A Charmed Life: Growing Up in Macbeth's Castle

by Liza Campbell

  My father adored Hamish. They drank in the same way, and when Hamish bought a Ferrari with his television earnings they jockeyed with each other whenever they met in the local lanes. Hamish’s drinking kept getting him into trouble, and eventually he was caught out after ringing the local police station as he was leaving a bar in Nairn and daring them to catch him. The police could not outpace his car, but they easily outpaced his thinking. They made no attempt to chase him, but followed him at a leisurely speed, confident that there would still be plenty of alcohol in his bloodstream when they arrived at his house. On another occasion, he opened up all his cages just for the sheer bloody hell of it. Hundreds of mink ran amok in an undulating mass across his neighbours’ farms, like a luxuriant plague, leaving countless dead chickens. Just as he quietly admired the Wolf of Badenoch, so Hugh thought Hamish’s mink laying waste to neighbouring farms was all rather stylish. ‘What chutzpah,’ he kept murmuring.

  * * *

  For a couple of years we attempted to live at Cawdor while it was open. At night, the ropes were taken down and the room notes set aside so that the kitchen and dining room could be recolonized for dinner. As soon as the food was cooked, poor Edith had to clear up the kitchen to operating-theatre cleanliness in preparation for the visitors the next day. Moreover, at the time my father was going through an experimental food phase.

  ‘Right,’ he would say, ‘I think we should see what all the fuss is about swans.’

  ‘Oh please!’ we would beg. ‘A swan? Can’t we just eat something normal?’

  ‘Like what?’

  We would all then chime in with food suggestions that we thought were exotic enough to grab his interest.

  ‘Smoked eel.’

  ‘Devilled kidneys.’

  ‘Silverside?’

  ‘Chops!’

  ‘Dish dingers?’

  When we won him round, it was, ‘Good thinking! We’ll have silverside, with gulls’ eggs to start with.’ When we lost the battle, he would get Edith to cook red squirrels (without announcing what they were – to keep our palates free from prejudice). Another time it was hedgehogs that were packed in clay so that their spines snapped off when it baked hard. Edith mumbled in horror at the smears of clay all over her kitchen and the horrible little cooked corpses that she had to serve up. When squirrel and hedgehog were on the menu, it became pretty obvious why they weren’t in great demand, but they were more unpopular with us on compassionate grounds for Edith had artfully masked the taste with garlic and herbs. It seemed especially churlish for us to eat red squirrels when their numbers were already so depleted. North of the Grampians was one of the few places grey squirrels hadn’t driven them out, so the last thing they needed was a mad earl with an avant-garde palate.

  Supper was a meal the whole family came to dread, not because of the menu, but because it guaranteed our parents were confined to the same room. I longed for Aunt Carey to come and stay. I knew none of this would be happening if she were with us. Now when my father drank, he lashed out viciously as a matter of course. We were all in the firing line, but Cath took the most direct hits. She was stalwart and refused to react. Sometimes I thought her commitment to him was actually the very thing that was goading him and if only she would tell him to shut the fuck up he might actually comply … inshallah.

  Ma’s refusal to engage led to a change in tactics, and Pa’s spotlight swung round and settled on Laura. She became the butt of his most vicious persecutions. The totality of her deafness in one ear was still undetected, so when anyone spoke to her on her hearing side she was animated and engaged, but if they were on her deaf side she was oblivious, and appeared to ignore them. For Laura, all conversations at the dining-room table were like watching a tennis match with a view of only one end of the court. She was an undemanding child, never loud or brattish, happy for hours on various important decorating jobs in her dolls’ house or patiently colouring a picture. She had a placid self-containment – her logical response to a half-silent world. Hugh, however, would call his youngest daughter ‘odious’ and ‘stupid’ and would spitefully mock her, saying, ‘Go on, make me laugh.’ If Laura arrived for lunch in fancy dress – hardly unusual for a child of five – he would react with the same sort of distaste as if she’d vomited under the table. And when her little face crumpled in fear-filled confusion he would sneer, ‘Got your period?’

  At this point Cath could no longer ignore Hugh. She would leap to Laura’s defence. This was her baby, whom she had spent long months watching over in hospital, who had so nearly died and who held a very precious place in our mother’s heart. My father had spotted the chink in her armour and Ma was in the game now. Whenever she waded in to protect Laura, it only excited Pa to further extremes. One lunchtime it became too much for Emma to bear. She grabbed her fork and tried to stab Pa in the hand. She missed, but only just. He snatched his hand away just in time and the fork whacked into the tablecloth, drilling four neat holes. This was a truly daring affront. There was a stunned silence. Which way was Pa going to go? He already had a knife in his hand and we all knew exactly how sharp they were. Feeling that I must support her, I jumped up and yelped, ‘You’ve got cancer of the soul!’ It was the only time I ever stood up to him. And then we both legged it and hid in Lovat’s Hole for the rest of the afternoon.

