Memoirs of a Highland Lady

by Elizabeth Grant

  Dalachapple not only listened to my mother about the oar money, but he acted in accordance with the old established usage, and with a degree of delicacy quite amusing. In the most mysterious manner, and only when she was quite alone, did he approach her with her perquisite in the form of a Bank note folded into the smallest possible size. The oars were sold for half a crown apiece, a pair only to each float, and one season he gave her upwards of forty pounds and this was long before the great felling. She opened her eyes a little wider, and certainly felt the money a great comfort. She seldom had any in purse or pocket book, indeed ’twas of no use in the highlands. All we did not produce ourselves was ordered in large quantities on credit and paid by drafts on a Banker. We had no shops near us but one at Inverdruie, kept by a Jenny Grant, who made us pay very dear for thread and sugarplums and our charities were given in the form of meal or clothing; fuel every one had plenty of for the mere gatherings, the loppings all through the forest were never turned to any other account. They made a brilliant fire when well dried, owing to the quantity of turpentine in the fir timber, Still, those who could afford it laid in a stock of peats for the dead of the winter as the wood burned quickly out arid so failed to give as much heat as turf.14 My father had an objection to turf, and would not burn it up at the house even in the kitchen. Coals we never thought of; they could be had no nearer than Inverness, were dear enough there, and the carriage from thence, thirty six miles, would have made them very expensive; yet the wood fires were very costly; the wood itself was of no value, but it had to be carted home, cross cut by two men, split up by two more, and then packed in the wood sheds. It was never ending work, and at the rate of wages given, including the horse and cart, could never have come to less, when we lived the year round at the Doune, than £100.

  In the huge kitchen grate, in the long grates with dogs in them made expressly for the purpose of supporting the billets, the cheerful wood fires were delightful. But in our part of the house, where my Mother in her English tidiness had done away with the open hearth and condemned us to small Bathgrates, we were really perishing with cold; three or four sticks stuck up on end, all that the small space would hold, either smouldering slowly at the bottom if wet or blazing up to the danger of the chimney if dry, gave out no heat equal to warm the frozen fingers and toes during a highland winter. We held a Council upon the subject in the Schoolroom and decided upon taking steps ourselves to render ourselves more comfortable. Whenever we went out to walk, before returning home we visited the farm offices, and there from the famous peat-stacks provided for the farm servants we helped ourselves, each carrying off as much as we could carry. We got old John McIntosh to chop our long billets in two, and thus we contrived a much better fire; the grate was quite unsuited to the sort of fuel, but we made the best of it. When we told our dear old great grand Uncle of our bright thought, he started up, a little angry, not with us though and forthwith sent down for especial Schoolroom use two carts of the fine hard peats from the far off famous Rhinruy moss; they burned almost like coal, having but one fault, very light red ashes. We made some dusters, enjoyed our fire, and had to keep good watch over our store of fuel to prevent any being stolen by the kitchen, never failing every day to take an accurate measurement of our own peat stack, neatly built in one of the wood houses by the Captain’s men.

  And so our winter glided away.

  1. In 1827 Sir Thomas Dick Lauder wrote a prose romance on this notorious Earl of Buchan who burned Elgin Cathedral in 1390; much is made of the size of his hero’s teeth.

  2. Her niece, Jane Mackintosh, her sister Mary’s daughter.

  3. J.B.S. Morritt: he succeeded his uncle of the same name, for whom Scott had written his poem Rokeby in the previous year, 1812.

  4. It is surprising that E.G. does not comment on this confusion between the Stewart Lord of Badenoch and a Comyn.

  5. Woven cloth.

  6. Hockey is Lady Stratchey’s suggestion; E.G. actually wrote ‘Gough’, but she is describing an early form of shinty.

  7. This would contain 2 gallons or 64 gills.

  8. Macbeth,1, vii,27.

  9. The youngest daughter of the Grants’ great friend and neighbour, the Duchess of Gordon; she married the sixth Duke in 1803, and was therefore step-mother to Lord John Russell the statesman.

