A Charmed Life: Growing Up in Macbeth's Castle

by Liza Campbell

  I followed him out of the room. Bill the butler was in the hall looking pink and giving his nose a hard blow. I really, really did not want to see my grandfather’s corpse and prayed I wouldn’t be sick or scream or do anything that would shame me. The dining room looked bigger and darker than normal, the table had been removed and the blinds were pulled halfway down; on the centre windowsill was the demijohn that my grandfather filled with cider and honey to trap wasps. It was packed with dead wasps. It seemed odd that it was still there, but he would no longer be inspecting the casualties with a satisfied grunt. To my relief, Jack’s coffin was closed and lay on some sort of trestle with his walking crook and a tartan bonnet placed on the lid. I had no idea what to do. ‘Is he a skeleton yet?’ I asked. My mother gave me a cross look and told me to go outside and keep out of the grown-ups’ way until it was time for the funeral.

  I headed for the wild garden where I could hear voices coming from the thick stand of bamboo grown from shoots Grandpa had brought back from the Himalayas. Boojum and Alexander were having a disagreement about the direction of the earth’s rotation that was growing a little heated, conducted in exasperated whispers. Then Fred and Colin arrived, having been sent out of the house too. Uncle James had brought his trumpet with him and the mournful notes started tumbling from an upstairs window as we busied ourselves detonating the tightly crammed seedcases of the touch-me-not balsam flowers, while Fred sat under the giant gunnera leaves and silently picked at the holes in his kilt.

  A piper skirled laments as the pallbearers processed slowly to the kirk. Granny Betty and Pa led the mourners. She was wearing a trim black coat over a tartan skirt, her hair, as ever, in a miraculous white halo around her head without a single hair adrift, in the same periwigged style so beloved by our own dear Queen but more cumulo-nimbus and less like an Ionic capital. We walked behind Betty, friends followed behind us, and the estate workers brought up the rear. Silent villagers lined the road. Silent, that is, except for Mrs King the laundress, who was standing by the big beech tree noisily springcleaning her handbag as the coffin drew level.

  The beech tree! A sudden chill swept over me as we filed slowly past its wide smooth trunk. The last time we had come to stay, we had spelled out on the bark ‘Sex is Fun’ using the free alphabet stickers inside our bubblegum wrappers. If anyone noticed it, surely they would instantly recognize it as Emma’s and my handiwork and halt the funeral there and then to conduct a kangaroo court. I didn’t dare check if the words were still there, in case the act of looking drew everyone’s eyes to the spot; instead, I gave Colin a few hard pinches. It helped distract me, and besides, that boy just was not being sad enough. He had remained resolutely dry-eyed all day. By the time we reached the church I was feeling a little seasick from the sound of the pipes. Bagpipes are like a handsome man with halitosis: rather fabulous from far away, but taxing up close.

  The kirk vault was up to the rafters with dead forebears – it was our Campbell version of my grandfather’s wasp trap – so Jack was to be buried outside in the graveyard. The minister told us that life ‘was an en-gyne and God was the en-gyne driver’. He made heaven sound like an Inverness railway siding. As the coffin was lowered into the ground, Betty threw in a tea rose she had clipped that morning. On the way back to Cawdor, James’s two-year-old daughter Slaine got lost in the thicket of mourners’ legs. Being only knee height, she began to panic, tripped and measured her length on the gravel. My father gathered her up in his arms, dusting her fat little knee as she wailed. Everyone fussed around her, relieved to be distracted from their own sorrows by her much more transitory brand.

  The whole congregation slowly gathered in the drawing room for drinks and I wandered around listening into conversations. Mrs King was talking to our great-aunt Helen. ‘Did ye see that group of crows swooping overhead as his lordship’s coffin was being lowered?’

  ‘Really? No, I didn’t notice,’ said Great-aunt Helen.

  ‘Well, I thought that was quite fitting in some way,’ Mrs King continued, proffering some toffees.

  ‘A sort of metaphor? Yes. But they’ll have been rooks, not crows.’

  ‘Rooks? Are ye sure?’

  ‘There’s an old saying that the keepers taught me. It goes: “If you see a bunch of bloody crows, it’s a bunch of bloody rooks, but if you see a bloody rook on its own, it’s a bloody crow.” Crows are solitary.’

