A Charmed Life: Growing Up in Macbeth's Castle

by Liza Campbell

The Wolf’s reputation was such that it was said he finally lost his life at Ruthven barracks playing chess with the devil. As the devil growled ‘checkmate’, a cataclysmic storm erupted overhead. When the clouds finally cleared, the bodies of charred sentries littered the barrack walls. They found the Wolf’s body inside. The nails on his boots had been torn out, but otherwise he was unmarked.

  For Pa to buy the wreck of Lochindorb in the late twentieth century was a piece of romantic whimsy that perfectly encapsulated his typical response when faced with a serious problem. It was a phenomenon one of his subsequent girlfriends defined as his ‘morbid fixation with Never Never Land’. For a while Aunt Carey poked fun at her brother by ringing up and saying that it was ‘Red Riding Hood hoping to have a word with His Big, Bad Wolfship’. Lochindorb was really nothing more than a staggeringly costly picnic spot. As it offered no shelter, picnics there happened only in the summer months, but in Scotland, a small island surrounded by still, fresh water makes a perfect breeding ground for midges. Being supper for a million biting insects makes an otherwise beautiful day unbearable, and before long we were visiting Lochindorb only a couple of times a year. The thrill of ownership dwindled to Pa impressing guests by majestically pointing at it from the car window as he raced across the moor.

  After Lochindorb, more money was frittered on a variety of vanity projects, none of which flourished. Unlike a lot of wealthy people (John-Paul Getty was widely rumoured to have a pay phone in the front hall for his guests’ use), Hugh was incredibly generous and enjoyed splashing money about, but his extravagance was in inverse proportion to his business acumen. He learned to fly a helicopter, he had a fleet of sports and vintage cars; he constantly bought jewellery, mostly for Cath but often for himself, in the shape of chunky cufflinks the size of golf balls. Whenever Pa put his money where his mouth was, it was only to kiss it goodbye. He bought flats in London and Paris for himself, his mistresses and a few lucky hangers-on. He invested in crackpot schemes from Canada to Australia. In due course, he owned a jewellery shop, a helicopter company and then went into film production. All these businesses failed. To fund his lifestyle he sold off a bit here and a bit there in a steady trickle.

  My father’s mismanagement and profligacy need not have been overwhelming to us as a family. Fortunes rise and ebb – that is, after all, why they are called ‘fortunes’ – and there were trustees in place to put the brakes on irresponsible behaviour. But as my father’s inheritance shrank, so too did his heart. He grew older but he did not mature, and his conflicts deepened rather than abated. There were endless little ironies afoot: as a trustee, he managed other people’s estates quite brilliantly but left his own in a God-awful mess; as a host, he was usually convivial and generous, but as a father, he was intolerant and often unkind. Towards the end of his life, his family relationships shrank into the background as material things increasingly obsessed him. The more he pushed us away, the more we tried to connect; and as he grew more acquisitive, the more reckless he became with long-cared-for possessions.

  On a practical level, the sad evidence is that the inheritance of Cawdor overwhelmed Hugh utterly from the start. When it became his, at the age of thirty, he was far less ready or capable than his father had been at fourteen. In order to conceal his panic, he became autocratic. He despised anyone disagreeing with him, and therefore was hard to help. The only reliable course of action he found that helped him cope with these shortcomings was to drink. When he was drunk, he could take all the pain he held inside and inject it into those close to him.

  The sale of Wales had been a huge error of judgement and the answers to the questions raised were not ‘more cars’ or ‘a brand-new landlocked island’ or ‘topaz mines in Tasmania’. Hugh struggled to work out what to do next. We still had house parties and dinners at which my father was genial and witty and the commander-in-chief of anecdotes, but as soon as we were alone as a family he often dispensed with his considerable charms, and his joie de vivre was seamlessly replaced by a perplexing darkness. It was always a bad blow when someone cancelled a visit because it meant that there would be no wadding. And taking his moods out on Ma was becoming habitual. On a quiet day, my father stomped around the house slamming doors and sighing like an angry buffalo whenever my mother spoke, even when it was not to him. The most innocuous telephone call could trigger him.

  ‘Is that Rose Brothers?’

  ‘Urrrrgh.’

  ‘I ordered a side of ham last week and I…’

  ‘’Struth!’

  ‘… wondered if it had come in yet? It’s Lady Caw…’

  ‘Jeeezu.’

  ‘… dor.’

