A Charmed Life: Growing Up in Macbeth's Castle

by Liza Campbell

  I finally got to see what was on the other side of the door after he died. The gents was tiny. It contained a Victorian thunderbox hidden by a large mahogany throne and had a porcelain-handled chain flush that needed several pulls followed by a long delay while pipes clanked and shuddered as if a train was leaving a station. Jack spent long contented hours in here with a newspaper, a surreptitious cigarette and a supply of arse-serrating Jeyes greaseproof toilet paper. As for many men of his age, his Spartan toilet habits were a hangover from the ascetic ways of the military, and the seed had rooted deep. The advent of soft toilet paper upset his cherished customs, and Bill, my grandfather’s butler, would be sent forth to rummage through clearance sales to stock up on the dwindling supplies of Jeyes.

  At least we could be thankful that we were not the grandchildren of his friend Jimmy Dunbar of nearby Spynie Palace, who had taken hygiene austerity one step beyond. Instead of Jeyes, Dunbar used bracken, and on the rare occasions he travelled to London he took along an extra suitcase packed with bracken fronds, since London hotels were unable to cater for this particular requirement. Jimmy Dunbar was my father’s hero because he lived with his own coffin in the front hallway of his house and claimed to exercise his droit de seigneur over his tenants’ wives. Hugh never prepared for death in the way Dunbar did, but we did go through almost thirty nannies, and it was not because we children were waking them up in the dead of night.

  If the downstairs gents was out of bounds for children, then my grandfather’s study made North Korea look like Heathrow. The study was where he dealt with all the correspondence brought to him on a silver tray each morning by Bill. Jack had one unwavering rule regarding brown envelopes: never, ever open them. Bills put him out of sorts. Yet they were never thrown away – that would have been grossly irresponsible. Companies had long ago learned that if they sent duplicates to the estate office, business quietly continued. Upon Jack’s death, the study was cleared out and the slag-heap of accumulated mail was laboriously checked. Eventually a three-seater sofa, now buckled by the sheer weight of paper, emerged. Many of the letters contained cheques rather than the dreaded bills, but they were all years out of date and could not be cashed, so everything was burned in a large bonfire, along with the sofa.

  When my father took over the study he allowed us limited access but, in keeping with tradition, the gents remained out of bounds. It was now Pa’s locked domain, where at the end of his life he hid out, just like his father, to puff at sly fags behind Angelika’s back. He smoked four hundred cigarettes a week for thirty-five years and on the occasions he attempted to give up he described it as ‘unfurling my will-power and brandishing it around like a flaccid brandy snap’.

  * * *

  There were only two occasions during our Cawdor visits when we would gather en masse as a generationally varied family. One was when we were put into the back of ancient Land Rovers along with all the dogs to go out shooting ‘on the hill’. The moorland colours were constantly shifting. The keepers burned large swathes of heather to allow new growth, which provided food for the grouse chicks and left a patchwork of dark and light purple, of new and old heather, of silvery grey from older burns and blackened strips from fresh burns. It was usually cold and usually drizzling, and my main task on the day of a shoot was to keep out of sight. Hugh and his best friend, his stepmother Betty’s son William Gordon Cumming, liked to stand side by side so they could try and ‘wipe each other’s eyes’ by being quick enough on the draw to pot a bird flying over the other’s position.

  I would sit in the bottom of a butt, hands clamped over my ears, as Pa fired overhead. Shooting was deafening and dull, but I tried to keep my lack of hearty Highland enthusiasm quiet because it was such a treat to be with my father, even if it meant he only talked to Wasp and said ‘Shh!’ to me for the duration of an afternoon. There was not much to see from wellington boot level, other than a damp dog, and nothing to do except collect spent cartridges and sniff deeply on the warm cordite before popping them on my fingers as witch’s gloves. When the headkeeper’s whistle blew to signal the drive was over, I would scramble out and watch the dogs search the heather for fallen birds, their masters shouting, ‘Hel-ooost, hel-oost! Good boy! Heel now, heeeeel!’ Sometimes Wasp would retrieve a wounded bird and I was meant to wring its neck, but I just couldn’t; and rather than by the neck or feet, I carried the dead ones in my arms as if they were still living. ‘You weed,’ Pa would grumble.

