Once they had all landed, John would reappear and ask, ‘Why did yer no loose off a shot, Coln? Could you nay get a clear aim?’
‘I just couldn’t decide if the bushes had actually gone black.’
‘Och, that again. You’re a dreamer, wee manny.’ And he would start chuckling.
John Stewart had been a young soldier on leave at the time of the German plane crash on the moor. A strapping young man who had already won an MC, he was content to volunteer for a solo six-mile yomp into the landscape to capture any survivors. We would beg him to tell us the story. Depending on his mood he would give us slightly different versions of it, but it always ended with him saying in his strong staccato brogue, ‘Och, thut poor wee pilot laddie was jes’ pollverrized, so I jes’ concertinaed hum up into ma’ rocksuck, hoisted it on ma back an’ ran back doon the hull.’
‘Oh, Johnny, please tell us again, tell us again – just once more.’
But he would shake his head and march off with a swinging stride.
Every summer he was in charge of making sure there was a steady supply of young heather for the juvenile grouse to eat. We would hear John’s shouts and gaze up to see matchstick figures silhouetted in the distance, controlling the flames of huge fires. Some days, the optimum weather of a tiny breeze would turn at the drop of an isobar into a gale and the fires would gallop out of control. In one of his letters to school, my father described one such fire that ‘took off like a scalded cheetah’ on Holme Rose moor. When Hugh arrived on the scene, the flames had nearly reached a house at the edge of his beloved Big Wood. Two fire engines and the frantic efforts of thirty men brought the blaze under control, with the help of a helicopter ‘that scooped water and rainbow trout’ out of the neighbouring reservoir, before the rain came down.
Outdoor pursuits were so much a part of male life in Scotland that unless we girls joined in, there was not much for us to do. Alas, my shotgun calling was very brief. It was not because I disapproved in any way. I loved the taste of venison and wild boar and I was prepared, under duress, to eat winged game; but I could see that if you failed to kill an animal outright you were completely obligated to end its suffering. This meant either taking the animal by the legs and whacking its head against a stone, or pulling its head away from its body until the neck broke. I could not fulfil that part of the bargain, and it simply was not done to carry on firing at point-blank range to finish an animal off. I never graduated to shooting driven grouse from a butt, I was far too excitable and dangerous. I remained a crouching witness, breathing in the cordite and erroneously shouting ‘Over!’ at the sight of a bumblebee.
Shooting with a rifle turned out to be much more fun because a rifle didn’t have a kick that left your shoulder bruised black and yellow when you got the positioning of the stock wrong, but I only went out stalking once. I loved creeping silently over the moor with Pa and John Stewart, keeping out of sight and upwind of the deer until there was a chance of a good free aim on one that had moved clear of the herd. But when I looked through the cross-hairs of the telescopic sight at this shy, elegant animal, the very last thing in my mind was to squeeze the trigger. I only really enjoyed plugging oranges and bottles – nothing with lungs.
Being inexperienced and in charge of a deadly weapon is nerve-racking if the intention is ‘to be safe’. If we inadvertently pointed our gun at anyone, Pa would give us a clout and a tongue-lashing. Like learning to drive, there were actions that had to become second nature. Unlike driving, you couldn’t fire a gun slowly, and if you messed up you ended up like the farmer’s son in Wales who shot himself in the groin. Accidents did happen, and when they did there was a strict protocol about who you could hurt. If someone peppered a fellow guest, it was a regrettable but standard risk run by any group of people carrying arms. If, however, you hit an unarmed beater or a keeper, it was a scandal. There was a strict etiquette to follow:
• The guilty party must put down his gun immediately.
• The guilty party must ensure the injured party is taken care of and seen off to hospital with all speed. It is inconsiderate for the guilty party to travel with the injured party. If the man is in pain, he should not have to feel obliged to exchange pleasantries with the trigger-happy schmuck who nearly killed him.
• The guilty party must then leave the moor without delay, return to his lodgings and reflect on his shame in solitude.
