Living with the Laird: A Love Affair with a Man and his Mansion

‘Well let’s see, Nora was the eldest…’

‘Then John, known as Jack,’ I went on.

‘Uncle Jack, right. I never knew him,’ said John, grinding a carpet of pepper over his haddock. ‘So he was the first son? I guess he was.’

It was clear that John had either never known this fact or forgotten it, obscured as it was in the dark corners of the mind where the might-have-beens or what-ifs lurk and are best left undisturbed. For the biographer, on the other hand, this was the stuff of a story, a key that turns a dutiful list of dates into a human drama. Was being the second son at the core of Tom’s disturbing jealousy towards his own firstborn?

‘Maybe,’ said John mildly, not quite as entranced with my research as I thought he might be.

Armed with this narrative handle, I ventured further the following day into the Colonel’s diary, where it became increasingly clear that Tom was raised in the shadow of his older brother Jack, the heir apparent. So this was the proud young man in the uniform with his long Ouchterlony face, straight sharp nose and hooded eyes, who looked resolutely past my shoulder out of the picture frame in the basement. This was the man whose military medals were nestled in fitted purple velvet, snapped shut in a leather case and covered with dust. This was the boy whose glowing reports from Woolwich Academy dropped in my lap from the pages of his father’s diary. Here he was in the picture album, fourth from the left, dressed up as Bonnie Prince Charlie for an amateur theatrical by the lake.

A gold engraved invitation to luncheon announced Jack’s coming of age in 1906. A marquee was erected on the lawn; floral archways decorated the drives. In Jack’s honour a young spruce tree was ceremoniously planted in a conspicuous spot along the edge of the lakeside lawn. Dinner and dancing for the tenant farmers and local shop-keepers was followed by a grand evening party for the gentry. A printed programme of toasts ensured that the right things were said by the right people, and all raised their glasses to the young lieutenant and future laird of the Guynd.

First however he would have to prove himself in the larger world. Stationed in West Africa with the Royal Engineers, Jack was credited with directing the construction of the Great Ashantee Road in Ghana, which many believed was a monument of engineering skill amongst the finest in West Africa, and which earned him the title of major. In 1915, by then a married man with a child on the way, Jack felt that his duty was at the Western Front in France. On June 17, 1917, he was killed in action near Ypres. His commanding officer wrote a three-page letter to the family describing his death, explaining exactly how and where it happened, assuring them that it was quick, and concluding that he himself had lost ‘one of the best officers I have ever known.’

In Britain upper-class couples have long been advised to produce, if possible, a second son, just in case of an untimely death of the male heir due to war or fatal illness. They call it ‘the heir and the spare ’.

In America spare can mean stark or plain. In Britain it more often means extra. They speak, for instance, of the ‘spare room’, rather than the more inviting ‘guest room’ we offer in America. Sure enough, our spare room at the Guynd looked quite spare, in the American sense, even though it was painted pink and contained more spare chairs, in the British sense, than anyone could think of reasons to sit in during a week’s stay. John always emphasized the wisdom of having a spare two or three tins of tomatoes in the kitchen cupboard, anticipating a small meteorological disaster, or a spare and hungry cousin showing up unannounced. The number of spare parts John has raided from other people’s cast offs and collected in his workshop would take more than a lifetime to employ. To an urban American used to instant access to everything this may seem a bizarre and unnecessary act of hoarding, but in Scotland the primal urge to store away for the afterlife is a hangover from leaner, meaner times. Did this represent a faith—or, on the contrary, a lack of faith—in the future?

It was John’s mother who taught him to save. I discovered her string collection in an upstairs cupboard, of various lengths and strengths, neatly looped and tied and ready to use again. In the kitchen I opened a drawer one day to find it brimming with candle ends; the idea, John explained, was to melt them down and mould them into new candles, someday. Behind the jars of honey and jam on a high shelf I discovered half a dozen bottles of homemade raspberry vinegar, conscientiously labelled in his mother’s careful hand with the date, 1960.

‘Nineteen-sixty?’

‘Oh, that shouldn’t make any difference,’ said John. ‘Vinegar lasts forever, I should think.’

