A Childhood In Scotland

by Christian Miller

  On one mantelpiece stood a bronze clock shaped like a drum. It was supported by a bronze cherub, poised as if to strike the face of the clock with a bronze drumstick. When the big hand and the little hand were straight up and down, Nanny would come and fetch us, to put us to bed. Some evenings, the hands seemed to move with an almost unbearable lethargy.

  The term before I was six, I graduated from the nursery to the schoolroom in the tower; my sister had already been there for two years. Deliberately, my mother always chose rather stupid governesses, her theory being that only unintelligent women would understand how hard it was to learn; unfortunately, this meant that their teaching was usually very dull. We did our lessons seated at a circular table; my legs, which were too short to reach either the floor or the central pedestal of the table, prickled with pins-and-needles.

  ‘Stop fidgeting,’ our governess ordered. I tried leaning my elbows on the red wool tablecloth, to ease the pressure behind my knees.

  ‘Elbows off the table!’ the governess snapped.

  I tried grasping the sides of my chair seat with my hands and levering myself a few inches off the cushion.

  ‘Whatever are you doing, child? Get on with your writing, please.’

  Wearily, with inky fingers, I picked up the wooden pen. It was no use. One just couldn’t win.

  Our governess, who had taught the four elder children before taking on my nearest sister and me, was, like my father, a strict disciplinarian. She was also extremely ugly, having been chosen by my mother in preference to several other more prepossessing candidates not in spite of, but because of, her complete lack of physical allure. Not that my father was given to seducing nubile governesses, but my mother, perhaps with a certain amount of sense, was unwilling to take any chances. When this positive gorgon of a woman—over six feet tall, flat-chested, bristly-haired, and with enormous feet—applied for the job, my mother, quickly tearing up the other applications from twenty-year-old charmers, engaged her on the spot. But for all her severity and lack of grace we loved this governess dearly, and my father, appreciating her worth and probably also seeing through my mother’s gentle ruse, affectionately nicknamed her Rosy Rapture.

  Incongruously, she had a passion for birds. She seemed to know every bird on the estate—lark and swallow, wren, chaffinch, thrush, blackbird, oyster-catcher, plover, blue tit, yellowhammer, and many more; she knew and could imitate their calls; she knew where they nested, and the paths of their migrations; she watched them in summer and fed them in winter, and buried them (in matchbox, cigar box, or shoe box, according to size) when she found them lying, cloudy-eyed, dead in the snow. Our tedious lessons were enlivened by the bird table that she had fixed outside the schoolroom window. There came the tits, to hang upside-down on a dripping-filled coconut-shell, and the quarrelsome robins. Sparrows fought gamely for crusts with pigeons more than ten times their size, and beady-eyed starlings, seeming almost to sense their low status in the avian hierarchy, hopped quickly in and out, making off with a morsel of food before any more aristocratic bird had a chance to dispute their right of entry.

  In the spring, she took us bird-nesting, not for the purpose of collecting eggs—a practice of which she strongly disapproved—but to study the construction of the nests and to watch the development of the baby birds. We mapped the woods around the castle, marking each discovered nest, and out on the fields, where the plovers laid their eggs in stone-edged hollows, we fought with her inevitably losing battles against iron harrows and heavy-footed Clydesdale horses. In the academic sense, we learnt little from her except for basic skills, but in the world of birds her teaching was beyond price.

  None of our governesses thought of relating our lessons to the story of our family. The history of the Napoleonic wars, for instance, would have been far more interesting if someonehad pointed out to us that Napoleonhad surrendered to our great-great-grandfather on our mother’s side, and Shakespeare would surely not have bored us so much had we known that on our father’s side we were descended from King Duncan, the victim of Macbeth. Could my mother’s surprising dexterity with hammer and pliers have come down to her from her great-grandfather, who, born in 1797 with both ability and ample means, had become the first president of the Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers and had backed Stephenson in his development of the ‘Rocket’? Or her interest in literature have grown from a childhood spent among the books left by her father’s first wife (the dead mother of her older half-sisters) who was a first cousin to Elizabeth Barrett Browning? Was my father’s deeply-felt interest in the estate inherited from an eighteenth-century progenitor—an acknowledged innovator in the art of land management? The castle teemed with historical records; books, pictures, furnishings and objets 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. Instead, we struggled to learn by heart a list of the books of the Bible, traced—with a sense of suffocating boredom—maps which showed the outlines of the counties of England, or laboured over such tedious tasks as darning our woollen stockings, each of the mending-threads painstakingly criss-crossed, so that the finished effect was of a woven patch. We also learnt real weaving, setting up the pattern of our family tartan on loaf-sized looms and fashioning scarves and mats from wool that we had dyed with lichen, bark or herbs. One grey lichen—crottle—growing plentifully on the granite walls of the fields, produced an orange dye of outstanding ugliness, tingeing much of our handwork with the hue of sun-scorched earth.

