A Childhood In Scotland

by Christian Miller

  He was, however, much respected as a soldier, and when in 1902 he was created a Companion of the Distinguished Service Order, thirty lines of closely-packed type recorded his outstanding military career. Retiring from the army in 1909—the year he married my mother—he rejoined at the start of the 1914 war and, until severely wounded, commanded a highland regiment. After my grandfather made over the estate to him, he did everything in his power to be a good landlord; he was hard-working and honourable, and no doubt always acted with the very best intentions, but perhaps because he had never known affection from his own parents he found it almost impossible to show love to his children. True, when the boys were away at school he sat down at his big roll-top desk every Sunday, to write to them, and when my nearest sister, tripping over a dog, fell hands-first into a blazing fire she found herself—in terrible pain—being cradled consolingly in his arms. But the only time I ever remember him playing with me was when he once showed me how to tie a fisherman’s knot, and, as soon as I had mastered the intricacies of fastening line to cast he sent me brusquely away. Whether because he was in continual pain from his war-wound—which had torn away much of the muscles of his right arm—or because he was already developing the hardening of the arteries from which he died, he was an unapproachable father, and when someone finally broke the news to me of his death, I was at a loss to know why it seemed expected of me that I should cry.

  Although I don’t doubt that he loved her deeply, he showed little understanding or consideration towards my mother. Even after the estate had been made over to him, my grandfather and my grandmother continued to live in the castle, bickering so continually with each other that my mother, pregnant for the second time, felt driven to have the baby in a rented house; my father, bringing her home with the heir (her first child had been a girl) in her arms, was embarrassed to find that the tenants had stretched a banner of welcome across the drive, and were gathered in the forecourt of the castle to cheer. Ordering the chauffeur to stop the car, he jumped out, leaving my mother to arrive at the door alone. Even if his action was caused by the fundamental shyness that may have lain under his apparently total self-confidence, it was not a kind thing to do, and though nothing could seriously damage my mother’s devotion to him the incident was one that she never forgot.

  My father never joined in any of our treats, such as our winter visits to the pantomime. Each year, the theatre in the county town put on a Christmas production of Dick Whittington or Cinderella or Humpty Dumpty or—to us wonderful, because of the flying—Peter Pan. My mother booked seats in the front row of the dress circle, with an extra unoccupied seat to put our coats on. The manager of the theatre, resplendent—even though we always attended a matinee—in dinner-jacket and black tie, met us at the door, bowed to mother as if she was royalty, and personally ushered us to our places. Pantomimes, in those days, were truly designed for children, with none of the adult-orientated vulgarities that later crept in; as the fabulous stories unfolded, I was torn between wishing the afternoon would never end and longing for the most magical moment of all—the transformation scene that ritually terminated the performance.

  Nor did my father join in birthday celebrations. Even before I could count, I looked forward eagerly to my birthday, marking off the days on the nursery calendar by a simple before-breakfast progression from one square to the next. My birthday was for me a magic day—the one day in the year on which I was completely confident that I would not be either scolded or smacked. Of course, if I was naughty on my birthday I would no doubt have been chastised, but whoever heard of anyone being naughty on their birthday? On my birthday I could do more or less what I wanted, I could choose the pudding for luncheon (almost always opting for pink jelly) and could even be fairly sure that the grown-ups would actually listen to me if I wanted to tell them something. Under such heavenly circumstances, who could possibly sin?

  Birthday presents were few and, on the whole, practical. My father didn’t think much of toys; for my sixth birthday he and my mother gave me a school desk, and for my seventh I received a set of carpentry tools. These were not toy tools, but full-sized workmen’s ones; I had to take both hands even to lift the hammer.

