Christian Miller
A CHILDHOOD IN SCOTLAND
Introduced by Dorothy Porter
Edinburgh • London • New York • Melbourne
Contents
Title Page
Introduction
When I Was A Little Girl
About the Author
Copyright
Introduction
In Daisy, Daisy (Routledge, 1980), Christian Miller gives an account of her lone journey from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast of America. The journey of nearly 5,000 miles was made, give or take one Greyhound bus and several more or less bizarre lifts, on a bicycle most emphatically made for one – an eleven kilo folding job that one might hesitate to take further than the local supermarket. Its rider was in her late fifties, a grandmother and not an athlete, not even a practised cyclist. ‘I had been sure,’ she writes, ‘that if I had so much as taken even the tiniest bit of extra exercise to prepare me for the ride, I would have found that some bit of me ached so badly that I would have been put off the whole idea.’ Her impossible but successful project is punctuated by personal triumphs and miseries as well as a series of serendipitous encounters and experiences—she marks its end by taking supper with a group of smelt fishers on the Pacific coast of Oregon.
She presents as the greatest privilege of her travels her sense of total freedom, of liberation from the persistent responsibilities of being a daughter, a wife and a mother. ‘One morning I woke up and realised—with considerable amazement—that nobody needed, any more, to know where I was. My mother had died, my children had grown up and my grandchildren belonged to them, not to me; my husband was happily occupied, and I myself had no job to tie me down.’ From time to time in her narrative she recelebrates the astonishing exhilaration of being her own woman: ‘It was a type of freedom unknown in my past life, where almost every action had been conditioned by the needs—either physical or psychological—of somebody else.’ It is a freedom which Christian Miller recognises as necessarily temporary since freedom from the claims of others is equally escape from the self that these claims have helped to construct. It is at her moment of greatest helplessness that she is most self-aware. She is sitting in the foothills of the Rockies contemplating their insurmountability. She is already suffering from mountain sickness: ‘I felt dizzy and weak, and in the pit of my stomach a demoralising feeling was lurking, like the dull weight that, as a child, I had experienced on my way to the dentist.’ Her need at this point is not for untrammelled freedom but for connection—the intrepid, sufficient grandmother can comprehend her feeling only by identifying it with a childhood fear.
It is now something of a cliché in discussion of autobiographical writing to speak in terms of self-creation and to find special problems in the formation of the female self. Yet it is impossible not to feel that A Childhood in Scotland must involve a journey as momentous and dangerous as the traversing of a continent. The recovery of childhood is a process which is at least likely to produce metaphors for the self and to arise from a need to connect and appraise. Christian Miller’s writings show her as rather impatient of the pretentious and portentous. Her adult response to remarks like these might well be a tart, ‘Does she think I don’t know who I am?’ much as the child wanted to shout at her mother’s friend’s insincere interest, ‘Did she really think I didn’t know a sheep when I saw one?’
It is true that there is nothing in A Childhood in Scotland like the conscious aesthetic ordering of Virginia Woolf’s reminiscences. ‘It is more convenient artistically to suppose that we were going to St Ives, for that will lead to my other memory, which also seems to be my first memory, and in fact it is the most important of all my memories’ (‘A Sketch of the Past’). Such exposure of the constructedness of her narrative is inconceivable from Christian Miller. Nor is there any sign of the writer’s trickery that is so tellingly and understandably used by Mary McCarthy in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood to excoriate her cruel, mean-spirited Uncle Myers. In comparison with these literary self-creators Christian Miller is surely transparent. Her memoir, we feel, is simply a question of how things were, unlike anything we could have known but made available for our half-admiring, half-reproving appreciation of difference. And, of course, a substantial part of the memoir was originally published in the New Yorker addressed to a North American audience likely to be engaged primarily with what must have seemed to them a fascinatingly anachronistic way of life. The piece is full of information about shooting, sheep-dipping, heirlooms, ancestors and ghosts. Evidently what is on offer is a castle rather than a child. But in the end, Christian Miller, while still elusive, is more up front than this suggests.