  ‘Och, I’ll nev’remember that.’

  ‘Well, think of “rookery” then. Rooks like to live together. There’s no such thing as a crowery.’

  ‘Aye, that’s good. Shall we be getting another wee nip of sherry?’

  An elegant old lady wearing several dead foxes and lace mittens was talking to Aunt Carey. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Emma had and she pulled me aside and summarized it, imitating the woman’s strong foreign accent. ‘You know, in New York we knew heem as Mad Jacques Cord-ur. ’E was so crezee when ’e was yong.’ We giggled with delighted amazement. We knew he’d been on expeditions to Tibet, but the teeming streets of New York seemed an impossibly unlikely place for our grandfather ever to have been. We had never once before thought of him as young. And crezee? So much intriguing information, and all of it coming a week too late for us to know him better.

  My father was dealing with a steady line of people giving him their condolences. People were professing their confidence in his new role as Thane. Hugh was going to be the new hub, and his character was going to have an impact on the whole community. Years after, I remember wondering what the experience must have been like for Hugh suddenly to have all this wealth, this title, this gain that came with the death of a loved parent and the greatest sense of loss any of us can experience. What must it be like to have one’s life predestined in this way? The convention of primogeniture recognizes but one child: the first-born male. All other siblings are superfluous. After Pa, Colin was destined for the role in our generation, a role Pa ultimately managed to betray. Like Emma, Fred and Laura, I have trudged life’s path, following unmarked byways, jaywalking emotional motorways and thrashing around in the psychological undergrowth. The eldest sons in families like ours have a separate destiny: theirs is like a flyover, fetchingly lit, with fur-lined guardrails and clearly marked signs reading ‘This Way, Buddy’. Does this make the chosen ones feel sure and steady, that their life’s path is wide and clear and not going to be short on luxuries? Or do they bridle? Like most either/ors the normal reaction to a predestined future is a bit of both, circling in tandem like Phobos and Deimos, the twin satellites of Mars.

  * * *

  The mourners gradually took their leave, and when the wake thinned down to family and a few friends we noticed that Uncle Peebles had disappeared. My mother wondered out loud where he had gone, and his children replied in unison, ‘Foraging.’ On his way back from the kirk, Peebles had spotted some large ceps through the trees and had slipped away from the wake to pick them. The thrill of the mushroom hunt lay deep in his Teutonic bones, and once he had gathered the ceps he had spotted some shaggy inkcaps and so on until, as Alexander and Boojum said, he was on a full-blown forage. On his return, he delicately unwrapped a large white handkerchief and showed us his haul. He was particularly happy to have come across some unseasonably early boletus. ‘Let’s cook them immediately,’ he said, heading for the kitchen. ‘Mushrooms are the traditional remedy to cheer the heavy-hearted.’ And I absolutely believed him.

  * * *

  The worst thing about our grandfather’s death was that when we went back to school our parents packed up our life in Wales and moved us up to Scotland. Cawdor was our new home. The initial shock of knowing we were never going to return to Golden Grove started to wane little by little as we began to get a sense of place. Hugh began to tutor us on our Scottishness: how the name Campbell made us members of one of the most powerful clans in Scotland, but that over and above the Campbell name our pride dwelt in being from Cawdor. Our roots, he said, held us in an unbroken line of castle chil
dren from the times of snoods and heralds, when curses were cast and fairytales were true. Our family motto, ‘Be Mindful’, was etched in stone all around, and he told us it was a reminder and an instruction. Other family mottoes say pointless things like ‘Only the Foolish Boy Pranceth at Dusk’ and ‘Specta Id Quod Feles Intraxit’.* ‘Ours is concise and clear-cut,’ he said. ‘It means, “Think!” – and that means, of our history, and of Cawdor. There are laws of the land, but Be Mindful is the private law of our family and should not be confused with other Campbells.’

  Our clan is vast. By far the largest branch is the Argyll Campbells from the west coast. The others, like Breadalbane Campbells and Cawdor Campbells, are spindly twigs on the sequoia-like trunk of the Argylls. Being born a Campbell comes with an inbuilt notoriety; on being introduced, a fellow Scot’s reaction can range from jokily scandalized to sincerely cold.