  And he would storm out, slam!, shaking the pictures on the walls.

  Pa hogged a wide range of settings on our emotional dials. If a guest arrived, the static would die away, as if his transmission mast was set to retract as they walked in. After they left, his bulbous moods were instantaneously readable. Edith, who ventured out of her kitchen only occasionally anyway, would be sent scurrying back if she caught sight of him. The moment I walked into a room where he was, or where he had just cut a vindictive swathe, I would feel clotted with anxiety. Emma used to call him ‘the amateur barbarian’, although privately I thought he was turning pro. I concluded that only poor people got sectioned on psychiatric wings. Rich lunatics raved free with everyone looking the other way.

  And then, without warning, the sun would come out from behind its cloud and everything looked as if it might improve. He would take me into the Big Wood with him so that he could inspect some rare tree or other. As we passed each stand of trees, he would test me to see if I could name them. If I dithered, ‘I’ll have to hurry you! Chop! Chop! Two seconds to answer, or here comes the chopper to chop off your head!’

  ‘Um … sycamore?’

  ‘No! Velly velly bad, cloth-ears. Minus one thousand points.’

  But his chiding was warm. He had a habit – a relic from when I was very small – of clasping my hand; we would take it in turns to squeeze each other’s fingers. In moments like these I could imagine that one day, even one day fairly soon, we might all feel happy and loved and secure. I gave him the benefit of the doubt every time. To do otherwise was just too scary.

  I didn’t know what was really wrong with Pa, couldn’t even guess. Alcoholics were stinking tramps in doorways, drinking from cans of Special Brew. Alcoholics did not wear moleskin boots and hamster-lined coats; they did not drive Ferraris. One evening, after another fraught dinner of unilateral insults, I sat down beside Pa by the fireplace in the drawing room. I wanted to speak to him, to appeal to his better nature, to beg him not to be so aggressive. I didn’t know how to put it, how to order my thoughts. So I just opened my mouth and out it came: ‘Please, Pa, stop drinking.’ I think I was more surprised than he was. I had no idea I was going to say anything like that. He looked at me, his eyes filled with tears, and then he looked into his glass and said, ‘Yes. I’m going to stop drinking. I’ll stop tomorrow.’ And a tear plopped into his gin.

  Pa’s drinking followed a standard trajectory and the effects on him were archetypal, but none of us could see that. We circled around a black hole. I didn’t realize in the morning, when we were all feeling fragile after the venomous things he had come out with the night before yet he was behaving as if nothing had happened, that he did so because he simply had no memory of what he had said, and never would have. It was almost impossible to articulate what was happening. Family life had gradually become nightmarish. Yet I loved him. We all did. We really adored him. Within the almost permanent state of exasperation he lived in, he needed only to make a tiny gesture for us to feel that one day all might be well again. As soon as we were away, he wrote us funny letters filled with affection. But the thing that really messed with my mind was that the soft world he conjured lived only on the page. My mother’s letters showed another side.

  My darling Liza,

  The boys left yesterday on the aeroplane. It all seemed horribly sh
ort, but I think they were both very happy here. Colin went shooting after lunch yesterday and only arrived back just in time! Fredbox was very upset about going. It was Steve’s birthday and he had been asked to a small party. There was only really time for him to give his present, seize a piece of cake & into the car. He was a bit slow coming out of the Websters’ house and Pa strode out & pushed him so roughly. It was awful – desperate tears & unhappiness & I felt frantic too. I wept like a baby when they finally walked to the plane, and came back to Cawdor looking like a rag.

  * * *

  Without Wales as the cash cow to take care of Cawdor, my father eventually realized that he was going to have to open the house to the public. Once he had made the decision, it took a year to prepare. Signposts, ropes and cameras were installed. A pitch and putt course was created, our old gypsy caravan appropriated as a ticket office and golf club store. A cafeteria replaced the laundry rooms where Mrs King had steamed the linen. A gift shop, stocked with fudge, mugs, Loch Ness monster oven gloves and make-your-own-Cawdor-in-cardboard packs, was created in a cellar beyond the old, old kitchen with the siege well in one corner. After years of there being just one, jealously guarded, loo on the ground floor, there were now rooms lined with them in Bill’s old pantries. There was no need to install many wheelchair ramps as most steps already had them in place for the wheelbarrows that carried firewood and peat into the house. Pa ordered a flag of our coat of arms that was hoisted at the top of the tower when we were open for business. Later, after he remarried, the flag came to mean that the Thane was ‘at home’, like the Queen.