  The present I liked best was a doll made from a stocking, which I was given when I was four; she had black boot-button eyes, and because she was bald she wore, whether naked or dressed, a pink crocheted bonnet. Her name was Cuddly, and I loved her dearly, but when I was six an over-officious nanny, deciding that she was dirty, cremated her in the nursery fire. All that remained were the two boot-button eyes and the hook off her bonnet. I was heartbroken, and even the gift from a sympathetic visitor of a china doll with real hair could not console me. I was almost glad when the visitor’s own child resentfully stamped on the head of my new doll; if Cuddly could not—phoenix-like—be re-born I did not want a substitute and, indeed, I never had another doll.

  The morning I was given Cuddly, a pink ribbon had been uncomfortably knotted into my stubbornly straight hair, and I had been sent to visit my mother in her bedroom. My father always got up early, but my mother, who never quite succeeded in adjusting herself to either the cold or the spartan habits of the north, lay in bed for as long as she dared, sipping China tea and nibbling very thin slices of white bread and butter. It was lucky for her that she had not married into an earlier generation of the family, for about 1734 one of my ancestors had written of his young wife—like my mother, from the south—that she was ‘a dreadful slug-a-bed; Tis oft six of a morn ere she rises’.

  I knocked at my mother’s door, and the little wheels of the pulley squeaked as she released the fastener. ‘Come in!’ she called, and I reached up for the handle. It was of porcelain, painted with forget-me-nots, and in the chilly air of the passage it felt like a lump of ice.

  My birthday was in December, so there was a fire burning in her bedroom, the reflection of the flames licking brightly against the shiny brass fireguard. On the fur hearth-rug stood a circular metal bath, to which the maids would later carry hot-water cans shaped like tall tea-pots, my mother having refused to bathe anywhere except in front of her bedroom fire. Not for her the rigours of the castle’s only bathroom, from the hot taps of which—or so the story went—ice had been known to fall. In later years, she spent another part of her dowry in adding more bathrooms to the castle—a visitors‘ bathroom, a maids’ bathroom, a schoolroom bathroom, and a bathroom for the nursery, but they, too, were linoleum-floored and bleak, and were used more from a sense of duty than from any expectation of pleasure.

  My mother was sitting up in her princess-and-the-pea bed, propped against a pile of lace-edged pillows; she wore a frilled georgette bedjacket, and her yard-long brown hair streamed down on to the silk-covered eiderdown. She held out her arms to me.

  ‘Happy Birthday! Have some sugar!’ And she proffered a lump of sugar from her tray, her hand held flat, as if I were a pony.

  I climbed up beside her, feet tucked under the eiderdown.

  ‘And how old are you today? Is it one, or two?’

  I giggled happily, and slid down until only my nose was clear of the eiderdown. Secretly, I licked the silk; it tasted, disappointingly, of nothing.

  ‘Three, then?’

  I shrieked with laughter, and rolled over and over, down into the hollow from which my father had risen.

  ‘Surely you can’t be four? Not already?’

  My mother’s black terrier, woken unexpectedly from a dream of chocolate-peppermint-creams, jumped barking from his basket as I bounced up and down on the big bed, trying to grab from her the present that she had magically produced from under her pillows.

  The high spot of a birthday was tea, which was served in the dining room. Balanced on a heap of cushions in my father’s big chair I contemplated, entranced, the crackers and tinsel and chocolate biscuits, the shortbread and Swiss rolls and ginger snaps that spread in seemingly limitless bounty between me and my mother, at the other end of the table. On either side sat my brothers and si
sters, for this one glorious day relegated to positions subservient to my own. Toward the end of tea, all the candles on the table were blown out and my birthday cake was brought in, its candles seeming to me to burn as brightly as the sun. Chocolate cake with white icing, the words ‘Many Happy Returns’ scrolled in pink around the top—had there ever been a more beautiful cake? Surely not, I told myself as, paper hat falling over my eyes, I licked some icing off my fingers, positively daring the grown-ups to correct my manners. Birthdays were always happy.

