A Childhood In Scotland

by Christian Miller

  An eighteenth-century ancestor had recorded that by 1712 the castle ‘had battlements and six different roofs of various heights and directions, confusedly and inconveniently combined’, and by the time I was born it had grown even more labyrinthine. Rooms led off other rooms, passages twisted, stairs spiralled dizzily and then—just when one thought one must nearly have reached the roof—changed direction and, dropping almost vertically, led back to the point from which one had started. There were rooms with high ceilings and rooms with low ones, narrow rooms, square rooms, curved rooms. Some of the largest rooms had right next to them rooms so small that one could, by stretching out one’s arms, touch opposite walls.

  My mother loved the little rooms. She had one fitted out as a miniature library, to house her treasured personal collection of books. Born and brought up in the more urbane county of Perthshire, some hundred miles to the south, she had accepted my father’s proposal of marriage after a candle-lit courtship—not having seen him in daylight before agreeing to become his wife—and seemed never to have quite got over her surprise at finding herself the chatelaine of so comparatively uncivilised a place as the castle. Perhaps it was a sense of isolation from the sheltered world of her girlhood that made her look on her library as a sort of refuge; the tiny room, lit only by the vertical shafts of light that prised their way in through the arrow-slit windows, smelled of leather bindings and of the lily-of-the-valley scent she always wore. The almost tangible presence of the characters in the books gave the room an expectant sort of magic, like the atmosphere in an empty theatre that will soon be filled with all the bustle of a play.

  The front door of the castle was so heavy that a child could only just open it. Entering, one found oneself in the front hall, which had been made some three hundred years previously, when the curtain wall was replaced by the wing. It was a dark, depressing room, panelled with polished oak and hung with the stuffed heads of stags and of a Canadian wapiti that had once lived in the grounds. The seldom-used fireplace was flanked with carved angels, the supporters of our family coat of arms; they were roughly the size of a six-year-old child, and when I was about that age I used to hug them secretly, hoping that they might come to life and play with me, for I was often lonely. Against one wall stood a huge oak chest holding the fur-lined car rugs that were so necessary when we drove out in winter; against another stood two hinged-headed mandarins, brought back by some ancestor from a voyage to the Orient; made of papier-mâché so closely compacted that it felt like porcelain, they nodded inscrutably in the gloom, perpetually out of time with the ticking of the grandfather clock. Once a week, my father went from room to room, winding all the clocks in the castle. When the cord-suspended weight of the hall clock was cranked up, giving it the energy to run for a further seven days, there was space in the pedestal for a child to hide. To be actually inside the clock when it struck twelve was a particularly satisfying experience.

  Off the hall to the left was the smoking room, even darker than the hall and redolent of tobacco. Men did not normally smoke in the drawing rooms; to enjoy their pipes or cigars they were banished to the smoking room or to the newer billiard room, which adjoined it. Under the silk-shaded lights, the green surface of the billiard table stretched down the centre of the room. The walls were decorated with sporting trophies—animal heads from Africa, or plaster models of outsize fish. Built into one corner was a sacred stone, seven feet high and carved with a primitive cross; it dated from the ninth or early tenth century, but until the billiard room was built in 1888 had simply stood outside in a field.

  Because we might damage the cloth, we children were not allowed to play billiards, but sometimes we were allowed to stay in the room when a game was in progress and would run busily round the heavy-legged table, picking the ivory balls out of the pockets; when we grew tired, we would lie on our backs beneath the table, drawing pictures on the underside of its slate bed with the green chalk kept for marking the ends of the cues.

  The smoking room butted up against the guard tower. The little circular room at the foot of this tower, reached through a door so small that one almost needed to consume an Alice-in-Wonderland ‘Eat Me’ cake in order to pass through, was called Meg’s Hole. Legend had it that Meg, married to an early owner of the castle, had been left behind while he and the other men had gone out to face a rival clan, who were on their way to attack the castle. But the attacking clan had circumvented the defenders, and Meg, glancing out of a tiny window in the guard tower, had spied the enemy advancing up the drive. Having a pretty shrewd idea of what would happen to her if she was captured, she had grasped the shaft of a huge meat hook that hung from the ceiling of the small room, pulled herself up, and, letting go sharply, impaled herself through the throat on the barb. There the invaders found her when they entered the undefended tower, and there they left her for her husband to see when he returned home.