  The highlight of the day would be getting back to Cawdor and clambering out of sodden clothes and into one of the gigantic Victorian baths surrounded by glass decanters etched with grapevines and full of purple bath crystals and soupy pine essence. There were long copper plungers instead of plugs, and the scalding water was a soft peaty brown. The baths were so long that if I lay down I had to hang on to the sides or float, and when I sat up the water lapped my shoulders. The bath towels were the size of spinnakers.

  If it had been a good day out on the moor, with a big bag, it meant one thing: game on the menu for the rest of the week. I hated eating grouse. I hated eating pheasant. I hated eating teal and woodcock and snipe and jugged hare, especially when the meat was so rare that it might just as well have been left on a radiator for ten minutes. But my childhood took place in pre-fussy eating days and we ate what we were given. The only relief from the musky tang of game blood was when my teeth clattered against a pellet. This was very auspicious. On my privately calibrated scale of luck, it was one up from winning ‘pull a wishbone’ and two down from seeing a shooting star.

  * * *

  The only other occasion when we spent time together as a complete family was on Sunday mornings, when we would gather in formal dress and head off to kirk along with the house staff: Bill the butler, Mrs Wood the cook, Jessie and Annie Mary the housekeepers, and Mrs King the laundress, all in our Sunday best. Our tiny children’s kilts had been handed down from Edwardian times. If you lifted the front flap, the tartan beneath had been reduced to lace by moths. It made for a draughty walk down the drive, across the narrow wooden footbridge that spanned the Cawdor burn and then along the village’s only street.

  Even though the kirk is a modest size with a short stump of a tower, its construction in 1629 had nearly bankrupted the 12th Thane. The interior complies with all the rigid stipulations for exemplary Presbyterian plainness. The only concession to decoration is a couple of wall plaques listing the dead of two world wars. There is no stained glass, no altar and no crucifix. Watching dust motes whirl softly in a light beam was the extent of visual stimulation.

  The minister’s sermon was as unedited as it was stern, typically commencing, ‘This week I was inspired to put pen to paper on the subject of babbling fools…’ followed by a pause as he glowered at us all over the top of his spectacles. A reading would follow that was most likely about Lot’s wife, or Job and his malignant ulcers. The Presbyterian God was a dour one who must have thought up the rainbow while he had a temperature and was not feeling quite himself. The songs we sang were all wilfully obscure works from forgotten backwaters of the hymn book, and on the rare occasion that a hymn’s words looked remotely familiar, any unholy confidence was expertly crushed by the opening chords of some Harrison Birtwhistle experiment on the organ. We were cajoled into trying to follow the cascade of random notes by the sterling efforts of a large-bosomed lady called Peggy Forsyth, who tapped her feet and gave it her all in a loud and warbling soprano. Pa used to hiss that her vibrato was due to her wearing a truss. Whatever the impact of her undergarments on her vocal cords, she kept the congregation singing. On the occasions when she was absent, voices were apt to falter and drop out one by one, as if poison gas was seeping from the vestry.

  In keeping with Presbyterian tradition, communion was taken once a year only, at Easter, when we could look forward to a hunk of real bread and some port. The service would finish off with the congregation stumbling through that cheery foot-tapper ‘By the Light of burrrning Martyrs, Christ thy bloody s
teps we trace’, with my father singing it in a basso profundo that sounded like heavy furniture being dragged across the floor. In a pew at right angles to ours, Mrs King from the laundry at Cawdor would make no effort to sing. Ever. She would wave to us gaily while popping a succession of hard-boiled sweets into her mouth and spend the rest of her time flattening out and folding up the cellophane wrappers – as if she could never fully relax from her laundress’s habits. Pa kept himself amused by glaring at his watch in full view of the vicar and making stage-whispered comments, usually about Peggy Forsyth’s choice of hat, but if we tittered he produced a hammily pious ‘Hush now!’ This would only make matters worse, and with heaving shoulders I would wait for him to hand over his large spotted handkerchief to stuff into my mouth.

