* * *
The fountain-pen day was the last time I was invited to stay with my stepmother. We all continued to visit Scotland a couple of times a year, taking it in turns to stay with Colin. If we wanted to go home, it was easier to buy visitors’ tickets along with everybody else. From time to time we bumped into our stepmother there. Once, Emma and I were with our children when we came upon her in the drawing room giving a personal tour to a party from Scottish Heritage. Angelika did not notice us as we joined the back of the group and swept an arm past our family portraits saying, ‘And these, over here … these are all the generals.’ It was not clear to which of the many portraits she was referring, but it was nice to hear that all the boys had got promotions. Pryse hadn’t even been a soldier last time I passed his frame. She ushered the group into another room, but I stayed behind to gaze at the Pa-in-drag portrait. We spotted Angelika again as she waved her guests off and we went over to say hello. In a flash of mischief we asked her if she could take a photograph of us. We handed her a camera and stood in front of the portcullis, grinning gormlessly and giving the thumbs up, enjoying the irony of her stepchildren and step-grandchildren as tourists in their family home.
* * *
Colin lived by the Findhorn in a small farmhouse which he enlarged to accommodate his growing family. It turned out that Hugh had run the estate into the ground. The farms had been poorly managed and great blocks of forestry had been neglected to the point where the woods were impenetrable. The plantations had never been thinned, and as the trees grew they had become so tightly crammed together that they had to be clear-felled before maturity, thus wasting much of the original investment. Uncle William helped Colin turn Drynachan from being a sparsely populated grouse moor into a profitable partridge shoot that provided funds to help repair other parts of the estate.
Drynachan was problematic though. Angelika insisted on getting the use of it in the middle of the shooting season, regardless of the headache of re-housing the paying guns elsewhere. Sometimes, Colin had eight men crammed into his house, to make way for our stepmother. Whenever they clashed over this, Angelika’s stock response was to threaten to remove all the furniture. Colin finally decided enough was enough. He hired a fleet of pantechnicons and carried out the threat for her, delivering a lodge-full of furniture to her other house, Auchindoune. Through all of this, Colin managed to keep the family together. My marriage had collapsed within months of Hugh’s death. Having lost the two central men from my life, and having become a single parent of toddlers, I was a mess. Colin was unceasingly empathetic and supportive.
Although Angelika lived at Cawdor during the offseason, while it was open the castle was run as a tiny company with her and Colin as its two directors. When Colin queried some of her business decisions, she resigned her directorship and went off to New York. The company articles stated that, ‘if at all possible’, one of the directors ‘should live at Cawdor through the winter months’, so Colin, as the sole remaining director, moved his family in. Even though he knew the move was doomed, he was elated. He rang us all up and said, ‘You’d better get a move on if you want to come and stay because Angelika is going to use all her energies to get me out.’
It was strange to go back to Cawdor. For the first time since Hugh’s death, we wandered through the corridors behind the visitors’ route. The main guest bedroom had new hangings on the four-poster bed; a riot of flounces in various shades of peach, decorated with Princess Michael of Kent in mind, and a Christmas card from her still stood on the mantelpiece in late spring. The guest loo was still lined with pictures of us as children, wearing kilts, holding dogs, dressed for aikido, but it was upsetting to find that rooms not on public display were now in squalid disarray, and at the top of the tower there was a huge, unattended leak. Cawdor had become very sad for us.
As Colin predicted, Angelika rushed to court. She petitioned that the furniture, which had survived the wear and tear of half a dozen generations, would suffer from being used by her step-grandchildren. The judge bowed to her appeal and ruled that Colin and Isabella could stay, but their children could not. The final score from that skirmish was: Inanimate Objects – 1, Current Thane – 0.
* * *
Whenever I ran into any of Hugh’s old friends, I quizzed them for clues about his state of mind when he rewrote his will. Patrick Lichfield was as baffled as any of us. Hugh had acted as Patrick’s trustee and had been instrumental in organizing his family affairs to safeguard the estate for Patrick’s son. I went to stay with Guy Roxburghe, one of our family trustees, to find out what he thought. His answer was that Angelika was very good at running the castle shop. Other trustees repeated this explanation. So, running a shop that sold oven gloves and cardboard cut-out Cawdors through which all visitors got siphoned on their way to the exit trumped the rightful inheritor. Perhaps Buckingham Palace will go to Camilla Parker Bowles because of her superlative ways with souvenirs. Other old friends made suggestions that ‘he must have done it as a tax dodge’.
‘Then why would he keep that secret?’ I would ask.
‘Well, it will be entailed, so it reverts back after death.’
‘It’s not entailed. Angelika could leave it to Robert Mugabe.’
‘She’s bound to move out in a few years. After all, she’s a widow rattling around on her own in a house with, how many bedrooms?’
‘About eighteen.’
‘Exactly. Cawdor’s always been a family house. Colin’s got, how many children?’
‘Three, and another on the way.’