  * * *

  We were still at school when the first visitors started to arrive but Pa sent us letters that gave us an idea of what to expect when we got home. He described giving a large group of travel correspondents a guided tour. After he had delivered a detailed lecture on medieval life to explain the reason for the well in the old kitchen, he reported that an American in the party had piped up, pointing at the well and asking, ‘So this is where they junked the trash, right?’ He gleefully recalled that the same man had taken the stuffed goat’s head for a deer. Another visitor had given him one of the ‘stupid-looking badges’ on his hat that said ‘Stand up for Ohio.’ My father had pinned it to his sporran.

  In another letter he asked that I come up with a more suitable family motto for the new circumstances at Cawdor. His own suggestion was ‘the stranger who tries locked doors within the house should be watched with zeal from behind the hedge’.

  When we arrived back home at the end of term, he presented us with name badges of our own. Mine read ‘Lady Elizabeth Campbell’. It ran almost the entire width of my chest, and if I turned sharply the laminated corner stabbed me in the shoulder. No-one ever called me Elizabeth; Elizabeth was a bothersome name. It started well enough, and the zed was deadly chic, but just as things were looking good it got ambushed by an enforced lisp and everything fell apart. It is small wonder that it has more shortenings than any other name: E, Eliza, Liza Bette, Betty, Bess, Bessie, Beth, Lily, Libby, Lezzer, Liz, Lizzie, Lilibet, etc. The badge made me feel that we were no longer at home on our holidays, but being paraded as these little exhibits my father had fashioned earlier, Blue Peter style.

  For the first few days, Emma and I obediently wore ours and, as instructed by Pa, our kilts too. We felt self-conscious and ridiculous. It made us look like part of the management, and visitors bore down on us. We fielded their questions as best we could.

  ‘Where is the Blasted Heath?’

  ‘About seven miles east of here, near Brodie Castle.’

  ‘Can we walk to Dunsinane from here?’

  ‘Not unless you are hiking. It’s fifty miles back down the A9, near Dunkeld.’

  ‘What were the names of the three witches?’

  ‘Oh. I don’t know.’

  ‘What d’you mean you don’t know! You live in this castle. What d’you do all day, young miss?’

  Emma gave me a nudge. ‘Just make it up,’ she mouthed, but I couldn’t think of any convincingly witchy names, and anyway, the questions kept on coming.

  ‘Who would have been King of Scotland if the Jacobites had won?’

  ‘Um, well, Idi Amin is King of Scotland at the moment.’

  ‘What utter codswallop! Now you’re just being plain cheeky!’

  But it was true. At least, according to Idi Amin it was true. He had proclaimed himself ‘His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Al Haji, Dr Idi Amin VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular & King of Scotland’. Why Amin included the throne of a distant country in this splendid list is a puzzle in which logic has no function. Amin’s rise to power by toppling his mentor did have echoes of Macbeth, although his murderous temperament did not need any encouragement from a wife – of which he had a few.

  That night I lay in bed trying to come up with three names I could trot out if someone asked me the witch question again, and fell asleep trying out Rhiannon, Gudrun and Beathag … Agatha, Hannah and Dot … Lilibet, Lizzie and Bess …

  By the end of the week we were back in our jeans and had quietly dropped the badges into one of the many new litterbins. As soon as I was anonymous again the anthropological roles were reversed and I could roam about and indulge my furtive twin fixation. If I spotted twins, all I wanted to do was grab someone and whisper, ‘Look! Twins!’ like a twitcher spotting a pair of chanting goshawk.

  My favourite perch was by a small window on the stairs leading from the Tower Room down to the Tree Room. On one of the little lead-latticed panes was a piece of two-hundred-year-old tagging. Pryse Campbell, the saucy one painted as a tartan-themed dog’s dinner, had scratched his twirly signature into the glass with a diamond. From this position I could peer down on people coming across the courtyard to the front door. To my right was the Lochindorb yett, and to my left I could hear people scuffing down the stone spiral before I saw them.

  I liked to look at people’s faces and envisage the youthful face in an old one and the aged one in a child; to detect family similarities, and eavesdrop on exchanges like, ‘Ooh, it’s steep! You go ahead, Dermot, and tell me what’s next.’

  ‘Looks like a dead tree, Gran.’

