A Charmed Life: Growing Up in Macbeth's Castle

by Liza Campbell

  After a couple of trips to the Alps with us as a family, my father refused to join in any more. Instead, he started initiating an alternative holiday. This pulling apart was the very first tear in our family façade. The first separate holiday, when I was twelve, was to Jamaica, and I went with him, along with my cousin Mosh Gordon Cumming. It is clear from one letter I wrote to my mother that spending time with him on my own was not something I was used to:

  I’m so excited about Jamaica. Wot on earth will I wear? I think Pa is so lovely, I really won’t know wot to say to him. He’s so incredibly generous and sweet, how are we going to pass the time on the journey? I wish I was seeing you more, you sound so miserable about your holiday to Courchevel with the smalls.

  My anxiety proved unwarranted: we had a wonderful time. Pa was good at holidays and being a host. He loved being in the Big Wood or the dojo or his London club or a mistress’s arms; what he was not good at was the rest of his life, the bit that involved decisions, management and accountability. As children at far-away boarding schools for much of the year, we remained blissfully unaware for a little bit longer of the effect this was having.

  Chapter 9

  Ghost: The outward and visible sign of an inward fear.

  Ambrose Bierce, ‘The Devil’s Dictionary’

  We had not been at Cawdor for very long when my parents hit their first big problem. It was the vexed question of the widow. The death of a patriarch always heralds a period of musical chairs, but to turf Betty out in the immediate aftermath of Jack’s death would have been grossly insensitive, so my parents moved in alongside her. The house was fuller than it had been for years with a family of seven, Thatch, his wife Val, a stammering butler, a weepy Welsh cook and our step-grandmother. As the months moved towards a full year and Betty showed no intention of leaving, Hugh began to find our new domestic situation untenable. Questions hovered. Who sat at the head of the table? Who invited guests to stay? Who slept in the master bedroom? Who would turn off the logs in the grate?

  Hugh had always had a civil relationship with his stepmother, and it continued while he tried to work out how to gently broach the subject of her departure. Betty had been thinking hard too, and things suddenly reached a head when Hugh discovered that she had been in talks with the Scottish National Trust behind his back. She had been quietly trying to negotiate a deal to hand over Cawdor to them – on condition she was allowed to stay on as tenant. This was way beyond her remit, and Betty was no match for my father. Although she had sufficient steel for Machiavellian scheming, Jack’s will had left Hugh with all the power. Within weeks of Hugh uncovering her plans, a dower house was bought and furnished, and Betty was forcibly relocated. When the move came, Hugh virtually had to prise each one of Betty’s fingers off the house.

  Her new home was five miles from Cawdor, in Nairn, a gracious town renowned for the wholesome roughage of the eponymous oatcakes. In 1886 an excitable Victorian entrepreneur had styled Nairn ‘the Brighton of the North’ in an advertising campaign that overlooked the town’s lack of pier, pavilion, Regency architecture and indeed anything else remotely resembling Brighton. Sure, both are seaside towns, but in size, temperature and action, Brighton makes Nairn look like a defunct crypt. The townsfolk note its pin-drop quietness by referring to their local newspaper, the Nairnshire Telegraph, as ‘The Three Minute Silence’. Betty found it galling to relinquish her role as chatelaine of Cawdor for the mundanities of small-town life. For months after she could be found sneaking into the house like Hunka Munka, to remove knick-knacks without which she fancied life in Nairn would be less satisfactory. Time after time we would arrive back home from a walk or a shopping trip and bump into our step-grandmother in the courtyard weighed down with ornaments, vases and lampshades. Ma would greet her politely, walk her to her car, help her load it up and wish her goodbye, in the belief that kindness and good manners would make it the last raid. Eventually Betty’s house was tricked out to her satisfaction and the raids stopped.