  For a very long time after her death, the dark marks of her blood were said to have stained the stone floor under the hook, and, discovering that they had finally worn away, my brothers hastened to touch them up. After all, they reasoned, if visitors were too ignorant to tell the difference between blood and red paint, what could be the harm?

  Above Meg’s Hole was my mother’s little library, and above this was the museum. Circular, like both the rooms below it, the museum was ringed with shelves, on which were set out all manner of curios, mostly connected with rocks or fossils or skeletons. I wasn’t allowed to touch any of these, so I found the museum boring; above it, the guard tower ended in a little round dressing-room. All four floors of the guard tower were connected by a tiny, cramped, curving stone staircase.

  Turning right instead of left from the hall, one entered the base of the main tower and, passing the foot of the small spiral stairs that led up to the first floor, found oneself in a low, stone-floored passage. Opening off this passage were the wine cellar, the beer cellar, the lamp room, the butler’s pantry, and the silver room. They were all vault-ceilinged and very dark. At the end of the passage was one of the new wings. It had been built about the seventeenth century and contained the servants’ hall the cook’s private sitting room—known, for some long-vanished reason, as the housekeeper’s room—the menservants’ bedrooms, and some storerooms and larders, most of the latter facing due south. Branching from this wing were three other wings; one-storeyed, they held the kitchen, the scullery, the dairy, the game larder, the two laundry rooms, and an inner and outer gun room.

  The outer gun room was littered with muddy boots, wet mackintoshes, dogs’ leads, discarded lunch baskets, empty ferret boxes, newly killed game, leather-seated shooting sticks, and string-sided gamebags. Rough, red-faced beaters tramped in and out—smelling, in their wet, work-soiled tweeds, very like the Labradors and spaniels that, just returned from a shoot, lay in exhausted, furry heaps in the dark corners. In contrast, the inner gun room, which opened off it, housed some of the family’s most valuable possessions—the 12-and 20-bore sporting guns, which, in pairs, stood on their stocks in baize-lined, glass-fronted cabinets; alongside them were the rifles for killing stags, and the small ‘four-tens’ with which children learned to shoot. Pistols lay neatly beside boxes of ammunition. Oil, cleaning rags, ramrods, and small tools were laid precisely on the window ledges. The room smelled of oil and old gun-powder, overlaid with the faint odour of abraded steel; in atmosphere it seemed halfway between an operating theatre and a shrine.

  Beyond the gun rooms stood long weatherproof boxes containing the salmon and trout rods; nearby, in an outhouse, hung the nets and the vicious, hook-ended gaffs used for landing salmon. The reels, lines, spinners, and steel-barbed fishing flies were kept in the inner gun room, where the bright feathers of the flies burned like glowworms under the mica lids of the small compartmented boxes in which they lay.

  The main tower of the castle had two spiral stairs. The small one led only to the first floor; its curved walls were encrusted with swords, claymores, broadswords, dirks, daggers,
rapiers, and sabres, and, like almost all spiral stairs, it curved upward in a clockwise direction, so that a defender would have the benefit of a free right-handed swing of his sword arm against a mounting attacker. The small stairs finished at the door of the Little Drawing Room. This was a cozy room lying over the front hall. One of our four pianos was here; it was a baby grand made of inlaid rosewood, with a lyre-shaped music rest. Next to it stood a black-and-gold Chinese cabinet. By standing on the gros-point seat of the piano stool, I could reach high enough to open the doors of this cabinet; inside, the drawers and doors and divisions were arranged to give the appearance of an Oriental palace. There were staircases I could make my fingers walk up and down, and secret compartments I would find and then pretend to forget, so as to give myself, all over again, the joy of fresh discovery.