  While I was away at school, my mother wrote to me about one of the more exciting services.

  Pa and I went to kirk yesterday. The service was full of distractions. A small boy from Piperhill played tiddlywinks with his collection money through the prayers and shouted loudly all through the children’s hymn. Not long before the sermon Jessie went a paler shade of grey and was escorted out by Bill, later joined by Peggy Forsyth who obviously felt she might be missing something, & one could but envy them all missing the sermon. I went to look for Jessie afterwards to see if I could drive them home, but she was recovered and giggling having been revived by a strong cuppa in Annie Mary’s house.

  * * *

  When it was sunny, our holidays at Cawdor were spent grazing on currants in the vegetable garden, stroking the ginger noses of the Highland cows that were pastured beside the drive for ornamental purposes, and clambering across the acres of rooftop gables. From the top of the tower you could see the sea. On the southern battlement there was a medieval loo, a stone projection that jutted out from the vertical pitch of the tower walls with a little stone seat but no floor. If you peered between your knees you could see the courtyard far below. I never managed to pee down it; vertigo always gave me a stricture.

  When it was miserable weather we went to the attics, or more often loitered in the windowless back passages behind the green baize door. If a bell rang we would run to where a long line of bells hung on coiled springs, like treble clefs. High up on the wall beside each bell the name of the corresponding room was painted in neat black letters. Even if the bell had stopped ringing, it was easy to spot which one in the line-up was still quivering. ‘Gun room!’ we would shout, and the relevant person would scurry off. Behind the green baize door we could chat to the house staff much less formally than if we met up on the other side of it, although there were some staff who weren’t much cop whichever side you met up. Mrs King wasn’t any fun outside church. She was amiable enough, but the omnipresence of a boiled sweet in her mouth made my contributions to our conversations an endless series of ‘whats?’ Jessie and Annie Mary were the housekeepers, and made a fearsome duo. They too were best avoided.

  Bill, who looked as if he could be Grandpa’s brother, was the one we wanted. He was friendly, but circumspect due to his catastrophic stammer. They said he had acquired it as a boy at school, when he was forced to write with his right hand because it was considered improper to be left-handed. This information really bothered me since I was left-handed too; I could barely do anything with my right hand, other than pick my nose. I ate with my knife and fork back to front, which meant my elbows were always out of kilter with everyone else’s on the long benches at school. But listening to Bill struggling to say ‘More mince, m’lord?’ made me determined to get mine the right way round and avert an unwanted remedial intervention.

  The butler’s pantry was orderly, meticulous – professional. In the middle, it had a big table covered with a thick damask tablecloth and padded by a green felt undercloth. Bill would show us how to fold napkins into origami lotuses or smear the clean cutlery with pink polish that turned grey when it was dry and ready to rub off. Emma and I were delegated the forks and spoons. We each wore one of Bill’s cotton polishing gloves so that every curve got properly buffed. Only Bill was allowed to clean the knives because over the years the steel had been worn to razor sharpness on both edges. Guests had to be cautioned against pressing a forefinger along the length of the blade. People who didn’t listen soon found out that it wasn’t an idle warning and had the appetite-spoiling surprise of finding their flesh newly cloven. A lunch guest once inadvertently dropped his knife from his plate as he passed by my mother’s chair. The knife fell silently, vertically, piercing my mother like a javelin and pinioning her foot to the sole of her shoe. Ma, for whom discretion was always the better part of valour, let out the smallest of gasps so as not to embarrass the guest, then seized the handle, pulled it out and left the room as her shoe brimmed up with blood.

