A Charmed Life: Growing Up in Macbeth's Castle

by Liza Campbell

  To which they replied in unison, ‘Must we?’

  Emma’s and my escape was to go and stay with our Gordon Cumming cousins who lived at Altyre, near where the real King Duncan died. We would plead with Cath to drop us off after doing the shopping chores in Nairn. It was no distance for Scotland, only about seven miles further east along the main road to Forres and the tiny hamlet of Dallas beyond (once upon a time someone had emigrated to Texas from there). Compared to Cawdor, Altyre seemed utterly carefree – and this despite the presence of Mrs Mac, their nanny, who ruled with an iron oven-glove behind the green baize door. Mrs Mac had ferociously short hair shaved at the nape that lent her more than a whiff of the military. She ran a household rating system of gold and black stars for good and bad behaviour. Alastair and Sarah, the two eldest, were beyond her jurisdiction, so her efforts were concentrated on the two youngest. Emma’s contemporary, Cha, was Mrs Mac’s pet; gold stars were strewn across every day of the week after her name. Mosh, my friend, was the opposite: by Thursday, Mrs Mac had usually run out of black stars and was having to continue charting her crimes in black marker pen. As a nanny she was firm but fair, but life wasn’t. Cha thrived because she had natural cunning, while Mosh was always in the doghouse because she was incapable of lying.

  Our cousins were all incredibly horsey and talked in a special patois to their animals, and among themselves. They would burble impenetrably all day long and were just as happy communing with one of their dogs as chatting to a parent. We would trot about all day long, being cowboys on their home farm – a startling architectural oddity for the Highlands, built in the style of a Tuscan monastery with arched cloisters and a campanile. It was our very own spaghetti western backdrop. We would shamble about practising with homemade lassoes, talking about ‘dogies’ and lying in wait for our enemy, in the shape of a hapless tractor driver. These games ended for me when yet again I came home unable to breathe from an asthma attack and Pa drunkenly bet me a thousand pounds not to ride again until my twenty-first birthday. It was an unimaginably huge sum and I agreed immediately.

  Neither Uncle William nor Aunt E ever said anything to us, or asked us any questions, so I never knew if they were aware of what was going on at Cawdor. It was just heaven to be away, even if Mrs Mac insisted that we join in her star system. Pa was a different person when he turned up at Altyre. Betty’s expulsion from Cawdor had not ruffled his friendship with Uncle William in any way. They adored each other and sat around drinking gin and tonics and telling each other racy stories that would end up with them lying on the floor crying with laughter. The Gordon Cumming daughters spent their evenings practising song and dance routines and Uncle William, Aunt E and Pa would sit there politely as we jumped around doing clankingly pedestrian moves to words from ‘Ode To Billy Joe’ by Bobbie Gentry. What our cousins lacked in tunefulness they more than made up for in self-belief. They were always bellowing to anyone who cared, or dared, to listen.

  The bad thing about Pa being one third of the audience was that it inevitably meant the end of our stay, that he had come to take us back. If he arrived at night, our faces and any subsequent fortunes just had to hope for the best as we crammed into the passenger seat of his Ferrari and he drove home flat out. He had a habit of switching off his headlights as we careened towards a sharp corner or a hump in the road. He did it, he said, to check for the lights of an approaching car, which would mean he should move back onto the right side of the road; but after a few drinks he often forgot to turn the lights back on, until I started whimpering. I would pray that we would soon reach the Wee Manny’s Grave, because it was the only place where he was guaranteed to slow down. It was a small cairn of stones, now mossy with age, that marked the spot where a wounded Highland soldier had finally collapsed and died after escaping the disaster of Culloden. The man had staggered fifteen miles before succumbing on this lonely brae, anonymous but never forgotten. There was always a jam jar with flowers in it perched on the topmost stone. We took a momentary pause in any journey to inspect the current offering. They were just wild posies – harebells, buttercups and a couple of foxglove stems – but they were always fresh, even through the winter months, when there would be a sprig of heather and some holly berries. Who tended it so diligently was a mystery.