‘Well then, she’s bound to move. What about London?’
‘She sold their flat. She prefers to stay at Kensington Palace with Marie-Christine Kent. Anyway, she spends all her time in Paris.’
‘She could buy something nice there.’
‘She already has.’
‘Well then. There’s Auchindoune as well, so she’s got plenty of places to go, hasn’t she?’
‘Yes but—’
‘It’ll come right. You’ll see.’
‘Hmm.’
* * *
Anyone who has lost a parent knows that when one dies it does not mean the end of the relationship. They live on in your head, and as I tried to come to terms with all that had happened it sometimes felt like Hugh’s character conflicts were so bizarrely acute that instead of building up a picture they busted it wide apart. He was a tree lover who neglected his beloved woodlands. He held lifelong anti-Catholic views, but became one on his deathbed. He was a control freak with the capacity to fall totally under the influence of another, and his heroes were Jimmy Dunbar, who humiliated his heir, Hamish the mink vandal, and the Wolf of Badenoch. Obsessed by continuity, he decided the rules did not apply to him. He had displayed the family motto ‘Be Mindful’ on his belt buckles, but had never taken the words to heart. He worked hard to protect the inheritance of other people’s sons, but spurned his own. He was a philanderer who censured straying friends. He seemed to me to have behaved recklessly in his second marriage, but Colin was left to untangle the mess. It was hard to analyse such chaos when his unravelling had to be seen across the span of his whole life.
Hugh was a sensitive little boy and his nervousness was exacerbated by a neurotic mother. Extravagant adult fears on open display are as contagious as ebola to children, and Wilma’s steady determination throughout the war years was that if the end was not nigh today, it would be tomorrow. His mother was a far from reassuring figure; that role was filled by Hugh’s nanny, Miss Dunkerley. When Hugh was about seven years old, however, she took to ‘fooling around’ with him – something he described as a heady mix of panic and excitement. One evening, when my grandfather Jack was back at Cawdor on shore leave, Miss Dunkerley had taken Hugh into her bed as usual and was molesting him when the door creaked open. Jack Cawdor had come to join her. Miss Dunkerley leapt out of bed and managed to defer his visit with some whispered excuses and promises while Hugh lay hidden under the pile of rumpled covers, heart ha
mmering with the thrill. Miss Dunkerley’s attentions and this scene in particular were crucial in shaping my father’s worldview.
From an early age he had been disabused of any notion that parents are faithfully paired, like swans. Not only had he been witness to nocturnal family deceits, he had also scored a dubious victory over his Oedipal rival. If this gave him a reckless sexual confidence, it came with an inability to assess who was off limits. Hugh’s fixation with nannies resurfaced when we were growing up. Our beloved cook Edith’s room was one of the few exclusion zones when he was tipsily tiptoeing around at night.
When Hugh was in his early teens, Jack’s drinking and inability to express himself turned to violence. When he broke Wilma’s toe, he showed his son that physical abuse was an option, and as his parents’ marriage creaked, Hugh identified with the abuser rather than the abused. Wilma’s attempts to get Hugh’s sympathy were rebuffed so thoroughly that he effectively severed any affectionate ties with his mother.
An inability to articulate his own timidity allowed Hugh’s inferiority complex to flourish in the shady recesses of his thoughts. When I listened to the stories of the ass and the tree, Muriel and John the French repellent, they were just that, family stories. To Hugh, being born the heir made the same stories cautionary tales of what he had to live up to. These seeds germinated into a desperate reverence for people with a steely core. First he found, or perhaps was found by, Thatch, and later Angelika. The other way he dealt with his fears was with alcohol, but his drinking spun out of control. His addictions went unaddressed and got worse and worse. It was as if too much money kept him muddled.
When I was going through a box of all my old letters, I happened across a crumpled checklist written when I was about thirteen, in a juvenile attempt to work out what ailed him. It read like one of Aunt Carey’s cherry-stone rhymes:
Manic-depressive
Schizophrenic
Psychopath
Bastard
‘Manic-depressive’ was crossed out. My reason for eliminating it was that while he did have moments of mania and wild profligacy, he was not a depressive, showing some melancholy tetchiness only when he was hungover. ‘Schizophrenic’ was also crossed out. I dismissed that theory after asking him if he ever heard voices in his head. He laughed and said that I had gone mad.
I had compiled the list after watching a documentary about psychopaths. It had left me wondering. A professor with a lisp that was unfortunate for the number of times he had to mention the word ‘psychopaths’ said that only one per cent of them went on to be murderers. By this time I certainly believed my father was capable of killing someone. The professor went on to say that ‘psychopaths love power and often gain ascendancy in corporations, politics or within family systems during periods of turmoil. When necessary, the psychopath will be extremely charming and seductive, but it is only ever motivated by self-interest. They are without empathy or conscience; like a piranha in a goldfish bowl they cannot turn into a goldfish. There is never going to be an epiphany.’ I liked the bit about the piranha, but I knew in my heart that my father was capable of an epiphany. I knew he had the capacity to empathize. He even had a conscience, although it was a little underused. ‘Psychopath’ had therefore been crossed out too, with a small ‘phew’ written in brackets. In my earnest teenage way, I was trying too hard to pathologize. Hugh was just a common-or-garden drunk, yo-yoing between hangovers and drunkenness, sinking further and further into the quicksand.