  Lovat’s Hole was a secret room under the eaves above our bedrooms. You could not reach it from inside the house, but had to pass through a low door onto the roofs and up a ladder, where a stepped gable hid its tiny entrance. It was named after Lovat, the chief of the Fraser clan who had sought refuge while being hunted for high treason after the Battle of Culloden in 1746. It had a little window that overlooked the front door so he could spot the English soldiers coming. It had been an effective hiding place during the brutal mopping-up operation after the disaster of Culloden, and it still was now.

  If there was a handbook for Scots with advice on how to conduct a battle, Culloden would merit few entries. Sometimes, Pa would pull up the car on our way back from Inverness and walk us through the forestry plantation to find the burial mounds of the different clans and explain the messy disaster on the notorious battlefield so close to our home.

  During the final showdown between the Scots and the English, the Cawdor Campbells found themselves in an invidious position. There were Campbell clansmen on both sides, and by the early spring of 1745 our family found themselves sandwiched between the two enemy armies. If they sided with Bonnie Prince Charlie, they would earn the enmity of the much more powerful Argyll Campbells who marched under the English flag; but if they sided with the royalists, and then Charlie’s Highlanders won, Cawdor and its land would be slap bang in the middle of a victorious enemy army. The thane at the time was Joyless John, and he decided the only answer was to get the hell away. He hustled Pryse and his brothers off to Italy and retreated to Stackpole to catch up with some tutting and moody wall staring. While the decisive turning point in Scottish history was taking place on their doorstep, the young Cawdor Campbells were on a cultural Grand Tour, buying Venetian glass and comparing the prices of Neapolitan watercolourists.

  The charismatic young Prince Charlie had achieved the near impossible: he had united the clans in their loyalty to him. The English responded to the uprising by sailing an army of eight thousand men up the east coast of Scotland to Aberdeen, ninety miles to the east of Inverness. The general in charge of the enemy troops was Bonnie Prince Charlie’s own cousin, Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland. Poor intelligence led Bonnie Prince Charlie to believe that Cumberland’s army was half its actual strength, and a false sense of security pervaded his men when the royalists showed no signs of marching on Inverness. As the weather softened, many of the Highlanders took ‘seedtime’ leave. This thinning of Jacobite ranks was just the beginning of a sequence of events that led to the catastrophe at Culloden on 16 April 1746.

  On 12 April Cumberland’s army broke camp. Bonnie Prince Charlie assumed that the fast-flowing River Spe
y would act as a natural obstacle to the enemy’s approach, but the water was unseasonably low, the English found fords in three different places, and they easily saw off a small Highland troop that had been sent out to harry them. The English set up camp outside Nairn. Bonnie Prince Charlie responded by marching his men out of their winter quarters in Inverness to await the enemy on Culloden Moor. Although he had chosen this site in advance, the long, gently rising slope was perfectly suited to cavalry and cannon – and these were the chief military strengths of the English, not the Scots. One of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s Highland generals implored him to move their men across the River Nairn, to the opposite side of the valley. It was only a mile away, but the land there was far more rugged and rose sharply to a height of a thousand feet above the river. To engage Cumberland’s men from this position would not only make a cavalry charge impossible and favour the Highland fighting tactics of close combat, it would allow their soldiers to melt away into the desolate expanse of hills behind if needs must. The young prince ignored the plea and listened instead to his French advisers who recommended a surprise nocturnal attack. The Duke of Cumberland’s twenty-fifth birthday was on 15 April and they guessed that the royalist soldiers would have a drunken celebration.

  This strategy might have worked, but a massive catering oversight meant that no rations had arrived from Inverness for the Jacobite troops since bivouacking at Culloden. After three days with nothing to eat, the Highlanders were starving and far from battle-ready. The situation was so dire that when all the stores had been scoured and emptied there was only enough food to hand out a single rough biscuit to each man – and this was meant to sustain them on the eight-mile night march to Nairn and then into battle. They were already outnumbered and outgunned by the well-fed English, who had been accompanied in their advance by relays of supply ships. Now a third of the soldiers deserted to scavenge for food.

  Despite the food situation and the vanishing troops, Bonnie Prince Charlie persisted with the night march and marshalled the remaining Highlanders into two rather long, rather spindly columns. A dozen short, broad columns would have been capable of covering the ground much faster; in narrow columns, the front had to travel a considerable distance before the men at the rear could advance a single pace. In order to retain the element of surprise the columns zigzagged back and forth across country, slowing them even further. The night was pitch-black and unmooned, and there were soon hundreds of stragglers. By the time the head of the column reached the beech woods around Kilravock, men were quietly slipping away to sleep under the trees. The plan had been to cross the river here, using the same ford the Campbells had used when they kidnapped Muriel 250 years earlier. They would then march past Cawdor, re-cross the river parallel to Nairn and attack the English flank and rear. But it had taken most of the night to reach Kilravock and by two o’clock in the morning it was obvious that the Highlanders were in quiet pandemonium, and that they would never cover the ground ahead before daybreak. Instead of thrusting at his enemy with his men grouped like a pair of deadly javelins, Charles Stuart had a plate of mercury in human form. In fury and frustration, the attack was aborted. The troops trudged back to Culloden, hungrier, more exhausted, and now having lost any psychological advantage they might have gained by seizing the initiative. They arrived back at their starting point as dawn cracked across their failure. Despite the bitter cold, many just lay down in the open and slept. Yet more deserted in search of food.