  For hundreds of years, since early medieval times, the ceaseless jostling for supremacy between the larger clans had made them all endlessly suspicious of each other. During medieval times, the Campbells had slowly emerged as the main source of the Crown’s authority in Scotland. This closeness to the Crown had started with their fierce loyalty to Robert the Bruce, who won the throne in 1306 after murdering his rival John Comyn. Habitual proximity to power and their reluctance to relinquish the influence this gave them meant that when the centre of control shifted south of the border, so too did many Campbell allegiances. Their fellow countrymen deeply distrusted them as a result, but the reputation of the Campbell name only turned matt black at Glencoe.

  In the seventeenth century, while most Scots of the time supported the Catholic Stuart line to the throne, the Campbells gave their loyalty to the usurping Protestant king, William of Orange. In a move designed to pre-empt Jacobite dissent in Scotland, King William issued a decree that all clan chiefs must sign an oath of allegiance to him by the deadline of nightfall on New Year’s Day 1692. Those who defied the order would suffer the consequences. To oversee the job, William promoted John Dalrymple to be his Master of Scottish Affairs. It was a canny choice. Dalrymple was a former Jacobite and had the inside knowledge of poacher turned gamekeeper.

  It is uncertain why, but Dalrymple had a particular grievance against the Macdonald clansmen who lived in Glencoe. Some say it stemmed from the Macdonalds’ cattle-rustling lifestyle, but before the advent of pubs, football or television, rustling was a terrifically popular Scottish pastime. The Macdonalds were hardly going out on a limb in this indulgence. It is also rumoured that Dalrymple’s enmity was inflamed by their Jacobite stance, but there were many others with identical inclinations. Whatever his reasons, Dalrymple set a trap. He ordered Alastair Macdonald, the Glencoe chieftain, to report to Inverlochy, a castle well to the north of Glencoe, where he was to sign the oath. Macdonald had been deliberately misinformed, and when he arrived at Inverlochy he was told, oops-a-daisy, there had been some sort of clerical error and he must sign at Inverary Castle, fifty miles to the south. It was the time of the mini ice age, a bitterly cold winter; the Highlands were snowbound and the only passable route was a winding road that hugged the deeply indented coastline. Dalrymple’s plan to force his enemy into missing the deadline worked. By the time Macdonald and his horse had struggled to Inverary, it was 3 January and he had committed treason by default. With the King’s assent, Dalrymple instructed his ally Robert Campbell of Glen Lyon to exact royal retribution. He was to go to Glencoe and kill every male under the age of seventy.

  There was little love lost between the Macdonalds and the Campbells; feuds had rumbled back and forth between the two for centuries. But there was no current feud, and Robert Campbell and Alastair Macdonald were related by marriage. Nevertheless, the Campbells rode up the glen with a detachment of 120 mercenaries on 2 February. It is a sign of the deception that the Macdonalds suspected nothing and did not rush to arms. Whatever the explanation given for the Campbells arriving thus, unannounced, it was evidently plausible and the party was welcomed in and billeted among the many homesteads.

  The Campbells accepted every kindness proffered. They gossiped, partied, danced, flirted and feasted for ten days. Ten long days. Then, at five a.m. on 13 February, the Campbells rose in the dark and slaughtered their hosts in their beds. The chieftain was one of the first to die, followed by two of his sons. As his wife screamed for help, she had her finger bitten off to get at her rings. She was so badly beaten that she died of her wounds the next day. Men were bound with rope and shot. Women and children ran from their homes as the thatched roofs were put to the torch. Their closest neighbours lived many miles away in a different glen. It was a wretchedly cold dawn and they fled into a blizzard wearing only nightclothes. The plan to eliminate every Macdonald male – they numbered nearly two hundred – was only botched because Dalrymple and his detachment, who were meant to have arrived in time to join the killing spree, got delayed by snowdrifts. Glencoe is a remote valley flanked by towering crags. It is a sinister, evocative place of imposing but oppressive beauty. Unlike many other historical sites, it is really not too hard to imagine the terror unleashed there three hundred years ago. Thirty-eight Macdonalds died from their wounds, but an unknown number perished from exposure as they hid out in the hills during the following weeks. By the time Dalrymple’s men arrived they found the homesteads deserted, except for one old man, who they killed.