  Memorials like the Wee Manny’s were all over the Highlands. In the wake of the Battle of Culloden, the English were so remorseless in their suppression of the Scots that all tributes were low-key and allegorical. In the county of Angus, the locals planted a beech hedge by the roadside to mark the failed uprising. They swore to keep it growing until the English no longer governed them. It grew and grew, and today it is a vast wall of a hedge as high as any tree. Fire engine ladders are required in order to clip it. We knew all this as if it had happened just a few months before, yet we knew sweet zero about contemporary Scottish politics.

  * * *

  The Betty incident had flipped a switch in Pa that never flipped back. His temper, which had always been fierce, was now frequently out of control, and he seemed to revel in it. Outbursts multiplied, and the excuse could be minuscule. Thatch had successfully helped Hugh over his knife phobia, but the outcome was that he now regularly used knives to threaten people. He once threw a small dagger at a guest who was irritating him, the blade digging into the carpet between his feet. The man’s ‘crime’ had been to drag a chair from the far end of the drawing room in order to join in a conversation going on around the fire.

  Hugh gloried in these sudden cessations of hospitality. When he found out that a visiting acquaintance called Sonny Marlborough had moved Aunt E’s car away from the drawbridge without her permission, he tried to wrestle Marlborough off the drawbridge. Another man, by the name of Murlees, came to Cawdor to discuss the restoration of his castle in Aberdeen, but during the course of dinner Hugh fancied he heard his guest say something offensive, although Cath, who was talking to Murlees at the time, remembered only desultory chatter. Hugh stormed up the table, grabbed his wife by the wrist and said, ‘Come on, we’re going.’ He dragged her to his car, locking the portcullis behind them, and after he had driven aimlessly around the county she eventually persuaded Hugh to return home. They found Murlees talking to his driver through the iron bars of the gate, imprisoned in a house where he had been made to feel totally unwelcome.

  Our mother had always been a level-headed woman and she did her best to calm her husband. Until now, the main cause of strife had been Hugh’s hectic extra-marital adventures. Hugh was a dashing figure to us, but a wife and five children in wellies did not fit with the personal vision he had for himself as a samurai playboy. His new best friend was the photographer Patrick Lichfield, who had a conveyor belt of model girlfriends. Hugh hoovered up Patrick’s cast-offs. They shared everything: tailors, cars, hairdressers, girls. The only difference was that Patrick was single and Pa was married. The phrase ‘scoring birds’ fitted him perfectly; he was a twitcher. It was as if, on a fundamental level – a level on which his very survival depended – Pa felt fully validated as a human being only when he was seducing someone. A succession of his lovers came to stay at Cawdor as guests, with my mother as their hostess. Years later, when I reread the letters my mother sent me at school, I suddenly saw them in an entirely different light.

  Dadda went south the day I came north. He is off to a hidden destination where he is breathing deeply and trying to write a ‘book’. He wanted total peace so none of us knows where he is!

  The book, needless to say, never materialized.

  The only reassurance Cath had was that however sexually tactless her husband was, after each sortie he returned to her declaring his love. To keep sane she concentrated on the idea that this was a sign of his underlying devotion, but beyond all the giddy pleasures of his macho bullshit there lurked something darker: a total inability to articulate his frustrations. If he had been able to talk about them, he might not have kicked his cars, smashed his fist into doors and thrown books across the room. It was not clear
if Hugh was concerned about such lapses of self-control. It was clear, however, that his drinking had increased – or his resistance had diminished. If Cath were a stick of rock, she would have the words ‘For Better Or Worse’ printed down the length of her core. She had taken a vow, and come what may she would stand by her man. When Hugh went plain mad rather than just sex mad, she stood by her maniac.

  The next person to succumb to the tensions was Peter the butler. It all started to go wrong during a course of driving lessons he was taking. He said the stress of crashing gears was causing him to suffer from dandruff. It seemed like a minor neurosis, but the next thing we knew Peter had gone straight from his three-point turns to Raigmore hospital in Inverness, where he requested immediate admission to the mental health ward. Initially the doctors refused, but Peter was adamant, and they relented. A consultant psychiatrist contacted my mother to inform her that he would be unable to return to any form of work due to a tentative diagnosis of manic depression. My mother was amazed at the trajectory of his illness, from a light dusting of scurf to total collapse, but volunteered to deliver a suitcase to the hospital.