  Christmas was another wonderful day. When my mother first came to the castle, she had been horrified to find that it was treated as an ordinary working day; she looked out of the window on the first Christmas morning of her marriage and was astounded to see the gardeners raking the gravel of the castle courtyard. Later in the day, she was amazed to discover the village shop open for trade and to find the blacksmith hammering noisily at an hour when she expected him to be on his knees in the kirk. The very next year, she set about importing the delights of Christmas, superimposing—like the early Apostles—new customs onto rites that already existed.

  One of the ancient games that my mother found still being played in the castle was brandy snapping. Brandy snapping—the name came not from the drink but from the word ‘brand’, a derivation from the old verb ‘brinnan’, to burn—was in its original form played by standing all the young girls round a silver dish. This dish, about the size of a card table, was filled with nuts, which were then doused with spirits and set alight. The girls had to snatch the nuts from the flames, and burned fingers were once supposed to be a sign that a girl was no longer a virgin. The secret, of course, lay in snapping up a nut so quickly that the flames did not have time to strike. But seeing the anguish that this yearly joke caused young servant-girls who, completely virtuous, hesitated for the very understandable reason that they were frightened of fire—my mother widened the net and persuaded everyone to play, infiltrating the idea that the girl who snatched the most nuts would be the first to marry. In the darkened dining room, the flames leaped up toward the rose-and-thistle ceiling as family, visitors and servants jostled round the lighted dish. If my father saw some young maid dithering on the edge of the group, he would pick her up bodily and force her hand into the flames. ‘Come on now! We can’t have you ending up a spinster!’ Struggling and screaming happily, she would allow her hand to be forced among the burning nuts, and would then be thrown through the air into the arms of whichever of the watching menservants seemed keenest to catch her.

  Finding that there was a tradition of feasting and decorating the castle with evergreen boughs, my mother had little difficulty in adding to the day turkeys, plum puddings and Christmas trees, and although everyone continued to work on Christmas Day, Christmas presents appeared—not only in the castle but all over the estate. My mother kept a reference book in which she had written down the names and birth dates of all the tenants’ children and the presents that she had previously given them, and about a month before Christmas she would take us shopping to help her select the current year’s gifts. Back home, dolls, footballs, clasp knives, mouth organs, toy soldiers, conjuring sets and other toys were laid out on the billiard table, labelled carefully, and tied up in holly-decked paper. My mother made it a rule never to give the children of the tenants anything useful, thinking that their lives were quite serious enough already. When all the parcels were done up, she would have them loaded into big wicker baskets and piled in the back of the Daimler; then she would set off around the estate. As she stopped for a chat at each house, this delivery of the presents could take anything up to a fortnight.

  The best known of all the Scottish festivals, that of Hogmanay, was not celebrated in the castle, my father only acknowledging the existence of the New Year’s Eve revelry by allowing, as was common all over Scotland, New Year’s Day itself to be taken as a fully paid holiday.

  Besides Christmas, my mother’s other winter innovation was the hockey party. In those days, the lairds, even though they might be close friends with their tenants, did not mix with them socially, nor did they extend much of a welcome to local professional people. This resulted in an acute lack of companionship for their daughters. Whether these girls were home only for the holidays or, lessons behind them, were living permanently in the widely separated castles, they rarely saw one another, and even more rarely had the chance of meeting young men. They whiled away the dismal winter days with books or needlework, with practising the piano or taking the dogs for walks. Almost always, they were extremely lonely. My mother saw this and, trying to think of a way that a lot of young people could be entertained without too much trouble, hit on the idea of a hockey party. Hastening off to a school outfitters’, she bought several dozen hockey sticks. She then engaged the local band (one elderly lady who played the piano, accompanied by her son on the accordion), ordered in a large quantity of food, and sent out invitations. From north, south, east and west, the young men and girls converged on the castle; those who were too young to drive were brought by their family chauffeurs, who were themselves glad of an outing. The young people arrived after lunch, warmly wrapped in a good many layers of wool, and were at once sent out to the big lawn behind the castle to join whichever team had fewer players. There were no rules, no umpire, and no half-time—anybody who was exhausted simply dropped out, and rejoined his team when he felt better. Whoever arrived after all the hockey sticks had been appropriated used a golf club, a walking stick, or his foot. The scrimmage went on till dark, when everyone tumbled indoors to gorge on hot buttered scones and thick, spoon-supporting cocoa.

