in a towel. It was like a living advent calendar.

  We were limited to five ‘are we nearly there?’ questions each. If we exceeded our quota, my father whipped round and clashed our heads together – a formidable way of inflicting sudden pain that left no outward sign of injury. Another trick to keep us quiet was to allow us the normally strictly prohibited chewing gum, but on the few occasions we did nod off for a bit we would wake up with the gum matted in our hair. I would lie on my back, attempting the impossible task of extracting the sticky clod while listening to the drone of the midnight shipping news.

  ‘Biscay … Finisterre … Sole … Fastnet … Lundy…’

  ‘Where’s Finisterre, Pa?’

  ‘It’s at the end of the world.’

  ‘Is that near to Cawdor?’

  ‘Careful now! That counts as another “are we nearly there”, which makes it your third time. And we’ve still got hundreds of miles to go.’

  Petrol stops were our only chance to stretch our legs. We would examine the hundreds of squashed moths on the car headlamps and chase after Wasp, who threatened to romp off into whatever northern county we happened to be travelling across at the time. Once we were north of the border, the road was a ribbon of moonlight, but it was also a busy abattoir for larger creatures as bedazzled hares, rabbits, pheasants and the occasional hedgehog went under our wheels. We passed the early hours playing roadkill-counting games in the matter-of-fact way of mortuary attendants.

  ‘I think that was a mouse!’

  ‘It could have been a baby rat.’

  ‘Ooh gosh, don’t start arguing, you two. Just add it to the hedgehog tally and call it “smaller mammals” instead.’

  The only time a collision caused a proper stir was when my mother took out a hefty ram. Conscience-stricken, she turned the car round and drove back down the road to check if it was dead or, worse, injured. If it had a broken leg, we were duty bound to put it out of its misery there and then. I had no idea how we were going to manage it – bludgeon it with a suitcase? As we rounded the corner where we had hit it, the ram reared out of a ditch and my mother smote it a second time. It dodged off again and disappeared into a wood. And who could blame it? We seemed to be conducting an inadvertent vendetta against it. My mother turned the car round a second time and drove on, tight-lipped with horror.

  As dawn thrust a sullen light into the car, we would cross the high passes that traversed the Grampians and finally reach the single-track road that wound its way over the last liver-coloured stretch of moorland before the land dipped down to the River Findhorn, and suddenly the landscape went from bleak to beautiful. Entering the Findhorn valley was like stepping into a Victorian watercolour. The river had carved its way through steep-sided hills of towering larches planted by Napoleonic prisoners-of-war. The place felt secluded, sheltered, secret. The Findhorn snaked sleepily over shallow rapids, a deep coffee-bean brown. The slow corners formed shady pools where salmon lay up on their journeys upstream to spawn, but in spate, the scene was transformed. The river could double in volume in a matter of hours, and the colour changed, as though seething milk had been added upstream. The force of water would chew up the banks, tear down the hazel trees that fringed the curves, and carry them away to the sea. Beyond the Findhorn, there was one last stretch of moor before we reached the Big Wood surrounding Cawdor. We would arrive in time for a breakfast of salted porridge and Arbroath smokies, with the closest thing to jetlag a car can provide.

  While my grandfather Jack was still alive, this breakfast was the first and last meal we shared with the older generations. Thereafter we were despatched to the nursery wing at the furthest end of the house. The nursery was a gloomy room that had ‘The Google Book’, written by Wilma’s father Vincent, in pride of place – the only evidence that she had once been resident. It was the single most petrifying children’s book I have ever read, with pictures that even managed to make sunsets look creepy. It was too big to fit into the bookshelf so it would lie on a table, beckoning horribly. I longed to ignore it, but before long I had succumbed, starting slowly and nervously and then turning faster and faster, hoping to skip over the page with the awful Google creature on it and later, curled up in bed, trying desperately to keep its image at bay. I kept wondering what kind of a man my great-grandfather had been to write such a strange, nightmarish children’s book. I asked Pa about him, but the only thing he could remember was being taken to London Zoo as a child and Vincent striding up to the llama cage, removing his bowler hat and flobbing a great gobbet of spittle at the animals, ‘to get in there first’.

  The nursery was in a 1940s time warp. The toys were ones Hugh and Carey had played with. All our late 1960s cultural references were to flowers, peace signs and cut-out fashion dolls, and it was hard to relate to the Tommy and Gerry lead soldiers, wooden Spitfires and laminated sheets showing the different types of battle aircraft in silhouette to help identify passing planes. They illustrated British and German planes from three angles: In Profile, Head On and From Below. There were twenty different sheets, each with six or more illustrations to dither o
ver. Even if there had been whole enemy squadrons flying over, the nursery would have been strafed to rubble before Hugh or Carey had had time to furiously flick through all the options to recognize a Fokker (Head On). And despite Grandmother Wilma’s worries, during the entire length of the war only one German plane ever flew over Cawdor. A fighter plane returning to its airbase on the continent after a raid on Glasgow strayed off course, ran out of fuel and plunged into the moor a little distance to the south. The crash left a deep crater in the peat that soon filled up with water. Twenty-five years later the dewpond was still there, and when Pa took us up onto that part of the moor we would tramp across the springy peat to study it. When we threw in a pebble, aviation oil rose up in rainbow-coloured hoops, and if we grubbed about among the heather roots we could still unearth scraps of coloured wiring.

  * * *

  ‘Visiting grandparents’ has a cosy ring to it. It conjures up sitting on laps, looking through old family albums, hot milk and certainty. As with Pa’s grandfather, Vincent, there was nothing cosy about our grandfather. He did not indulge us in any way. He never engaged us in any sort of conversation other than to bellow if he caught us picking moss off the drawbridge or scuffing the fine gravel in the driveway. A liquid diet of pink gins had turned his complexion to tones of magma. Jack was always dressed in a kilt, sporran, incongruously flamboyant socks and a hessian-strength tweed jacket. He only ever wore trousers on his infrequent forays south of the border. Among all the other unspoken rules, there was one that the wearing of a kilt outside Scotland was naff. The crepitus crunch of his hobnailed boots on the flagstones would echo across the courtyards, giving us time to skedaddle before he came marching out of the house, kilt swinging in stride. We would peep round the corner and wait for him to unlock the studded door that led to his offices and the downstairs loo. This was his private kingdom, despite it being the only loo on the ground floor. No-one, but no-one, aside from Jack Cawdor, was welcome. There was even a doorbell.