  Murderous plots were not particularly rare between clans and the total killed at Glencoe was no more than at others. What thrust these particular events so deeply into the mass psyche was the violation of every tenet of Scottish hospitality in the days leading up to the atrocity. To ambush one’s enemies and fall upon them without delay was an acceptable form of violence; to cosy up to them first was not. A ballad was written to chronicle the tragedy:

  They came in a blizzard, we offered them heat.

  A roof for their heads, dry shoes for their feet.

  We wined them and dined them, they ate all our meat,

  And they slept in the house of Macdonald.

  They came from Fort William with murder in mind,

  The Campbell had orders King William had signed.

  ‘Put all to the sword’ these words underlined,

  ‘Leave no one alive called Macdonald.’

  If there has been retribution for the betrayal at Glencoe, it is that the name Campbell carries the stigma to this day. There were occasions when I wondered what it would be like to have a less provocative surname, like Blennerhassett or Tibbs, rather than one that completed the phrase ‘never trust a…’.

  Alongside this screeching violin of a name there was another aspect of the Cawdor Campbells to consider: if you shake the family tree, bottles fall out. This is not to say that the family had somehow suddenly degenerated, for until the mid-twentieth century addiction was either ignored or wholly misunderstood – seen as wilful degeneration, as if an alcoholic has the luxury of choice in the matter. Since alcoholism often runs in families, it could well have been doing so in ours for centuries; history wouldn’t and probably couldn’t relate. (Although one eighteenth-century unfortunate wounded himself fatally while trying to kill a seagull with his blunderbuss. A seagull. Surely a dead giveaway for a lush.)

  Jack Cawdor had lived with a hand clamped around a tumbler of gin. Aunt Carey enjoyed a drink, and Pa seemed to have an insatiable thirst for anything except water. No-one noticed how many heavy drinkers there were in the family because only Great-uncle Andrew, my grandfather’s younger brother, was seen as having any sort of problem. He was the family’s designated drunk and was known as ‘Drunkle Uncle’, a name coined by Carey. He earned it after inadvertently driving off the end of the Kessock jetty and plunging into the Moray Firth, having misjudged the distance to a departing ferryboat by many yards. The spotlight never left him, and everyone else’s drinking was studiously ignored. Although none of my immediate family dropped dead directly from alcoholic poisoning or from altercations with seagulls, most died as a result of their addic
tions in one way or another. ‘Hold a woman by the waist and a bottle by the neck, and not the other way round!’ Pa would cry if someone grasped the port decanter too low as it made its strictly clockwise orbit of the table. Strangely, of the men it was only Great-uncle Andrew, the boozy scapegoat, who ever truly got the gist of this comment: he remained in a calm and loving marriage to Great-aunt Helen, a woman my father once described as looking ‘like her face had been set on fire and someone put it out with an axe’.

  The degrees of contradiction in each human nature are what define our character differences. My father’s dominant contradictions were that he was gregarious but painfully shy, and capable of generosity on a grand scale, not just materially but of the spirit, but also of a meanness that encompassed premeditated cruelty. One minute he could bounce with confidence, the next he seemed queasy in his own skin. He could do very little socially unless he had had a stiff drink first, but it was never just one, and as four went to five and to six, the alcohol in his system magnified rather than smoothed his moods. He became paranoid, belligerent, sexually incontinent and, on occasions, violent. He brushed off the ill-effects of his drinking with light-hearted explanations, on one occasion joking about loss of memory to the extent that, on waking, he was puzzled to find ‘several bruises about my person’. ‘They probably came out of a bottle’ was his conclusion.

  Drink does not explain all that happened to us as a family, but looking back, many things would never have taken place in the way they did if alcohol had been absent.

  * * *

  I felt bereft about leaving Golden Grove for a place I associated with a kilted curmudgeon and where we were only tolerated when sequestered in a distant wing. The three bits of continuity we had from Wales were the ubiquitous Thatch, all the portraits of our ancestors hanging in Golden Grove after the obliteration of Stackpole, and the cook, Edith. It was fifteen years before I could face returning to look at those river valley views again. The peaceful routine we had known in Wales was turned upside down; the course of our lives had changed for ever. But what changed the most was Pa.