  Double doors connected the little with the Big Drawing Room. Half of this was old, lying over the smoking room, and half was new, having been built when the billiard room was added in 1888. The resulting double cube made the Big Drawing Room the most beautiful room in the castle. At the point where the old and the new parts met, the walls were slightly thicker; to mask these projections, very tall gilt-framed looking-glasses had been hung facing each other across the room, and if, standing to one side of one of these looking-glasses, I peeped carefully round the frame, I could see a long corridor of mirrors reflecting each other into what seemed to be infinity. From down this mysterious gallery of glass innumerable small girls gazed back at me, silent, wondering, the strands of their hair lifting in unison with my own.

  The Big Drawing Room had five large windows, facing east, west and south, and a small sixth window, shaped like a cross, facing north; the large ones were all hung with embroidered Jacobean curtains. The intricate design of birds and trees that flowed from floor to ceiling was beginning to pull away from the original linen backing, and when relations came to stay they were sometimes coerced into spending wet afternoons stitching the embroidery onto new foundations of cream-coloured satin. My mother was indignant that the original material was perishing—after all, it was only three hundred years old.

  Whenever the sun shone, it flooded through the windows of the Big Drawing Room, bathing the oriental rugs, the glass-fronted china cabinets, the Louis XIV chairs, the Tudor stump-work sewing box, and the carved and gilded Spanish madonna that stood on a pedestal beside the grand piano. The madonna was about four feet tall, and had at one time adorned the long-demolished palace of a dimly-distant local bishop. Nobody knew exactly how she had come to Scotland; perhaps, like the dark-brown eyes of some of the local inhabitants, she was a legacy of the Armada, a few of whose ships were driven north and wrecked on the coast of Scotland after Drake defeated the Spaniards in 1588. Tradition also had it that some of the patterns we knitted into our jerseys had also been brought to Scotland by the survivors of the Armada, who had themselves inherited the designs from the Arab conquerors of Spain.

  The madonna had a wistful face; most of the portraits in the Big Drawing Room were, however, happy ones. In pale-blue satin or creamy lace, scarlet velvet or green taffeta or white muslin, their hair constrained by ribbons or flowing free, my ancestresses held court on the walls, as much a part of our living family as if they had been seated with us round the fire. Behind them in their portraits were the familiar outlines of mountains or streams that we could still see out of the windows, and their trailing hands caressed dogs that might have come from the same litter as those that we children romped with on the floor. The madonna, together with the most beautiful of the family portraits—an Allan Ramsay painting of a woman in cream-and-blue satin—and many other family treasures had been spirited out of the castle at the end of the nineteenth century by an avaricious nephew of the then very elderly owner; it had been a classic Victorian melodrama of exchanged deed-boxes and misinterpreted wills, ending with my mother spending much of her dowry to restore the heirlooms to the castle.

  If, instead of turning into the Little Drawing Room at the top of the small spiral stairs, one turned right, one entered the anteroom, a compact, vault-ceilinged room that lay outside the dining room. This dining room had once been the main living room of the castle, and had a fireplace so large that half-a-dozen people could stand inside it. The open chimney soared straight up to the top of the tower; standing in the fireplace I could look clear up to the sky and imagine only too vividly the sooty life of child sweeps who, like the hero of one of my storybooks (Kingsley’s The Water Babies) had been forced to climb such Stygian funnels. The fire that burned there in winter was so fierce that, if we wanted to make toast, we had to use toasting-forks fashioned from the antlers of deer, the curve of the horns allowing us to shelter round the corner of the fireplace while still presenting bread to the flames.

  To break the draught that this blaze would otherwise have tugged across the room, my mother placed by the door a petit-point screen, embroidered by the child of one of my ancestors in the early seventeen-hundreds. The wan face of this diligent little girl gazed down from a group portrait on the wall; near her stood her brother, in whose Edinburgh house she was spied, many years later, by Robert Louis Stevenson. In his book Catriona Stevenson makes his hero, David Balfour, describe how his host (whom he names) introduced ‘a dry old lady’ who ‘sat at a frame of embroidery’ as his sister (also named). The screen was reputed to have been largely stitched at a particularly beautiful bend in the river, near to the castle—a spot still known by the little girl’s name; could she also have been working on it far into her old age? Six feet high and nine feet wide, with a hundred and forty-four stitches in each square inch, the making of it must have been a daunting task; I was comforted that Stevenson, through the mouth of David Balfour, twice described the old lady as ‘smiling’.