In the end, I had put a tick against ‘bastard’. Of course that was wrong too. Another truth emerged when I found a letter he had written the year before he died, in which he blamed his recent absent-mindedness on the sleeping pills ‘which I have taken for years and which have just been banned’, while rejoicing in the fact that he now had ‘a cast-iron excuse’ for the memory blanks we had all been aware of for years. I had taken no account of it before, but rereading it made me ask his friends slightly different questions. The sleeping pills, it turned out, were the upshot of a hefty cocaine habit. I was amazed – not that he was a cokehead, but that I had missed it when it was so blindingly obvious. Hugh was always up until the early hours, forever leaving the room only to return mopping his nose with a large spotted handkerchief, forever having wild mood swings. Coke extends the capacity for drink and delays the falling-over stage, but it seemed a miserably sad state of affairs that Hugh took it night after night on his own. No wonder we all felt so out of step. I also understood why Hugh had got his drugs muddled up in his letter to me about my boyfriend ‘Richard’. He had written that ‘cocaine’ made one ‘more boring than a drunk because it has the effect of making you believe you are a genius’. He was inadvertently counselling himself.
The last person anyone expects to find in the next-door cubicle in a nightclub is a parent, but it was much less frightening to think that the balance of his mind had been tipped by drugs rather than the sober, internal tics I had listed against mental disorders as a teenager. Coke was not the whole answer, but it went some way towards an understanding of the crazy paranoid behaviour, the women, his lack of judgement, the hexes, the violence. Hugh was like a child. He adored the luxuries Cawdor gave him, but loathed the burden of being the Thane. He could only really express himself and feel free in his letters. Writing gave him real joy. In his letters he could be his best self, and whenever I reread them the bad memories diminish and I can believe he loved us all. Although away from the page expressions of emotion often made him wince, I do think he loved us all very much, poor man. Maybe, just maybe, somewhere in that crazy head of his he thought he was doing Colin a favour. As a child hiding within the man, he might have found it hard to imagine that his son would be able to cope with the responsibilities Cawdor entailed, and resolved to free him from the chains of primogeniture. As Shakespeare put it
To throw away the dearest thing he owed,
As ‘twere a careless trifle.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Marianne Velmans, Jonny Geller, Jo Micklem, Patrick Janson-Smith, Daniel Balado, Deborah Adams and Doug Keen for their support and faith. My love and thanks to Miles Bredin, Milla Guinness, Raffaella Barker, Natasha Fairweather, Kathleen Tessaro, Gilly Greenwood, Kate Morris, Debbie Susman, Jill Robinson and Aly Flind for all the reading, listening and encouragement.
I would also like to thank Mad Harper, Joseph Farrell, Mairead Lewin, Sarah Stitt, Catherine Fairweather, Simon Tiffin, Ruth Burnett, Clarissa Pilkington and Louise Guinness for their loving friendship.
My love to Emma, Colin, Fred and Laura with whom I shared a mad, bad and often beautiful childhood, and especially to my mother, who, while being a very private person, let me write about things that were very painful for her. A more courageous, kind and dignified woman would be hard to find.
My love, as ever, to Storm and Atticus, my wonderful children, who were so patient with me as I burned supper after supper while trying to write. And who both know full well that I am only going to write another book to cover up for the fact I can’t actually cook.
And lastly in memory of a father, who, but for his failure to escape the vice-like grip of a pernicious disease, would have been a truly spectacular human being.
The sadness is that while my father was a brilliant letter writer, and on paper was able to express his kindest, funniest and most generous self, I have been unable to quote extensively from any of the letters he wrote to me as a child because of the laws of copyright and the contents of his will. To protect a few minor characters, I have changed some names.
About the Author
Liza Campbell, daughter of the twenty-fifth Thane of Cawdor, was the last child to be born at Cawdor Castle. Her childhood was divided between her father’s vast Scottish and Welsh estates. She is an artist, writer, journalist, and calligrapher. She lives in London with her family. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Thanes of Cawdor
The Campbells of Cawdor
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Acknowledgements
Maps
About the Author
Copyright
This book is an autobiographical memoir of the life and experiences of the author as recollected by her. In some limited cases names of people, places, dates, sequences, or the detail of events has been changed to protect the privacy of others. This apart, the author has confirmed to the publishers the truthfulness of her recollections. Whilst the publishers have taken care to explore and check the contents where reasonably possible, they have not verified and accordingly cannot warrant its veracity in all respects.
A Charmed Life: Growing Up in Macbeth's Castle Page 26