  ‘Well, I don’t think I need to see one of them! I’m still trying to get Gramps to cut down those laurels.’

  As I watched the world go by from my corner, I liked to imagine what kind of holiday the visitors were on. Was it the morbidly obese man in the leather catsuit and dog collar who was touring the Highlands on that Easy Rider Trike parked in the drive? Had those peevish-looking children with Art Garfunkel halo-hair absconded from the vile county of Kent? Did their fathers kick the furniture and cannon into passage walls at night too?

  * * *

  Every summer, the arrival of parachutes from out of the sky marked the launch of the Highland Games in Nairn. Canisters attached to the parachutists’ heels belched coloured smoke as they spiralled down to a canvas landing apron in the main arena while a regimental pipe band marched around the perimeter playing Scottish standards. The bagpipes made the tunes blurry and sub-aquatic, but when the snare drum rolls came in, they sharpened up the sound just as a pair of goggles clears your vision underwater. Throughout the afternoon there were displays of the Highland fling to polite, rather than wild, applause. These dances were nothing like the reeling we did. Overdressed children in waistcoats, lace jabots and leather pumps pranced like nimble but enraged pixies in a complex hopscotch around two swords lying crossed on the floor. Maybe this is where Pa subconsciously picked up his anti-hex ideas. It was all taken very seriously, and there were endless heats. Finally, as the audience was drifting towards a collective nap, a cup would be awarded to some grandchild of Rumpelstiltskin. Far more exciting were the sweating, topless men, mostly itinerant New Zealanders, having shearing races. Huge, docile sheep were held deftly between the men’s legs as they peeled away the fleeces
to reveal skimpier, balder models that pronked skittishly away on release.

  There were high jump and pole-vaulting events too, then the sudden appearance on the running track of scrawny men who, unbeknown to us, had been racing towards us in a bobbing filament from some anonymous field on the other side of the county. Burly men in kilts hefted cabers into their cupped hands and balanced them vertically with the help of a bulging shoulder. A few steps and then, if they could produce sufficient momentum, the pole was flipped onto its opposite end and into a lumbering somersault. The novices were easy to spot: they staggered about like a drunk making off with a keepsake from a sawmill. When they lost their balance, the caber would topple sideways with a thud and a sympathetic groan from the crowd. If you caught a glimpse of underwear, you knew you were watching a Sassenach. It was anathema to a Scot to wear anything beneath his kilt. A proper kilt had enough material so that however far the pleats swung out, you never saw their bits.

  In a second arena there were flower displays and raspberry jam contests, pet races and sparklingly clean combine harvesters for sale. Farmhands in manila-coloured coats led outsize bulls wearing outsize nose rings to compete for the title of most fabulous beast. Some were creamy and sedate, others were piebald and mad-eyed, but neither type looked anything like the average joe bull seen in any pasture.

  Best of all was the fair set up on the parade ground by the sea. We would have go after go on the waltzers, screaming for the sleazy-handsome boys to straddle the back of our chair and spin us faster, faster, faster until the g-force pinned us to the dirty velvet backrests.

  The Nairn Games had been going for a hundred years, but similar Highland events had been held for almost a thousand, organized by Highland chiefs to give their clansmen a festival with a useful sideline: messengers were recruited from the fastest runners, bodyguards from the strongest, battle drummers from the musicians and castle entertainment from the dancers. Seeing the size of the crowds the modern Nairn Games drew, Pa inaugurated the Cawdor Games, in the hope of attracting more visitors to the castle. It started as a tiny affair, with a few races, a tug o’ war and piano bashing, where teams would race to demolish two upright pianos into pieces small enough to pass through a small square frame. To the wild amusement of all the children watching, the pianos produced loud, discordant tunes as mallets thwacked the ivories. The star of the Cawdor Games was an Obelixian mink farmer called Hamish Davidson. He smashed pianos, threw curling stones, tossed cabers through the air, and soon found regular work on the hugely popular television programme Britain’s Strongest. The show’s champ was an ex-policeman called Geoff Capes, who had won the nation’s heart with his ability to haul tractors and lug piles of paving stones. The two men became friends, and when Hamish invited Geoff up to the Cawdor Games there was a meteoric rise in audience numbers and Cawdor benefited accordingly. At the end of the season, when the figures were collated, Pa wrote excitedly that visitor numbers at the castle had gone up by 10 per cent, going against all other economic indicators ‘except for the price of crude oil and the birth rate in Nigeria’.