  By noon, word came that the English were approaching. There were more debates about making for the high ground to the south, but Bonnie Prince Charlie again refused. As the royalists neared the bottom of the long slope, the two armies fanned out in front of each other and Cumberland’s men opened fire with cannon and artillery. The Highland ranks were thinned instantly, without even engaging their enemy in return. And the fusillade continued. The Scotsmen struggled to maintain their positions while waiting for orders to charge. They needed to be in close combat to wield their claymores; until they could do that, they were just standing targets. While his men took a terrible pounding, Bonnie Prince Charlie vacillated. Finally he sent an envoy with a briefing to charge, but the man was killed by a cannon shot and the message never arrived. In desperation, the Highland soldiers took it upon themselves to charge, but it was without any sort of coordination. They ran forward waving their swords and yelling their hearts out, and were cut to ticker tape. Bodies piled on bodies until they lay three and four deep. The whole calamitous encounter lasted just forty minutes. Superior technology won the day. As usual. Over one thousand Highlanders died. Among the dead were scores of unarmed day-trippers who had ventured out from Inverness to witness the unfolding drama. A piece written at the time described the aftermath:

  Immediately after the conclusion of the battle, the [English] men, under the command of their officers, traversed the field, stabbing with their bayonets, or cutting down with their swords, such of the wounded of the defeated party as came under their notice. This was done as much in sport as in rage; and, as the work went on, the men at length began to amuse themselves by splashing and dabbling each other with blood.*

  Cumberland’s intention was to put the Scots down so hard they would never rise up again. Bloody reprisals continued for five months under the order ‘It will be no great mischief if all should fall.’ Women and children were not exempt, and in Scotland the royalist general has been known as Butcher Cumberland ever since. For those left at Cawdor, the only thing to do was open up the house to the English troops as they came and went. While being expedient rather than rampantly principled, Joyless John probably saved Cawdor for the family.

  After months on the run, Bonnie Prince Charlie was able to escape back to France, where he sank into alcoholism. His drunken excesses eventually alienated even the staunchest Jacobites. The English built the colossal and stunningly beautiful Fort George on a peninsula outside Inverness and for years after any murmur of dissent was met with extreme prejudice from the government troops garrisoned there. The only way Highlanders could express their affiliations was silently. When they drank to the king, they passed a finger over the top of their wine to indicate it was the king across the water they were saluting. And scores of young blades, like Pryse, saw it as their subversive duty to be recorded for posterity looking as if a tartan haberdasher had attacked them and won.

  Chapter 12

  Now I am cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in

  To saucy doubts and fears.

  Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 4, sc. 1

  Scottish summers were dominated by killing and dancing. The only aspect that was markedly different from the previous centuries was that the killing was now confined to animals. When the young men came off the moor, they changed into their kilts and sporrans to dance with their hands in the air in imitation of the antlers on the stags they’d just been stalking.

  If you gazed around any ballroom, you could see the distinctive livery of each clan and make the connections between brothers and sons and cousins and uncles and fathers by matching up the tartans of their flying kilts, and the women by the sashes tied across their bodies. Ma and Pa were both beautiful dancers, but being a sophisticate from the Welsh valleys, I initially loathed reeling. I considered it little more than esoteric prancing and stubbornly boycotted the reels, but eventually the boredom of not joining in wore me down. As I gradually came to understand the pattern repeats as we wove down the line of dancers, I started to love it. It was like being a crochet thread with a brain. Sometimes I even fantasized that it would be possible to modernize our parties if only we could try doing these same dances to contemporary music, but no-one was ever interested in trying out the Dashing White Sergeant to T. Rex. The bigger parties were amazingly old-fashioned and there was an unspoken etiquette to follow: no dresses above the ankle; men might remove their jackets only if they happened to slip off from a surfeit of sweat; men could clap and leap and holler, but a girl doing the same was viewed as off colour – she must move smoot
hly and avoid hearty skipping; newcomers who couldn’t do the dances were quietly frowned upon for cocking up the flow. People drank copiously and then sweltered it all out again.

  When we were old enough, we were allowed to go to the Northern Meeting in Inverness and do the round of formal balls in Skye, Perth and Oban. They were held in rooms lit by chandeliers and with specially ‘sprung’ floors so that the whole room bounced gently with the thud of six hundred feet stepping in time. The most old-fashioned of all the old-fashioned aspects was that you had to pick up a numbered dance card. It came with a printed running order of reels and an attached tasselled pencil. You filled it in if and when a boy came up and asked for a dance. He then noted you down in his and you sought each other out when the programme reached your booking. All the girls lived in terror of having an unmarked card. If Pa was my only entry, I would scribble anything – Godalming Flats, Red Corpuscle, Arc Welder – in light pencil so at least it didn’t look as if I was a wallflower.