Leaving the hill was an act of contrition, so someone who ‘didn’t even put his gun down’ and continued shooting would get a name as a bit of a shit. The grown-ups generally closed ranks and refused to let us in on these scandals, but once we wore our mother down until she gave us a name. It turned out that Pa’s cousin David was one. We asked what had happened to him, but she explained that he had already been in the doghouse for years, ever since he had been caught spitting in a great-aunt’s bath when he was a child. The doghouse? I could see it for his gun crime, but for spitting? This seemed strangely harsh. Aunt Carey described it as the family scandelabra.
* * *
Every couple of weeks from August to February there was a houseparty at Cawdor with a dozen guns accompanied by their wives, plus Thatch, who never carried a gun. I assumed he had never learned to shoot because in aikido you needed only two fingers to bring death. In the intervening weeks, invitations to other estates took my parents to every corner of Scotland, all over England, and across to the Irish bogs, if there was snipe shooting on offer. Hugh followed the principles of Ready! Aim! Fire! to remarkable effect on the moor and in the woods. At home, it was different. If he was in a temper, it was Ready! Fire! Aim! And with women, he was Fire! Fire! Fire! Because of this, keeping Pa company on these excursions was not always a barrel of laughs.
* * *
When I was twelve, Pa also insisted that I learn at least the rudiments of casting. ‘You never know,’ he said, ‘you might spend your honeymoon fishing, like Uncle William and Aunt E.’ This made me marvel that their marriage had survived at all, let alone produced four children. We drove to the river and Pa chose me one of the hand-tied flies he had made as a boy, using a snippet of his sister’s bright red hair. Ten minutes into my first proper lesson I hooked an incredibly unlucky salmon quite by chance, and under a tirade of enthusiastic threats and instructions I tried to reel it in. When the fish came into the shallows, Pa waded in with a net, scooped it out onto the bank and bludgeoned it with a little cosh that ghillies dryly call a ‘priest’. He was thrilled that I had succeeded on my very first attempt. I tried to hide it from him, but the fact was he was a deal more excited than me. I was pleased, but my first thought was, ‘Well, at least I’ve got that out of the way. I won’t have to do it again.’ The second thought was, ‘We’re going to have to eat this thing.’ At the time, I could never have imagined that one day I would be fishing almost every day for years, including on my honeymoon.
* * *
My brother Colin wrote a short letter to our parents from his new prep school. It read: ‘My heart’s in the Highlands. At Cawdor Castle to be precise.’ If I was to be precise, the bank of the River Findhorn was the place that captured my heart. It became my favourite place in the world after Wales.
In the summer, while Pa was casting in a distant pool, we would don goggles, jump into the freezing water and swim down to the lines of salmon. They took no notice of us. Sometimes we would find six or seven resting in a vertical stack, motionless but for the gentle twirl of their fins and an occasional punkah-like swish of their tails. Close up, their heads were streaked with scars, and the great jut of the males’ underslung jaws made the experience a little eerie. As we kicked down into the murky water, Jacques Cousteau’s television commentary would play on a loop in my head – the time when his son was filmed swimming into a tunnel only to vanish for ever. ‘And zat eez ze last … we saw … of Philippe.’ I would kick back up to the surface, heart thumping. We would clamber out of the water blue-lipped with cold.
After pulling on clothes over dripping limbs, we
would go and find Pa and hope the sight of our juddering jaws would persuade him to pack up for lunch. Luckily he was far less fanatical with a rod than he was with a gun, and he would join us on the shingle and give us nips from his hip flask. We would then scramble into his Land Rover and drive upstream to Drynachan, where Ma was already feeding the Smalls on a large picnic rug. Thatch would be sitting to one side wearing an over-tight blazer, awaiting his pupil.
Drynachan was our shooting lodge on the banks of the Findhorn. The house had started off as a bothy where hunters slept after a day on the moor. In the days before cars, the game was brought off the hill in large wicker panniers slung over packhorses and it was too tiring for the shooting party to try to reach Cawdor after a long day’s shooting. Drynachan was enlarged in a gradual and completely haphazard way: some kennels were added here, an extra bedroom or two there, and it finished up an unphotogenic mess from the outside, but heavenly within.