  When our ornithological governess, stricken by mortal illness, suddenly left us, my mother—alarmed, perhaps, by the idea that she might have to look after her own children—broke her self-imposed rule and, cabling an agency in Paris, engaged a young French girl without a preliminary interview. Mademoiselle, who arrived a week later, turned out to be dark-haired and, in a quiet way, extremely seductive, but my mother need have had no fears of her so much as exchanging glances with my father, for she had not been in the castle for more than twenty-four hours before she threw herself, both literally and figuratively, into the arms of the footman. The steep spiral stairs that ran up the full height of the tower were not easily negotiated by someone accustomed to a Neuilly bungalow; we children grasped the rope that hung almost vertically down the central pillar around which the stairs pivoted and, more or less air-borne, glissaded down in giant leaps of twenty or more treads at a time. Mademoiselle, hastening after us, lost her footing and fell, with a delicate Gallic shriek, straight into the arms of John, the current footman, who luckily happened to be coming upstairs at that exact moment.

  This John was a most romantic-looking young man, tall, even-featured and, like many people in Scotland, red-haired. Caught as she fell down the stairs, Mademoiselle gazed up at John’s brilliant mountain-blue eyes—and fell instantaneously, hopelessly in love. John, intoxicated by his first breath of French perfume, was not slow to respond.

  Who could possibly blame Mademoiselle—young, pretty, and above all, lonely? A governess, although theoretically a member of the family, was, in fact, ostracised by every group in the castle. True, she taught the children and ate lunch with them and their parents, but she dined alone in the schoolroom and never, unless she was given a definite invitation, sat in the drawing room. Servants—even the ones who fought among themselves—united in resenting every governess, who to them represented almost as much work as an extra visitor in the house, without the benefit of a visitor’s accompanying tip. Even the children whom she taught seized every opportunity to elude her. In the long evenings, alone in the deserted schoolroom, she sat reading yesterday’s Times while outside the wind soughed round the shuttered windows of the castle. It was a solitary life.

  Into the virginal vacuum of the schoolroom, that blazing summer, erupted John, carroty curls springing rebelliously from restraining Brylcreem, uniform buttons
agleam. He and Mademoiselle conducted much of their romance through the medium of song. Beside the schoolroom piano stood a walnut music-stand stuffed with leather-bound scores of Bach and Chopin and Beethoven and Mendelssohn, and also, for the training of our young voices as well as the exercise of our fingers, a volume of Scottish songs. Musical notes fortunately knowing no frontiers, it was not long before Mademoiselle was fingering her way tentatively through the air of ‘Annie Laurie’.

  It was when she had mastered the cadences of ‘Maxwelton Braes’ and was groping her way through the opening bars of ‘Coming Through the Rye’ that John, hurtling in with the schoolroom tea-tray, suddenly burst into song.

  Gin a body meet a body, coming through the rye,

  Gin a body meet a body, need a body cry?

  he carolled in a clear, strong baritone.

  I gazed, open-mouthed with astonishment, but Mademoiselle, quickly rising to the occasion, dimpled prettily and, with a suddenly-developed dexterity, hastened to play the accompaniment to the next verse. John sang on, and after a while she joined in with a hesitant soprano.