  10. Such stories were collected by Sir Thomas Dick Lauder in his Legendary Tales of the Highlands.

  11. Scots: to prepare or make ready.

  12. To endure one’s fate, to submit to one’s destiny.

  13. Perhaps the most notorious of all the incidents of the ‘Highland Clearances.’

  14. The word used throughout Ireland for peat

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  1813

  IN the spring, as soon as the hill was open, my father went to London to attend his duties in parliament. My Mother then changed our arrangements a little. We did not get up till seven, dark of course at first, but a whole hour gained on a cold morning was something. Miss Elphick, Jane and I breakfasted with her at half after nine. We used to hear her go downstairs punctually ten minutes sooner, opening her bedroom door at the end of the passage with a deal of noise, and then making a most resounding use of her pocket handkerchief—our signal call, we said. We all dined with her at four. After that there were no more lessons; we passed the evening beside her reading and working. The work was the usual shirting, sheeting, shifting, towelling, etc., required in the family, the stock of linen of all kinds, being kept up to the statutory number by a regular yearly addition. The whole was then looked over, some mended to serve a time, some made up for the poor, the rest sorted into rag bundles constantly wanted where accidents among the different labourers were so frequent. We read through all Miss Edgeworth’s works, Goldsmith’s histories, most of the Spectator, and a few good Standard novels from the dusty shelves in the Study. On Saturday nights we were allowed a fire in the barrack room, after which indulgence my hair was admitted to shine much more brightly. After dinner, in an hour we had to ourselves, Jane and I generally read to the ‘little ones.’ Mary was hammering through ‘Parent’s Assistant’ herself, two pages a day for her lesson, enough as she slowly spelt her way along the lines, but not enough to interest her in the stories, so she seemed pleased to hear them to an end with Johnny. We often had to repeat a favourite tale, so much approved were Lazy Lawrence, The Little Merchants, The basket woman, and some others. And then when we demurred to going over them again we were so assailed by our listeners that we began Evenings at Home, leaving out the Tutor, George, and Harry. What excellent books these are for children—ay and for those beyond childhood, how they form the mind, enlarge it and the heart as well, make virtue so lovely, teaching to shun the vile, excuse the sinner, filling the head so with good that there is no room left for evil. There are no orphans where such teaching surrounds the nursery. Yet it was not while I was young that I was fully aware of the value of the library chosen for us. It was when I was again reading these old favourites to childish listeners, to you, my own dear children, that the full extent of their influence struck me so forcibly. They have not been surpassed by any of our numerous Authours for the young since. This was a very happy time with us, even though poor William was away. We only saw him at midsummer, the journey being too long for the Christmas holidays to be spent with us; he passed them always with the Freres.

  One April morning Grace Grant, the Greusaich’s daughter, the pretty girl who waited on us, drew aside the white curtains of my little bed and announced that ‘Mr Cameron’s two houses were in ashes.’ A fire had broken out in the night at the Croft in the new house occupied by Mr and Mrs William Cameron; it had spread to the stack yard and the offices, and even to the upper cottage in which the old people lived, and when my mother reached the scene, for she had been roused by the news, had got up, and dressed, gone off walking those two or three miles, she who seldom went farther than her poultry yard in the day time, she found the homeless family on the green watching the destruction of
their property.

  About half of this news was true. The fire had broken out and the lower house was burnt to the ground. Some of the corn stacks were destroyed, and one young horse was injured, but the rest of the stock and the better part of the crop and the old cottage were safe. My Mother had gone up, but before her bed time, the tidings having been brought to her while she was reading as usual after we had left her, and she brought back with her the two eldest of William Cameron’s boys, who lived with us for the next eighteen months, there being no room for them at home. The loss to their parents was great. All the handsome Glasgow furniture was gone, as well as sundry little stores of valuables saved by poor Mrs William from the wreck of her City splendour. It was quite melancholy to see the blackened ruins of that little lovely spot; much of the offices had fallen, and though at this season they were less necessary than they would have been at any other time, the heaps of scorched timber and broken walls we had to pick our way through on our first visit made us feel very sad. The old people received us as if nothing had happened. Miss Mary was neither more nor less fussy, more nor less cross than usual. Mrs Cameron sat in her chair by the fire in her bonnet and shawl, and her green shade over her eyes just as she had ever done; a monument of patience in idleness, sighing in her accustomed manner, no change whatever in her. I am certain she had been equally immovable on the night of the fire. Mr Cameron talked to us cheerfully as usual of all matters going, the fire amongst the rest, as if he and his had no concern in it, except when he raised his fine head towards the sky in humble gratitude that there had been no lives lost; he even played on the Jew’s harp to us, Lochaber, which we called his own tune, for he came from that part of the country, and Crochallan, beautiful Crochallan, which we considered more peculiarly our own, for we had all been sung to sleep by it in our infancy. I learned to sing it from his playing and he taught me to pronounce the gaelick words with the pretty, soft Lochaber accent, so very different from the harsh, guttural of Strathspey. Years after at Hampstead, my Uncle Frere, who remembered my childish ‘crooning’ of it when he had his fever, made me sing it again not only once, but for ever; and one day that Francis Cramer1 was there he made me sing it to him; never was there a musician more delighted; over and over and over again was repeated this lovely gaelick air till he thought he had quite caught it, and when he went away he bade me farewell as Crochallan ma vourgne!, little suspecting he was addressing a young lady as the favourite cow of one Allan!