When we came to live at Cawdor, our holidays were made even more hectically social by the presence of a colourful Parisian called Sheila de Rochambeau, who began renting Drynachan for the summer months. Sheila was a Francophile American with Scottish roots. She embraced every Highland tradition with gusto and filled the lodge with a steady stream of French and Italian friends. Her three teenage sons were tricked out in extravagant tartan outfits that owed much to Pryse’s portrait in the drawing room. To complete the look she equipped them with sporrans made from beaver heads, and skean-dhus – short, sheathed stabbing knives carried in the sock for easy access, though theirs were more like canteens of cutlery than switchblades. The boys’ girlfriends were a source of fascination to me. Drynachan acted as a tester on their relationships, and each succeeding summer new ones replaced the old. The boys always seemed to be attracted to women who made you wonder how on earth the word ‘charming’ and ‘French’ ever got uttered in the same breath. They were invariably pretty, spoilt, humourless and appalled to find themselves stuck out in the middle of nowhere and at the mercy of their boyfriends’ rather overpowering mother, who ordered them out on rugged hikes when they were the types liable to give themselves a bad gash while crossing a lawn.
Going out to shoot rabbits in the dark was their idea of hell, but our idea of a treat. We would be in quiet raptures as we sat on the metal floor of the Land Rover having rabbit corpses thrown in at us in the dark. Myxomatosis had been ravaging the British rabbit population for years, and as we drove through the fields with a searchlight sweeping from side to side you could see exactly which ones had contracted the disease. The healthy rabbits scarpered; the myxi ones stayed where they were, eyes swollen shut. Blam! Fish in a barrel, but nothing you could eat or feed the dogs with. They would be left for the scavengers.
Sheila’s eldest boys were twins. They joked that unlike Colin and Fred they would have no problem over just one of them inheriting their father’s title of Vicomte de Rochambeau, because Eric would have it in France while Marc would have it in England. This was because when it came to twins, the French took a perverse view of the ‘first born’. In England we believe the first baby out into the fresh air is the eldest, but in France they believe that the first baby conceived is then ‘blocked in’ by its ‘younger’ twin, so the last one out is considered the eldest.
Eric and Marc were identical but fairly easy to tell apart – until they had a minor shooting accident. For their birthday, Sheila bought them each a high-powered rifle for a chamois hunting trip in the Alps. The guns were enormous. The twins were unaccustomed to shooting anything, let alone chamois, with a weapon the size of a rocket launcher, so Pa agreed to give them both a lesson. He set up targets on the far bank of the river and zeroed in the sights before getting them to lie down in the grass and get used to the weight of the guns.
‘Marc, you go first,’ my father said, and crouched down beside him. ‘There’s quite a wind from the west, so aim very slightly to the right of the bull. Settle your breathing and then squeeze the trigger, gently. Don’t wrench it, and whatever you do, don’t press your eye against the rim of the sight. This thing’s got a kick like an angry kangaroo, so—’
KERBLAMM! The rifle report drowned out the rest of the advice. Marc was thrust back across the ground by Newton’s second law of physics. He stood up looking dazed. Blood began to course down the side of his face from a perfect crescent shape cut above his eyebrow. Sheila took one look at her son and led him off to her car to go and get stitched up in Nairn. Eric wanted his turn regardless. My father crouched down again.
‘OK. Well, you can see that Marc was a bit hasty. So, take your time, breathe and – don’t press the—’
KERBLAMM! Backward thrust, suppressed groan, identical crescent-shaped cut, same position. Sheila stopped her car halfway up the drive, collected her second son, and returned from the doctor with them looking more identical than they ever had before.
At the end of the summer, the Rochambeaux returned to Paris with fresh scar tissue and battered relationships, and Drynachan returned to being a working lodge where people came to shoot partridge, grouse and pheasant. My father wrote describing a party there one late November, which included a bad-tempered duchess and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, whose name John Stewart found so hard to pronounce he just referred to him as ‘yon other Frenchman’.