  In some ways, Scottish dialect is nearer to French than it is to English, and once they found that they could sing duets together, John and Mademoiselle must have felt that they had discovered an almost ideal method of overcoming the language barrier. Every evening, when he came to fetch our tea-tray, John would linger in the schoolroom. Conscious although I was that he should really not be there, I was secretly delighted, for he played Snap with me, and did fascinating conjuring tricks with glasses of water and lengths of string. He taught the schoolroom dog how to Die For The Country, and above all, he sang duets with Mademoiselle.

  I lay on the bearskin hearth-rug, replete with scones and raspberry jam, watching Mademoiselle as, seated at the upright piano in her pretty foreign clothes, she tried out first one key and then another. John, an elbow propped nonchalantly against the piano’s polished candle-holder, leant solicitously over her, turning the pages of the music album. And then they would sing.

  ‘On the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond’, ‘Over the sea to Skye’, ‘Weel may the keel row’—the familiar verses and melodies filled the darkening schoolroom and drifted out of the narrow windows, to mingle with the whirr of the wings of a late swallow or the high, almost inaudible squeak of a hunting bat. Unnoticed beside the dark chasm of the unlit fire, I hugged the snuffling, sleeping dog, and wondered why it was I felt so happy.

  My brothers, who had respected but not actually loved the previous governess, treated Mademoiselle with unaccustomed tolerance; towards either a governess or visiting child that they did not like they could, however, be merciless. We had no relations on my father’s side except for a morose uncle, married incongruously to a frail, exotic American; on my mother’s side, though, we were liberally supplied with uncles and aunts, whose progeny—coming from less spartan homes than ours—were ritually despised by my brothers. Small cousins, wearing modish clothes from Harrods or The White House, would be dragooned into crossing a nearby ornamental burn on a whippy, single-plank bridge; this burn, coerced at some date prior to 1782—when it was featured in a painting—into a glassy ribbon punctuated by waterfalls, was made even more alarming by the fact that at certain times of the year it swarmed with baby eels. The same luckless cousins would be abandoned, candleless, in vaulted cellars, or lured into tree-houses, from which their pitiful wails, hours later, would signal their paralysing terror of attempting a lone descent. Any governess whom my brothers decided to hate would find a live hedgehog in her bed, or be plied with elaborately-embroidered tales of ghosts, subsequently to be awakened in the small hours by mysteriously-banging doors. Their ghostly inventiveness reached its peak one dark night when, to get rid of a particularly unpopular governess, my brothers wrapped themselves in white sheets and lay down in the massive white schoolroom bath; the governess, groping for the taps by the flickering light of a candle, suddenly found the floor of the bath heaving up towards her, its macabre groans magnified horribly by the porcelain sides of the bath.

  As soon as we were judged old enough to take care of ourselves, we children were turned loose out of doors when lessons ended. The daily life of the estate provided countless fascinations. Down one of the drives we might find the foresters, lopping a dangerous branch off an old beech tree; later, we would come on them felling holly or ash for the fires, or planting, on some hill too barren for even the most stalwart farmer to cultivate, a new plantation of bristly baby pines or soft, ethereal larches.

  In a field near the end of one of the drives was the shepherd’s caravan, surrounded by the lambing pens to which the mountain ewes were brought in springtime. Here we went to watch the ewes giving birth and to help the shepherd feed bottles of milk to orphan lambs. The shepherd’s caravan, heated by an iron stove as small and as black as an opera hat, smelled of warm milk and sheep wool; along one end ran the shepherd’s bed—a single wood plank only about a foot wide, covered with a grey homespun blanket. He drank the same milk as he gave to the lambs and so, whenever he offered it to us, did we, while his two brindled sheepdogs watched us from their corner by the stove, hopeful of leftover drops.