  Then, while the servants busied themselves clearing away the tea and laying the tables for dinner, the girls and young men went upstairs, where, strictly segregated, they had baths. The spare rooms allocated to the girls were littered with discarded pullovers and muddy shoes; party dresses hung from curtain rails and cupboard doors, petticoats were flung over chairs, and a confusion of evening slippers and embroidered handbags lay jumbled on the sofas. Under the eiderdowns of the huge beds, laughing, gossiping groups of girls—supposed to be resting—hugged their knees and chattered as if in the space of a couple of hours they had to exchange every single thought that had ever passed through their heads.

  At seven o’clock, the dressing gong boomed, and an hour later everyone was gathered in the dining room, where extra chairs had been crammed round all the tables. In the light of the flickering candles, the faces of the fifty or sixty young people who were seated at dinner glowed with excitement. That evening there seemed no such thing as an ugly girl.

  In the Big Drawing Room, my mother had fixed a looking glass behind each of the wall brackets, so that it appeared that the room was lit by a hundred candles instead of fifty. Fires blazed in the fireplaces, the long curtains were tightly drawn—shutting out the blackness of the night—the furniture was pushed against the damask-hung walls, the rugs rolled back. The pianist struck a commanding chord on the piano, while her son wrestled the first note out of his accordion.

  Up and down the shining parquet we raced, Strip the Willow, the Dashing White Sergeant, eightsome reels, foursome reels, sixteensome reels, the Duke of Perth, and Petronella—nobody dreamed of sitting out a single dance. One of my ancestresses had composed a strathspey that was known by the name of the castle, and this was always included in the evening’s music. At midnight, the chauffeurs were summoned from their games of whist in the servants’ hall, hot soup was handed around, and sheepskin coats were thrown over evening clothes. Missing girls emerged, bright-eyed, from unexpected corners, to be followed seconds later by self-conscious young men. Addresses were scribbled on starched shirt cuffs, and promises for future meetings exchanged. Half-frozen engines spluttered in the courtyard, car doors slammed, and red tail-lights vanished down the drive.

  After that first hockey party, I went up to my bedroom in the tower too excited to sleep. It had been used as one of the changing-rooms for the girls; I opened the window to let
out the warm, powder-scented air, and leaned on the sill, gazing into the darkness. About a quarter of a mile away I could dimly discern the oblong of the Camp Field, so named because, in 1307, King Robert the Bruce had camped there with his army. The ghosts of the soldiers who had died soon after in the savage Battle of Barra were too weary with age to haunt; the winter night was utterly silent—no dog barked, no owl screeched in the frozen forests. Then suddenly, like a vast golden curtain, the aurora borealis swept along the northern horizon. For a moment, the lights hung motionless, then they wavered and changed to pink. It seemed that I heard a sharp sound, like the crack of a whip—could it have come from the sky, or could it have been that the shifting lights, recalling to my subconscious the chromatic cloaks of clowns, gave me the impression that I was the solitary spectator of some stupendous celestial circus, commanded by a spectral scarlet-coated ringmaster? But as the sound—whether real or imaginary—ricocheted away down the ice-fringed river, the lights in the sky changed to mauve and blue and then, shifting sideways, dissolved, to reappear a moment later in stripes of brightest silver. For several minutes, a hundred miles from the surface of the earth, the lights shifted, forming and re-forming in columns and ribbons and draperies of ever-changing colours, and then, as suddenly as they had appeared, they vanished, and I was left rubbing my eyes, half dazed with sleep and wondering if the whole vision had been a dream. I stumbled into bed, and pulled the eiderdown up around my ears. In the dark silence, I heard the rats scampering through the wainscoting as they hurried downstairs to search for their share of the feast.