  As they acclimatized themselves to being in charge of Cawdor, my parents began slowly to modernize it. First, the fake log fires were put onto a real fire, and then they moved the kitchen from the far end of the house into the room next door to the dining room. The former kitchen was then converted into a dojo where my father and Thatch practised aikido. Pa’s aikido training had moved on to weapon work to counter his fear of knives. We had to take care when we went down to the wild garden on the west side of the house because Thatch and Hugh would often be crouching in the bamboo using the huge soft trunk of a redwood as a target. Thatch chose a pair of antique samurai swords for my father to buy and hang on the wall behind his desk in Jack’s old office – symbols of his new mastery. Pa held a great reverence for the swords and told us that the final forging had taken place at the point of dawn to symbolize the nobility of the Land of the Rising Sun. That they had to be sharp enough to cut a hair dropped on their upturned blades. That their sharpness had been tested on executed criminals. That the corpses had been strung up and cut diagonally, from right shoulder to left hip, in one smooth bone-slicing swipe. Sometimes Pa would take down one of the swords and let us have a closer look – occasionally to hold, but never to unsheathe. These were sacred objects, not to be used lightly.

  But something had gone wrong. Despite all Thatch’s teaching promoting physical dexterity, inner strength and peace of mind, Pa was growing increasingly disturbed. If a doctor had sat us down and asked us, ‘When exactly did your father’s thinking segue into shades of Macbeth?’, in retrospect it would have been around about this time. Unbeknown to anyone, Hugh had found the forcible eviction of Betty far more traumatic than his blasé attitude suggested. Her plot to wrest Cawdor from him had left him angry and shaken. Despite Betty’s living arrangements having been resolved, and the fact that she had now stopped trespassing, he still could not relax. How come she had always been in the house when we were out? He became increasingly convinced that staff members had been acting as informants. This may have been true, but only by default. The staff were in an awkward position: he had not told them that if Betty phoned and he and my mother were out they should deny the fact. He became properly haunted and thought that his stepmother was a witch. This was not a euphemism for his dislike of her, but a real belief that she had supernatural powers.

  My mother noticed his behaviour getting stranger, and tried to find out what the trouble was. Late one night he finally unburdened himself and confided that he feared his stepmother’s intention was to possess him, like a succubus. Ma put it down to a drunken rant, but later realized he was genuinely disturbed when he began to lay scissors, with the blades open, in what he thought were ‘strategic’ places around the house. He said they would act as hexes to keep Betty’s presence at bay. With small children running around Ma kept picking up the scissors, but Pa became furious and laid them all back down. Cath turned to Thatch for help. It was the first time we had really needed him to use his authority over Hugh and point out to him what was really happening – that in the turmoil of inheriting Cawdor our father was throwing his marbles out of the window in handfuls. Instead, Thatch merely bolstered Pa’s conviction that he was indeed a super-receptive psychic.

  In the central courtyard opposite the drawbridge there were three old horseshoes propped up against the tower wall. No-one took any more notice of them than they did the water butt or the ferns growing in a damp corner beside them. No-one, that is, until Pa was in the full grip of his hex obsession over Betty. The superstitious say that horseshoes must sit upright in a ‘U’ shape to bring good luck; if they are turned upside down, it invites bad luck. One day, as my father was crossing the courtyard, he noticed that someone had upended one of the horseshoes. The ‘someone’ was most likely one of us children who had accidentally kicked it over and shoved it back the wrong way round. We were not only clumsy but untutored in white magic etiquette. When Pa saw it, he was horrified; terrified. His ‘stepmother-as-evil-witch’ fantasy busted out into the open
. He brooded on it overnight and the next day accosted our old woodman, Findlay Macintosh, accusing him of being Betty’s ‘familiar’ and of knowingly tampering with the horseshoe. Mad words falling into a sane world finally brought my father to his senses. Seeing Findlay’s expression of utter bewilderment, he apologized for his outburst. The old man reassured his boss that no offence had been taken, but it had, and soon after Findlay took his retirement and tended his garden in the village.

  It is impossible to know why my father suddenly decided that a delicate family situation had paranormal elements, but maybe becoming solely responsible for such an old house played on his imagination. Absolutely every last thing at Cawdor is infused with our family’s bumpy history. Every painting, bed and tapestry has a story. But Hugh’s crise de nerfs notwithstanding, there were two things from which Cawdor was joyfully free: it was haunted by neither curses nor ghosts. Our neighbours were not so lucky. In the Highlands, it is not uncommon for families to be contending with curses passed down from the Dark Ages.