Mary McCarthy’s Memories were also first published in the New Yorker and in Harper’s Bazaar. Thus both she and Christian Miller have had two shots at their narratives. They have responded in very different ways to this opportunity. Mary McCarthy recounts in the book version that she has been accused of writing fiction or more simply lies. She then prints the original versions along with a commentary that admits their ‘dubious points’. This strategy retains the impact of the first writing while still suggesting scrupulosity. Christian Miller, we may assume, was equally accused of error and exaggeration after her New Yorker piece. In the later book version (John Murray, 1981) she must have been responding to some extent to disbelief or disagreement, particularly about the behaviour of her father whom she never in any real sense knew. This father, the first version firmly states, ‘beat us irrespective of age or sex’. This is more sweeping but less telling than the revised version: ‘I don’t remember what punishments were meted out to my elder sisters, but possibly because I may have ranked as a sort of substitute boy … I was also occasionally beaten, although usually I was only severely smacked.’ She goes on to detail a specific painful occasion. This then becomes more clearly a matter of irrefutable personal memory. Even-handedly she adds the section on her mother’s distress when the children were being punished and on her poor father’s bizarre upbringing which might a little mitigate his own unlovingness.
Such additions quietly assert truth—others more clearly point to the difficulty of self-formation and self-esteem in an unsociable, impersonal environment. These additions act to achieve subtle shifts of significance in the remaining parts. She adds her kind nanny who did not smack her. ‘And she picked me up and cuddled me, before putting me in my high chair … outside the open nursery window starlings and sparrows chirped in the ivy. I was happy.’ She adds the romance of Mademoiselle with her singing footman who briefly brings community into the nursery: ‘I hugged the snuffling, sleeping dog, and wondered why it was I felt so happy.’ Most movingly she adds the morning of her fourth birthday in her mother’s bed: ‘I shrieked with laughter, and rolled over and over, down into the hollow from which my father had risen.’ Here for a moment she has a proper place that includes both parents even if her father is signalled only by his absence. These additions act not to contradict an earlier impression of emotional loneliness but to enhance it—that which should have been habitual was exceptional.
Jean Rhys contemplates and despairs of the version of herself in her looking-glass when she is nine years old (Smile, Please); Virginia Woolf from the age of six or seven would stand on tiptoe to gaze guiltily at her face in the hall looking-glass (‘A Sketch of the Past’); when her grandmother forgets the word for mirror, Mary McCarthy finally comprehends that she is senile, has lost herself. It is not surprising that in her second version Christian Miller remembers to recall the tall gilt-framed looking-glasses of the Big Drawing Room. ‘From down this mysterious gallery of glass innumerable small girls gazed back at me, silent, wondering, strands of their hair lifting in unison with my
own.’ The innumerable small girls simultaneously offer and deny multiple possibilities: they are all of them Christian yet in the whole memoir Christian is never Christian. She has no name, she is the younger Child, an honorary boy. Her dog collar belts proclaim her to be Rover or Thunder or Trust.
Similarly the castle, its contents and its grounds are treasure-houses that provide and refuse material for the mind and the imagination. In any memoir there is a balance between acts of personal memory and dependence on the recollections of others whether from hearsay or research. What is peculiarly poignant in A Childhood in Scotland is that much that Christian Miller might have remembered she has been forced to research. ‘The castle teemed with historical records; books, pictures, furnishings and objects d’art of every kind could have been used to capture our imaginations, but nobody drew our attention to them and we remained totally unconscious both of them and of the ancestry that had led, through nearly a thousand years of recorded genealogy, to our own births.’ The adult makes the connections but these cannot make up for the unsatisfied childhood thirst. The world of imaginative learning, like the kitchen garden, was an area from which it seemed natural for the child to be excluded. At best rationed to entrance once a day provided she asked the right question.