Cawdor brimmed with guests every Christmas holiday. The foresters brought in wagonloads of holly branches with which Ma garlanded all the portraits. Decorating the Christmas tree was a group effort, but my mother’s beady eye would be watching out for symmetry. We had a free hand, just as long as the tree was topped off with a battered gold star; the biggest glass baubles went on the lowest branches, the smaller baubles went on the higher branches – all evenly spaced – and tinsel was laid along the lengths of branches until everything was just so. The whole tree was then studded with real candles. The presents were heaped in an artful cascade of intriguing shapes around the bottom of the tree, ready for Christmas Day. Locked in her dressing room, my mother took days to individually wrap the myriad presents needed to fill five children’s stockings and Pa’s. She used colour-coded tissue paper to keep the gifts distinct from one another, before stuffing them all into Jack’s old shooting socks. Carol-singers came to the courtyard on Christmas Eve. They were shepherded into the drawing room for mulled wine and we would strive to look serene as Peggy Forsyth trilled,
en the bleak mud-wuntaah
frrowstee weeand mead mowahn.
Erruth stoood harrd as eye-Ron …
Pa thought turkey a very overrated meat, so we ate goose. When we were so full we could barely fit our chairs under the table, Edith would stagger in with the brandy-doused cake, which she had prepared several months before and left to ferment in a larder somewhere in the furthest reaches of the house. By late December it was so alcoholic that when she put a match to it, it ignited with a great eyebrow-singeing ‘whoomph’.
Present opening on Christmas Day was a strictly ordered affair. We were allowed one small present on Christmas Eve, followed by stockings before breakfast on Christmas Day, and then one present at lunch. The main event came in the early evening, after we had changed for dinner. We weren’t allowed to open any present unless it was handed to us and we weren’t allowed to open any subsequent present until we had finished thanking the giver or noted down to which aunt or godparent we must write our thank-you letter. We were not allowed to rip into our presents; paper must be preserved for recycling. By the end of the opening session, Ma would have assembled a huge pile of discarded wrappings to fold away for future use. Her presents would remain unopened as she trimmed off bits of sellotape and salvaged lengths of scattered ribbon, and we would murmur ‘war baby’ to each other in a solemn, knowing way.
Our last Christmas treat would be a trip to see a performance of La Fille Mal Gardée at Covent Garden towards the end of the holidays. The ballet tells the story of a beautiful young girl whose ambitious mother wants her to become the wife of a rich landowner, but her suitor
is a clod and she wants to marry a handsome farmhand. Love triumphs over status. Later on, the story seemed an odd choice. Pa’s plans for us were identical to the mother’s and quite the reverse of the ballet’s outcome.
* * *
At Easter, we now went to the Alps. A local family called Hilleary would organize the booking of a sleeper train and fill it with their cousins, their cousins’ cousins, all their neighbours and their neighbours’ cousins, including us. The journey out was rarely completed without someone, dressed only in a kilt and a pair of socks and nursing a whisky hangover, wandering out onto a station platform in eastern France to buy breakfast and then being seen shouting and trying to flag us down with a half-eaten croissant as the train gave a sudden lurch and pulled away.
Our ski party would fill a whole hotel, and evenings were spent reeling to Dhileas Hilleary’s accordion and her mother Sheena’s yodelling. Ma had good skiers to keep her company: Mrs Hilleary, her sister Vora and their two brothers had all been Olympic skiers. Pa was the one who normally shone in sports – blood sports at any rate – but on skis he was overshadowed by Ma’s abilities. Pa was competitive, so the disparity in their skills annoyed him to the point that he declared that he hated skiing and insisted they go to the beach instead. But he couldn’t win: Cath was equally good on water skis.
Over and above this rivalry was a loathing for ‘groups’. A party of people venturing out onto a moor was fine, but doing something as a group in a foreign country was repellent to Pa. In his opinion, it was that dread thing: middle class. Whenever he found himself in a group, he felt obliged to catch a taxi and take it in the opposite direction. Rejecting his peers made him feel superior. It was a habit that reached its zenith towards the end of his life when he and his second wife became notorious for snubbing their companions and flouncing off.
A Charmed Life: Growing Up in Macbeth's Castle Page 13