  A couple of miles west of us, Kilravock Castle, from where Muriel was snatched, had a curse: if a gooseberry bush that grew at the top of their main tower died, so too would the male line. Why there was a bush on their roof in the first place is not clear. Maybe it was wind-seeded; maybe a gardener was going for a Babylonian look. In the late 1980s, the bush started to wither. The owner, Elizabeth Rose, a descendant of Muriel’s grandparents, made numerous frantic attempts to get a cutting from the original to take root, but it failed each time. Replacement with a brand-new gooseberry bush was apparently not valid in the small print of the curse. The bush died, the male line died out soon after, and Kilravock became a Christian youth hostel.

  Fyvie Castle, the home of my father’s great friend Sir Andrew Forbes-Leith, had a much harsher curse on it: that no eldest son would survive to inherit. It had been working like gothic clockwork ever since. Andrew’s older brother had died in the Second World War, as had his father’s older brother in the Boer War, and so on. Their curse was particularly taunting because it dangled the possibility of a solution: the curse on the men would lift when three ‘weeping’ stones could be found within the castle walls. The clues were described in a poem by Thomas the Rhymer, in what my father liked to refer to as ‘olde kakke shoppe’ spelling:

  Ane in the oldest tower,

  Ane in the ladie’s bower,

  And ane below the water-yett [gate].

  The third one, ye shall never get.

  After a forensic search, two of the strange, perennially damp stones were found where the poem said they would be, but the third remains elusive. Andrew Forbes-Leith vowed to break the curse. He moved to another house to bring up his children and allowed them to stay at Fyvie only for holidays. When he died, his eldest son was the first in generations to have lived to see his own father’s funeral.

  As a rule, curses were on families and buildings, but some natural features had enchantments on them too. The ‘Fairy Hill’, overlooking a gorge on the Findhorn eight miles or so from Cawdor, was such a place. It is a pretty spot, thanks to the great landscape gardener in the sky, and is enhanced by artistically grouped bracken clumps and elegant stands of silver birch. It was safe for walkers except on midsummer’s day, when anyone foolish enough to climb the hill would be abducted by ‘the wee folk’ and kept for ever. This might seem a bit of whimsy nowadays, but everyone stuck to a rule handed down from a distant time when there was a law against ‘Kyllynge, wowndynge, or mamynge’ a fairy. Superstitions were part of everyone’s beliefs, not just the preserve of backwoods simpletons.

  * * *

  The arrival of Aunt Carey at Cawdor soon after Hugh’s confrontation with Findlay was a godsend. She teased him mercilessly. Pa enjoyed being a tease but was normally incandescent if he was teased, unless it was by Carey or William Gordon Cumming. Her teasing was so warm and wicked that he could not help but laugh off the episode.

  As things settled down at Cawdor, Hugh would often list job descriptions that set off a shudder at the mere mention of their name – dentists, estate agents, proctologists, traffic wardens, tax inspectors, executioners and arms dealers – but the list was always topped off with stepmothers. He would explain his thinking thus: ‘No dentist has ever been sufficiently bad to form the backbone of our fairytales. I never want to go through anything like that ever, ever again. No-one should have to go through it. Father should have sorted Betty out beforehand.’ Of course, Jack had not meant to leave the mess; death had pounced on him before he had got his affairs in order. And who knows, maybe they were in order, but buried somewhere deep within the Himalayan letter pile in his office.

  In fact, Hugh had it easy compared to some neighbours. My grandfather’s bracken-loving friend Jimmy Dunbar had stipulated in his will that his heir would not be entitled to any of his property or money until he had been witnessed crawling naked for several miles across rough country, for no reason other than Dunbar’s desire to humiliate. Hugh was always fascinated by this strange, cruel man, but what is incomprehensible in the light of his reactions to the whole Betty debacle is that seventeen years later he went to the trouble of orchestrating similar circumstances for his own son – only nastier by far.