  If, after helping Bill with his chores, it was still too miserable to go outside we would be at another loose end – until Findlay Macintosh arrived, and then we would volunteer to help the bandy-legged gardener with his delivery of cut peat. Findlay was old and small but incredibly handsome with a shock of white hair and a face like a noble-hearted eagle. I thought that if I had been born in olden times I would have probably liked to marry him.

  After helping Findlay empty his barrow we would mooch off to shout our names into the echoey old kitchen well, which was there in case of a siege. Anything was better than spending time in the nursery. Having Wasp to play with would have made a difference to our time, but all my grandfather’s dogs were kept at the keeper’s kennels and Wasp was banished there too. The only animal allowed in the house was an enormous grey cat with matted fur and a dewlapped stomach that scraped the floor. Its name was Catter and it belonged to no-one in particular. How it came to be at Cawdor was long forgotten. It never behaved like a pet. It had the attitude of a recalcitrant stranger and wandered the castle corridors sticking closely to the walls, lurking in the darkest passageway outside the pantry by the peat pile. Sometimes it would come towards us, but if we reached out to stroke it, it would lash out. On its infrequent forays into the drawing room my grandfather’s eyes would light up and he would call it gently. ‘Catter! Come here. Come, Catter.’ Normally it paid no attention whatsoever and went about its business, rubbing against each of the piano legs before making a regal exit. But once in a long while Catter would be tempted by Jack’s soft blandishments and move stiffly down the room towards his fireside armchair, using a curious sideways step as if it had quietly studied dressage but now had prosthetic limbs. As soon as it was within striking distance, my grandfather’s boot, which he had been manoeuvring into position with glacial stealth, would shoot out and kick the cat back down the length of the carpet. This ritual was repeated until Catter died at some vast cat age and was buried in a flowerbed near the Tibetan irises, outside the kitchen. Common to the mystery of many human relationships, Jack conducted the interment with a sentiment unexpressed while Catter had breath.

  Staying at Cawdor was not something I ever felt any enthusiasm about. If anyone had told me we were due to move there I would have thrown a shit fit.

  Chapter 6

  One Scot: the cleverest man on earth.

  Two Scots: a quarrel.

  Three Scots: four political parties.

  Proverb

  My grandfather died suddenly. Heart attack. Bang. Gone. He was seventy. It was, without question, an impressive age for a man with a face the colour of a fire extinguisher.

  Emma and I were at school when it happened. Mrs C called us into her study. I was nine and wasn’t sure how to react, but saw that my immediate duty was to cry. I made myself think about Wasp getting run over by Stan’s gang-mower until some tears came.

  ‘Do you know what your father is now?’ she asked. We were both blank. ‘He’s turned into something…’ she prompted.

  ‘He hasn’t turned into Grandpa, has he?’ I said, unable to conceal my alarm.

  We left school and flew up to Cawdor for the funeral. Aunt Carey and Uncle Peebles were already there with Alexander and Boojum. Uncl
e James arrived on the train with his wife Bridget, their toddler Slaine and baby Cara – both tubby little girls. It was rare to have so many grandchildren at Cawdor and there were only just enough kilts to go round. Jack would have been appalled to see children in such numbers.

  The morning after we arrived, we came downstairs to find that breakfast had been laid out in a small anteroom with a barrel-vaulted ceiling known as the winter dining room. This was a completely new room to me, like eating in an upmarket grotto. There was no room at the table for all the grown-ups so they stood apart, sipping coffee and talking quietly. Aunt Carey was checking the cherry stones on Emma’s plate using her own version of the counting rhyme. Instead of tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, she said, ‘Cowboy, playboy, sugardaddy, black.’

  ‘Why are we here?’ I asked.

  ‘For Grandpa’s funeral, you dope,’ my father replied.

  ‘No, why are we in this room?’

  ‘Because he’s in the dining room.’

  ‘Who?’ I asked, suddenly nervous.

  ‘Why Grandpa, of course,’ my father replied, and rang the bell-pull to order some more coffee. When we had finished our kedgeree, he said, ‘Let’s go and see him.’