But the effort not to squander questions can bear fruit. It is not a bad preparation for a writer—it concentrates the mind and forces a focus for desire. Christian Miller does not pretend to be a born writer. Nevertheless if the adults laughed at her childish efforts at composition, she has the last laugh. She seems certainly to be a born looker and here her environment did not fail her. She was after all surrounded by a world of natural and constructed things which might enhance perception and feed imagination. In the most unlaboured way Christian Miller gives us the specialness of a child’s seeing and acting. This is expressed through the miniature and the vast. The castle itself is a maze in which as a child born there she is at home but as a child living there she is often utterly lost, standing placeless ‘in the darkening corridor, tears dripping into the empty sugar bowl’. But the black-and-gold Chinese cabinet offers a little home which can be explored by her fingers walking on a journey which is always familiar yet always new. While the children await their flirting nursery-maid they enter another miniature world of tiny insects that half-magically frees the imagination. Illicit trips in the pedlar’s van combine the joy of a small contained place—‘like being inside a shaken-up kaleidoscope’—with the thrill of movement. The security of the tiny is balanced by an awed awareness of the impressive mysteries of natural phenomena: the ‘celestial circus’ of the aurora borealis, the ‘subaqueous caverns’ of the pine-forests, the darkness outside the castle which envelops the lonely child and her dog, running ‘completely happy’ under the towering beech trees.
We can only guess what might have happened to Christian Miller had her father not died while she was still a child. We may say that she was lucky to have had the castle but luckier to lose it. In losing a father she obviously gained a mother (her novel, The Champagne Sandwich (Hodder & Stoughton, 1969), a light-hearted piece about a widow living with her two young daughters in a tiny flat in Chelsea, is dedicated to ‘my mother, who always sees the funny side’); in losing extent she gained intimacy and proximity. Her early capacity for love, lavished on carved angels, her doll Cuddly and her sister, the other Child, clearly expanded to fill her whole life. When she returns from traversing America her eldest grandson crashes into her house after a cricket match: ‘“Oh hello, Granny. You’re back. That’s nice.” And he came over and gave me a big hug. But then I saw his eyes wander over my shoulder, in the direction of the kitchen. “What’s for supper?” he asked hopefully.’
It is a question that his grandmother, the younger Child, would not have dared to ask.
Dorothy Porter
When I was a little girl, the ghosts were more real to me than the people. The people were despotic and changeable, governing my world with a confusing and alarming inconstancy. The ghosts, on the other hand, could be relied on to go about their haunting in a calm and orderly manner. Bearded or bewigged, clad in satin or velvet or nunlike drapery, they whispered their way along the dark corridors of the castle where I was born and spent the first ten years of my life, rarely interfering with or intruding on the lives of the living.
My mother couldn’t understand why the servants were frightened of the ghosts. Sitting in the sunny bow window of the Big Drawing Room, she would watch yet another maid—scanty possessions stuffed into a carpet-bag—fleeing down the drive that led through towering beech trees to the main road, and murmer sadly.
‘I can never get them to understand that the ghosts won’t hurt them. If only they’d just ask the poor things what they want.’ And she would sigh, and bend her head again over her petit point. She was working on a set of covers for the dining-room chairs, a Sisyphean task, for even if she had completed the full set of twenty-four—which she never succeeded in doing—by the time the last was done the first cover would have worn out, and she would have been compelled to start all over again.
Her concentration on her needlework was probably not helped by the fact that she had six ebullient children—known, in pairs, as the Girls, the Boys, and the Children. I was the younger Child, the last of her family. The Boys were sent to school in England when they were about eight, and the Girls when they were thirteen, so during most of my childhood they were home only during the long school holidays—four weeks in the winter, three weeks at Easter; eight weeks in the summer. But we Children—myself and a sister three years older—were, during all our years in the castle, too young to be sent away to school. Whether it was termtime or holidays, we lived in the castle, and it was dinned into us that if we found ourselves face to face with a ghost we must ask it what it wanted. ‘They only haunt because they’re worried, poor things,’ my mother would explain in her soft voice. ‘Ask them if there is anything you can do for them. And for goodness’ sake don’t be frightened. After all, they’re all your ancestors—whatever is there to be frightened of?’