  The dining room had been panelled in 1707 to celebrate the union of England and Scotland, and the plaster ceiling, installed at the same time, was ornamented with a design of intertwined roses and thistles. Under the plaster ceiling there was rumoured to be a second ceiling of carved and gilded rafters, and behind a section of panelling that had been set on hinges there was an aumbry, thought to have been a ‘priest’s hole’, where a priest could hide in the event of an attack—though it was difficult to imagine how even the thinnest of priests could survive for long in so small a cupboard. Above and to the side of the aumbry could be glimpsed a part of the frescoes that lay behind the panelling. These were thought to have been commissioned by a laird of the time of Veronese, who, admiring the paintings he had seen during his travels in Italy, had brought an Italian artist back to Scotland and instructed him to decorate the bleak walls of the room with coats-of-arms and scenes reminiscent of the Field Of The Cloth Of Gold. In the south-west corner of the room, concealed by another hinged section of panelling, was a crumbling stone staircase that had once led down to a well—useful in time of siege.

  Down the centre of the room ran the dark, polished dining table; fully extended, it could seat twenty-six people. It was lit at night by a row of four-branched silver candelabra and was commanded from either end by my parents’ high-backed, thronelike chairs. Two circular tables stood in the window embrasures to accommodate extra guests, and three serving tables lined the wall next to the door, ready to receive the dishes as they came up from the kitchen. Unless one was lucky enough to have a seat near the fire, the dining room was, like most of the other rooms, extremely cold.

  In the wing above the servants’ hall and storerooms were small, private rooms. Winding away from the anteroom, a very dark passage led first to my eldest sister’s bedroom, heavy with the scent of talcum powder, and then to the boudoir—the sitting room that she shared with another sister, three years younger than herself. The boudoir housed our communal treasure—a hand-wound gramophone. During the holidays, the two girls locked themselves in the boudoir for hours on end and, with an old jersey stuffed into the speaking-horn to muffle the sound, played and re-played their scanty stock of sentimental records; my father, had he heard
the clarinets and crooners, would have been sure to object. Forbidden by my sisters to join them, I lay on the sheepskin rug outside the door, listening entranced to the wicked rhyming of moon with June.

  My own province—the day and night nurseries—lay beyond the boudoir, shut off from the main part of the house by two green baize doors. The day nursery was a beautiful room with a large south-facing bow window, and at varying times served as the principal bedroom of the castle; the cupboard through which the tender ghost drifted to gaze at the babies was eventually converted into a doorway, leading to a new bathroom.

  From the anteroom outside the dining-room the main spiral stairs of the castle began their climb to the roof, five storeys above. Mounting the stairs, one came first to the main bedroom floor. Here slept my mother, her bedroom door secured by a brass-weighted fastener that was operated from her bed by an elaborate system of pulleys. The little wheels squeaked when she pulled the cord; secretly, I suspected that small goblins worked the machinery. Next to my mother’s bedroom was my father’s dressing room and, close by, a room devoted entirely to cupboards. My father had a very orderly mind, and each cupboard and drawer was clearly marked with its contents, listed as they might have been in an army quartermaster’s stores. ‘Vests, wool, thick,’ or ‘Shirts, silk, best,’ the neatly inscribed labels ran. On this floor and the one above were the visitors’ bedrooms. Green Room, Red Room, Brown Room, White Room, Tartan Room—room after room stood permanently prepared, with fresh towels beside the china washbasins, ready at any moment for the arrival of friends or relations. Tucked in between these two floors, at a different level from either of them, were the schoolroom and thegoverness’sroom above these was the library, with massive leather-bound volumes, too heavy for a child to pull out, and movable ladders for reaching the upper shelves. During my brothers’ holidays from school, they monopolised the library, for one of their hobbies was building boats, and in the library they could construct their eighteen-foot clinker-built sailing dinghy, their gunning-punt, or their canvas-skinned canoes. Because none of these could go down the spiral stairs, they were, when finished, lowered out of the window on the end of a rope. Sometimes the rope broke, and the work of months would be reduced to a tangle of broken staves and split canvas at the foot of the tower. If that happened, my brothers simply started again.