  Perhaps because of its atmosphere of danger, the stone quarry held a special attraction. Here the brawny-armed quarry-men battled the cliffs of grey granite with gunpowder, pickaxe and wedge. The warning hooter would moan down the valley, followed a minute later by the smoke of the gunpowder, which, in turn, was followed by the sound of the detonation. If we were free, these signs that the quarrymen were at work sent us scampering for our ponies, so we could ride up and watch the fun. We were, of course, forbidden to go anywhere near the quarry while blasting was in progress, but this was an order that we habitually disobeyed. To crouch with some dust-covered quarryman behind a heap of protective boulders, waiting for the charge to go off, made me feel akin to the midshipmen at the Battle of Trafalgar, or to the drummer boys on the field of Waterloo, for the noise seemed to duplicate exactly the roar of a cannon. Only boys were allowed to light the fuses; I watched, frozen with delicious terror, while one of my brothers lit the end of the snakelike fuse and then, with a nonchalance that he surely could not have felt, strolled away to shelter. The explosion shook the ground and sent the black mountain crows that nested in the crevices of the rock protesting through the dust-filled air.

  After the explosion, the quarrymen, skilled in detecting the faults in the grain of the granite, split it into blocks with wedges. The best blocks were shipped to London, where they were used in the building of the Thames Embankment, but most of the stone from the quarry was used for cottages, farmhouses and farm buildings. The highland cottages were very solidly built. They might lack even the most primitive amenities—a cold tap was considered something of a luxury in a district where water was usually fetched from a stream or well—but their walls were of rock. like the church in the village, they could be expected to last for anything up to a thousand years.

  The small, rejected pieces of rock went to the stone breakers, who sat at the sides of the roads on short, one-legged stools. They would reach for a stone from the pile beside them, toss it a yard or so in the air to get its feel and balance, and then, holding it in the palm of one hand, strike it sharply with the small hammer that they held in the other. No matter how unyielding the stone appeared, it always broke, and they would repeat the process with the larger fragments until all were reduced to a suitable size for mending the road.

  Close to the quarry on a rough patch of ground stood the permanent pens of the sheep-dip. Sheep-dipping, which was the idea of a farmer-turned-chemist from the border town of Coldstream, had only been in fashion for about a hundred years. Prior to that, anyone wishing to rid a sheep’s coat of parasites had had to wash the animal by hand. Now, it was a job carried out by professionals who travelled from estate to estate, easily recognisable by the colour of their arms, which were stained right up to the shoulder by the yellow liquid into which they plunged the s
heep. The black-faced mountain animals were marshalled by sheepdogs through a series of interconnecting pens, which finally led them to a sunken concrete bath filled with creamy-yellow disinfectant; in pits on either side of the bath stood the dippers—rubber-aproned, blasphemous—and as each sheep was precipitated out of the final pen they grasped it firmly, closed its nostrils with their fingers, and plunged it under the liquid. The whole ceremony resembled nothing so much as a rowdy mass baptism.

  Shearing, also, was done by travelling professionals. Although home spinning had almost entirely died out by the time I was born, we still used many articles that had survived from the days when, instead of being sold, the wool from the sheep was processed on the estate. This local wool was durable stuff; I slept during most of my childhood under homespun blankets embroidered ‘1745’—the year of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s abortive rebellion against the English. My family, being at that time more practical than romantic, had fought against Bonnie Prince Charlie, a fact that had not—even nearly two hundred years later—been forgotten by our neighbours. To tease those who still felt particularly indignant, my father had been known to place them, at dinner, directly facing the portrait of a bewigged ancestor, a judge, who had been the head of our family when the Prince of Orange (William 111) had taken over the Stuart throne.

  * * *

  Perhaps the activity we loved best was riding. We could ride wherever we wished, for, although most of the farms were let to tenants, our right to go where we chose was never questioned. The only snag to riding was that from time to time my father took it into his head to teach me how to do it. Left to myself, I simply got onto the Shetland pony that was habitually tethered half-way down the front drive, pointed its head in the general direction that I wanted to take, and started off, unhampered by either saddle or bridle. But my father’s cavalry training rebelled against such a ragged turnout, and if he came on me and was free he insisted on giving me lessons. Dumped unceremoniously on the back of one of the pensioned-off hunters or polo ponies kept in the stable, bare legs pinched between stirrup leather and saddle, I was sent to a paddock, down one side of which stood a line of jumps. Sweating with fear, I was made to cajole my horse into position at the start of the line, where my father stood, legs apart, flexing and unflexing a formidable, tassel-ended whip. Crack, the whip came down on my horse’s rump. The animal leaped forward, and I grabbed the saddle pommel.