So, as a child, I was never scared of the ghosts. But I didn’t go out of my way to meet them, either. I respected their privacy, and they mine.
There were four chief ghosts in the castle. The quietest was an old man in a velvet coat, who used to sit reading in the library; he was so peaceful that one could be in the room for several minutes without even noticing that he was there, but as soon as one did notice he would softly vanish, fading into the leather upholstery. The woman in a long grey dress was just as untroublesome; her face half covered with a sort of bandage similar to that worn by some orders of nuns, she would come through the wall-cupboard of the nursery and bend over the babies in their cradles, like a nurse checking to see if her charges were sleeping peacefully. Equally unobtrusive was the woman who regularly crossed one of the upper rooms of the tower and vanished into a loft; her only fault was that she did not know that since her time the room had been converted into a bathroom, and her sudden appearance sometimes unnerved male guests who, surprised in the bath, were almost relieved to discover that the woman who had entered was only a spectre. Far from quiet, however, was the red-haired young man on the stairs. He was a ghost who loved parties, and he could be relied on to turn up whenever there was festivity. Ceremonial evening dress for men having changed hardly at all for at least a hundred years, his appearance in kilt, sporran trimmed with ermine-tails, lace-edged shirt and silver-buttoned jacket, excited no particular comment among the merrymakers. It was only when some elderly woman guest would petulantly ask my mother to tell ‘the young man with the red beard’ not to push past people on the stairs that my mother would know he was out again. But anyone who slept in the tower could hear him on non-party nights as well, laughing and joking with his friends as he ran lightly up and down the steep spiral stairs. Often, after I was promoted from the nursery to a room in the tower, I would lie awake in the dark, with the blankets pulled high under my chin, listening to
the ghosts. But I never could make out what it was that they said.
* * *
The castle stood in the middle of my father’s estate, in the highlands of Scotland. Its central tower had been built in 1210, as guard-house to a nearby monastery. Of the monastery itself only the granite gates remained, but the church that had belonged to it—its first use recorded in 1078—still served as the village kirk, and in one of the safes of the castle lay a reliquary, one of the best pieces of Celtic craftsmanship in Scotland. Believed to have once held some bones of Saint Columba, who brought Christianity to Scotland in the sixth century, it was a small house-shaped box, carved from a solid piece of wood covered in bronze and silver plates carved with intertwined animals. It was decorated with bronze medallions, their borders covered with red glaze; of its enamelled hinges, pierced to take a carrying-strap, only one remained. I was unaware that it had been made more than twelve hundred years before I was born, but when I showed it to visitors I would raise the roof-shaped lid apprehensively, its strange aura making me half fear and half hope that the sanctified bones, which had long since disappeared, might have come back to rest again in the dark interior.
The castle originally consisted of the four-storey granite tower, connected by a curtain wall to a small guard tower. Probably there had been another wall that matched the first and created a courtyard containing an outside well, but no trace of this remained, although a water diviner located both hidden water and traces of precious metals in the place where this courtyard would have been, giving substance to a legend that centuries ago, in a time of attack, the inhabitants had thrown their treasures down a well.
In the seven hundred and ten years that had passed between the building of the tower and my birth, two more storeys had been added, but few alterations had been made to its basic structure. The curtain wall had been replaced by a wing of rooms, and over the centuries other wings had been constructed. They radiated from the central tower like the arms of an octopus, creating an architectural fantasy, for not only was the style of each wing separated from the style of its neighbour by several generations but some of the additions had been built on different levels, turning the interior into a maze in which only a Minotaur, or a child who had been brought up there, could feel really at home.
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