  My parents went to his room to pack his belongings, and what they found there made them realize that the things going on in Peter’s head were a little stranger than public appearances suggested. Behind closed doors, his room was crammed with plundered memorabilia. There were a dozen framed photographs surrounding his bed, but none of them was of Peter’s family. They were all Campbells: Hugh as a child, Carey in a ball dress, and great-great-aunts wearing straw boaters, sitting stiffly on Welsh ponies in front of Stackpole. His cupboard was crammed with my grandfather’s clothes. It was a bizarre magpie shrine. Cath thought it was quaint, but harmless; Hugh said it gave him the creeps. ‘I don’t understand. What kind of phoney would want to graft someone else’s family life onto his own?’ he kept asking no-one in particular. For a while it almost looked as though Hugh was going to reprise his there’s-a-witch-in-my-house meltdown.

  Then, just as rapidly as he’d first fallen for him, Hugh suddenly tired of Thatch. In the end, it all came down to money. After Hugh had his freak-out about domestic arrangements with Betty, he became a little more sympathetic to Ma’s aversion to sharing her home with Thatch and Val. Hugh moved them out of Cawdor and into a house at the end of the drive. Even so, Thatch drifted in most lunchtimes. Pa had happily bankrolled his svengali, but it had never been clear whether Thatch was a guest or an employee. My father was often an extraordinarily generous man, to the point where he could be seen as a bit of a pushover to the wily. His patience finally snapped after Thatch touched him for extra money, naming some lofty cause, and then, a couple of days later, he popped into his house unannounced and found him excitedly unwrapping what Hugh interpreted to be the lofty cause: a frosted-glass, electronically operated indoor fountain, complete with Mantovani soundtrack. The flowering of their relationship had been unusual, but the disintegration followed the normal pattern: tracer fire, burning bridges and the total annihilation of any friendship. Perhaps this typifies the actions of someone who surrenders his autonomy as totally as Hugh had to Thatch. The only way they can work out how to reclaim it is with maximum force.

  To appease his sense of guilt over his sudden rejection, Hugh took the same course of action he’d followed with Betty and Wilma: he bought them out of our lives and broke off all contact.

  While Thatch was still in Pa’s life, he insisted that Pa pass on his self-defence skills to girls only. It was meant to be a homoeopathic remedy for his womanizing, but it was a bit like my attempt to ink Satan out of my Bible. As soon as Thatch left, the self-defence classes collapsed, but to keep up his aikido practice my father decided to teach us. We would go to the dojo one at a time and be shown how to throw ourselves around the room in a martially artful way. In one letter home from Cobham it seemed that it was all top secret: ‘I have told no one about the Aikido, but when someone is going to hit me, I automatically put my arm up.’

  My aikido career came to a halt the day I arrived in the dojo and Pa showed me an enormous hunting knife – the type used for eviscerating deer. He told me that he would shortly leave the room and conceal the knife on his body; when he returned, I was to frisk him. If I didn’t find it and disarm him, he was going to come at me with it. I did as he said. I patted him all over – all over, that is, except for high up in his inner thigh, and that, of course, is where it was. I knew after patting him down that it couldn’t be anywhere else, but I certainly wasn’t going to touch him there. He pulled out the knife and I ran from the room slamming the door behind me. Later I bundled up my judo kit and threw it in an attic cupboard.

  Hugh persevered, but put his own private spin on what aikido was all about. The self-discipline that was meant to give aikido practitioners an inner calm and serve as a spiritual path went out of the window. He decided to form an elite squad of fighters: four male friends and Cath. He handed out leather belts made to his own specifications that were going to serve as the group insignia. The brass belt buckles were formed out of each of the six’s initials and were to be worn so they ‘could recognize each other’ during some future crisis, when they would annihilate ‘unacceptable people’. What sort of characteristics or behaviour would be judged ‘unacceptable’ was hazy, as was why the squad needed belts to recognize each other. Perhaps they were all going to be in a different dimension. If he had thought of a slogan for his gang, it could have been: ‘Bespoke Murder! In the Name of Good Taste!’ My mother didn’t even do aikido. Perhaps Hugh expected her to stand around like a magician’s assistant. It was all quite bonkers, and not in an entirely harmless way, but mercifully, the crisis that would force Pa to spring into deadly hand-chopping action never happened and mankind was spared.