  * * *

  My grandfather had overseen Cawdor in a calm and timeless way. Everything ran smoothly, people stayed in their jobs for life, change was avoided, surprises were unwelcome. Within a year of Jack’s death, the managerial side of Cawdor was a mass of rapidly widening hairline cracks. Word got out about Findlay and the horseshoe, and after decades of service, Bill left. He had been the butler since Hugh was a boy, and his loss was like the hour hand of Big Ben falling off. By contrast, Peter, the new butler my father employed, was a total neurotic. It was an uphill task getting to know the mechanics of such a big house, and whereas Bill was practised in dealing with guests, Peter was forever gasping and throwing his arms in the air. His Lippizaner-like walk did not work well with small rugs on highly polished floors and he regularly went arse over tit while bringing in the tray of after-lunch coffee. ‘That man is a one-man Greek wedding,’ my father would sigh before going over to help him clear up the shards of Spode. Soon the housekeepers, Jessie and Annie Mary, were handing in their notices in protest over Peter’s temper tantrums. Only Edith stayed on, jumpy, damp-eyed and forever bent over a bucket of feathers and entrails as she prepared endless grouse lunches.

  At this point, Granny Wilma was added to the mix. It was the first time she had returned to Cawdor in nearly twenty years. Hugh had kept his relationship with her on a distant, arctic horizon, but when she broke her hip he resolved to be the good son and invited her home to convalesce. Betty was married to our grandfather by the time we were born, and I had never knowingly met Wilma before. Pa put her into the furthest-away room in the house and left the bedside visits to Ma.

  I was intrigued by this heavy-lidded creature, wreathed in smoke and propped up in snowy sheets like a wrinkled djinn, who managed to pull off a remote and regal air despite a boy’s haircut and a stained satin bed jacket. The ceiling above her bed time-lapsed through an impressive array of unpainted colour changes, starting white and progressing to rich umber via old ivory, sand and manila. The wainscoting around the bottom of her bedroom door underwent a similar transformation as the smoke found an escape through the small gap under the door. Wilma spent her days in bed making learned, private poetry critiques in a swirl of fumes like dry ice. Years later, despite several redecorations, the smell of tobacco lingered.

  Wanting to find a way to talk to her, I took my pocket money, bought her a pot, and left my offering on the bedside table as she slept. The next day I went with Ma on her daily visit. Granny Wilma was very upset. She thumped her newspaper down on the bed. I hung back. ‘Cath, darling, I am beside myself. Last night I read a long article on the terrible plight of those poor dear slum children in São Paulo. Really, it breaks my heart. And then, this morning, there are even worse things to read about orphans in Mozambique.
I’ve been unable to sleep a wink for fretting about them. Not one wink.’ She sighed and gazed soulfully out of the window while she tamped down her unlit cigarette in the way that Mr Sharp’s black and white movie heroines did when receiving ghastly news about a loved one. ‘By the way, thingy, oh, whatishername? Your blonde daughter has given me a present.’ She flicked the pot with the back of her hand. ‘I can’t think what possessed her. It’s quite hideous. Take it and put it somewhere, will you?’ My mother whipped round to check if I had heard and made a grimace when she saw I had. She grabbed the pot and said, ‘I’ll leave you to your concerns about children on the other side of the world.’ And shut the door rather hard before taking my hand and saying, ‘Well, I love the pot. May I keep it?’

  When her hip was better, Pa built Wilma a cottage in the village. It was a conciliatory gesture in their long estrangement, but it was not a success. As she grew older, Wilma’s grandiosity had warped into a form of paranoia. Her voracious appetite for reading, once a salvation, became a curse. She believed that ‘she knew too much’; that the CIA, MI6, and probably Mossad as well were all keeping her under surveillance. Clouds over Cawdor concealed spies. Planes flying overhead had been ‘diverted to snoop’ on her. Agents skulked in many guises. She accosted the postman and ordered him off her property. As far as she was concerned, he could only be opening her letterbox for one thing: intelligence gathering. No-one could convince Wilma that if she really did know ‘too much’ her elimination could be carried out with the greatest ease, yet ‘they’ didn’t seem to be crouching in the bushes waiting for a clear shot.

  My father was already exasperated by her without any of these eccentricities. After the postal confrontation, he strongly suggested Wilma go elsewhere. She left Cawdor for a second and last time, this time moving to Herefordshire where she could be close to her youngest son, James.