  I never myself admired the Croft so much in its improved state as I did in the days of the two small detached thatched cottages, the stack yard here, the stables there, the peat stack near the burn, and the garden paled with backs, wherein grew the sweetest, small, black-red hairy gooseberries that were ever gathered. My father, on his return from London, immediately began to plan the present very pretty two storeyed Cottage, as I may well remember, for I had to make all the drawings for it architecturally from his given dimensions; inside and outside working plans, and then a sketch of its future appearance in the landscape, and I was so awkward, so unskilful, and he was so very particular, required all to be so neatly done, so perfectly accurate, without blemish of any sort, that I’m sure I could not tell how many sheets of paper, how many hours of time, how many trials of a then easily chafed temper were gone through before the finished specimens were left to be tyed up with other equally valuable designs, in a roll kept in the lower closed book shelves to the left of the Library fireplace, docketted by his saucy daughter ‘Nonsense of Papa’s.’ The new house was placed a little in advance of the old in a situation very well chosen. It looks most particularly well from Aunt Mary’s favourite walk round the Lochans. My father cut down some trees at one point to give a full view of it, and we made a rough seat there, as we did in many a pretty spot besides, where a summer hour could be dreamed away by lake, or stream, or bank, or brae, and mountain boundary, the birch leaves and the heather scenting the air.

  They were very stupid boys those sons of William Cameron. James the elder, was a real lout, there was no making any thing of him, though Caroline the french girl, true to the coquettish instincts of her nation, tried all her fascinations on him, really toiled to elicit a single spark of feeling of some sort from this perfect log. In vain. Jane was more successful with the second boy, Lachlan. Both brothers went daily to the School at the bridge of Coylam, the common parish School, and a very good one, where all the boys in the place were taught, and could learn Latin if they liked it. The present master piqued himself on his English. He came from Aberdeen, and was great in the English Classicks; whole pages from our best poets, first read out in the proper style by him and then learnt by heart by the pupils, formed part of the daily lessons of the more advanced Classes. Lachlan Cameron, taught privately by Jane, quite electrified the Master by his fine delivery of the ‘Deserted Village’ at the rehearsal previous to the Examination.2

  My father examined the School. I don’t know what there was that my father did not do; so busy a man could hardly have been met with. He did his work well while the whim for that particular employment lasted; the misfortune of it all was that there were too many irons in the fire; fewer of them he would have managed perfectly. Poor Sir Alexander Boswell, Bozzy’s very clever son, wrote a brilliant Tory squib once ridiculing the Edinburgh Whigs, and my father’s share of it ended thus—‘Laird, lawyer, Statesman, J. P. Grant in short.’3 This superactive tendency was very strong in me. Without being a meddler, for that I never was, I was naturally inclined to attempt too much. In my youth I was versatile, seized on some new occupation, pursued it to weariness, gave it up unfinished, and took with equal zeal to something else. My father was quite aware of this defect in me. He first insisted on every work begun being finished, however distasteful it might have become; next he exacted a promise from me to this effect as soon as the habit was a little formed. And to this promise I have faithfully adhered, sometimes at no small cost of patience, the love of being up and doing, making me even in more advanced age, undertake many labours, the completion of which was far from agreeable. Jane had none of this volatility; fond of employment, never indeed idle, she was endowed from the beginning with a perseverance that has carried her bravely through difficulties that would have then disheartened me. I was educated into equal diligence, but it was a work of time, and shews what can be done by judicious supervision. We always went with my father and mother to the examination of the School—no short business; my father was very methodical, no flash pupil could have imposed on him. Backwards and forwards he cross examined, requiring the reasons for all things, much as in the national systems4 now, as was never practised then. I have heard him say the boys were fair Scholars, but beat by the girls. The Latin class was very respectable, the arithmetick very creditable of course, the recitations had to be applauded, and Lachlan Cameron was rewarded for action as well as emphasis—Jane having John Kembled him to the utmost of her ability—by receiving a handsome Copy of Goldsmith’s works. The prizes were wisely chosen, indeed almost any standard work would have been appreciated. Mrs Gillies, during a visit to us at the Circuit time, taking a walk with my Mother one morning, went to rest a bit in a saw mill; the saw was at work grinding slowly up and down, while the log it was slitting moved lazily on, the man and boy reading till they were wanted. The Boy’s book was Cornelius Nepos5 in the original, the man’s Turner’s Geography. I question whether that dear good Lady Rachel’s little mannie at Druie Side, trained though he be by six months of the normal school in Edinburgh, will send forth such an order of minds. When I saw him he could hardly explain his ideas out of the gaelick, and the staff was small.

  The Schoolmaster’s wife taught sewing, very badly my mother said. She objected extremely to the fineness of the thread used for stitching, and she would take hold of a knot at the end of a hem and draw the whole up as if ready for gathering, as a proof of the incorrect manner in which the girls had been allowed to ravel over this most essential element of the science of needlework. Peggy Green w
as certainly better fitted to trim up a cap, dance at a harvest home, or preside at a tea drinking, then to teach white seam, or guide a poor man’s house. She had been Mrs Gordon’s maid, used to go up to Glentromie in the boat with the Colonel and the children, and at some of the merry makings fell in love with the handsome Schoolmaster, the very best dancer in Badenoch—for he was at Glen Feschie then. I cannot recollect his name. He got ‘wonderful grand presents’ at his marriage, a hurried one—but he and the fine wife did not suit, they were not happy, tittle tattle having contributed to make them unhappy.