  Chapter 11

  In the real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  The Scottish estate was predominantly forest, sheep pasture and moor: wild and beautiful, but poor-quality land. The Welsh estate was beautiful too, but it was bursting with arable land that sustained fields of tulips and daffodils, and its profits took care of Cawdor. We found this out when in 1972 my father suddenly sold Golden Grove and the entire Welsh estate. The land that had come into the family in the seventeenth century had lasted seventeen years in his hands. His decision to sell was many things, but most of all it was short-sighted. He had halved his land ownership, and the loss of Wales turned the financial equilibrium on its head. Running a pile like Cawdor was a whirling drain; the heating alone cost tens of thousands of pounds every year.

  Although Hugh was cash-rich in the short term, most of the money needed immediate reinvestment to bankroll Cawdor. Somehow, the study of budgets and accounts quietly turned itself into a shopping list. Hugh went on a spending spree. Another Ferrari arrived. And then another. Then a pair of Range Rovers, their insignias doctored so that they read ‘Hang Over’. There were a couple of souped-up, Italian Job-style Minis in bright blue and bright yellow. There was a paint-it-any-colour-as-long-as-it’s-black Model T Ford, a Hafflinger, a wartime Chrysler with gangster window blinds, a couple of canvas-roofed troop trucks and a cheesy, over-restored Chitty Chitty Bang Bang-style Bentley. The older cars just sat under dustsheets in the garages. I never got the car thing.

  When the garages were full up, next on the shopping list was the ruined castle of Lochindorb (Loch of Trouble). It comprised fragments of a curtain wall with crumbling corner towers and stood on a small island in the middle of a remote loch, fifteen miles from Cawdor. Hugh bought it at amazing expense, given that buildings without doors are hardly private property, and in Scotland there is no law of trespass. He could have gone there at any time, for free.

  Lochindorb had originally belonged to Robert II, grandson of Robert the Bruce. He gifted the fortress to his third and most wayward son, ‘Big’ Alexander Stuart, better known to his subjects as the Wolf of Badenoch. My father admired the Wolf in the same way he admired J
immy Dunbar, my grandfather’s friend with the fern toiletries. When asked why he liked men like these two, he was wont to reply, ‘I suppose the love of one monster by another is strong.’ Even in those casually barbarous times a hundred years before Muriel was born, the Wolf was notorious for his cruelty, and used his position as the king’s deputy to terrorize a wide region bordering the Moray Firth. He imposed his will by burning people out of their homes, and it became quite a habit. He graduated from individual crofts to razing villages, then whole towns. In 1390, his delinquency reached its zenith when he torched the gothic glory that was Elgin Cathedral. This arson was committed to vent his fury at the Bishop of Moray, who had been supportive of Mrs Wolf’s complaints of abandonment. (A woman who clearly didn’t recognize a stroke of luck when it poked her in the eye.) Once the cathedral was gutted, the fire swept on through the chapter houses, and went on to destroy Elgin’s college and, finally, the hospital. The Wolf was excommunicated for this outrage – a punishment as meaningful as giving a football hooligan a lifelong ban from visiting art galleries.

  King Robert eventually despaired of his son’s recidivism. He ordered the Cawdors, who were the local sheriffs in their brand-new shiny castle, to ‘neutralize’ Lochindorb, and paid them twenty-four pounds for their trouble. The Cawdors approached with caution and waited until the Wolf had set off on a pillage before rowing across to the island with a raiding party. They wrenched the yett, or wrought-iron front gate, off its hinges, rendering the stronghold … less strong. They hauled the yett back to Cawdor as proof of their work, and it still hangs outside the Tree Room as a piece of gigantic wall bling.