He should think. So why did somebody bother to put a date on it?

‘What about this black currant jam? It’s crystallised! Couldn’t we throw it out?’ John hesitated, suggesting that we might give it to someone who keeps bees, though he couldn’t think who just then.

‘What about the egg boxes, that arcing tower of them on the back stairs? Who are we saving those for?’

‘Someone who keeps ducks or geese or hens will need those, you wait and see. We used to have hens here at the Guynd. Freshly laid eggs every day.’

I was perhaps better equipped than many Americans to understand this kitchen clutter, as my mother was something of a saver too. In her kitchen she always kept a drawer full of washed, ironed and neatly folded aluminium foil. Her home-made soups always originated with the water she’d drained from cooking the vegetables. She saved the empty butter wrappers in the fridge to grease the pans, though she never baked a cake. My mother and John’s—British-born, living through the Depression and wartime—would have understood each other’s domestic habits perfectly. Never waste. Always have something to spare.

But how, I wondered, did it feel to grow up knowing that you were a spare child? As the second son you are part of a plan for disaster. You are a shadow figure, hovering, ready for the part you may never get, knowing that getting it would be at the cost of a tragedy that would mark your brother a greater hero than you for all time. What John’s father felt about it growing up we can only guess, but by the time the responsibility of the Guynd fell to him at the Colonel’s death in 1922, he did not look like a lucky man.

By the mid-1920s ‘the estate was not washing her face,’ as Tom put it to his trustees many years later. A growing influx of foreign goods from abroad had seriously depressed farm rents; landowners could no longer depend upon that income to cover the cost of running the house and estate. Furthermore, with the new Labour government in power there were the ever rising death duties to pay. Only the very rich (most often those whose income came from industry, not agriculture) could afford to pay them, whilst the merely land-rich were forced to sell off significant assets. The Ouchterlonys, I gathered, were amongst the latter. British confidence in land owner-ship as an incomparable security was fast eroding. The very spirit of the class system that held these places intact was threatened by the loss of so many eldest sons in the Great War.

Tom meanwhile, still a bachelor, had grown accustomed to the peripatetic life of a naval officer and found pleasure in the camaraderie of men at sea. His parents were both dead, and so were two of his brothers—Jack, the war hero, and Guy, who had moved to Canada and married, then drowned in Lake Ontario in a heroic and unsuccessful attempt to rescue two children from the same fate. Meanwhile the youngest brother, Arthur, would never recover from shell shock following two months in the trenches in 1917.

Tom’s sisters had fared somewhat better. Nora was married to a judge and living in London. Only Mary, Arthur’s twin, remained at the Guynd. A freckled, ginger-haired maiden in her early thirties, she had nursed their father through his last illness. Now down to two house servants from the nine she had grown up with, Mary was otherwise alone in this thirty-two-room house.

Little effort had been put into the estate for ten years. The triumphant days of Jack’s coming of age—of garlands and marquees, tea parties on the lawn and theatricals by the lake—was the Guynd of the past, evaporating in the mist of Edwardian nostalgia. Its future, as far as Tom was concerned, was looking highly questionable. And he was not alone. During the interwar years such places were held in contempt as old, ugly, extravagant and emptied of their purpose.

In the glass-fronted bookcase on the upstairs landing, I found the books John’s mother had collected over the years on country houses and castles, gardens and landscapes—guidebooks, handbooks and opulent picture books, all expounding on the grand and glorious traditions of which the Guynd was part. By far the most resonant for me was a volume called The Destruction of the Country House, a heavy paperback catalogue crowded with black-and-white photographs of abandoned stately piles. This was the battle cry of the 1970s preservationists led by Roy Strong, then director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, with a highly publicised exhibition. With cold accuracy the book is a roll call of some nine hundred houses and castles that had met the wrecking ball in the first half of the twentieth century. Like Walker Evans’s photographs of abandoned plantation houses in Louisiana in the 1930s, it was deeply depressing, all despair and regret, haunted by an irredeemable past and despairing of the future.

Yet somehow this awful book was a comfort to me. If it had been that difficult to hang on, the Guynd wasn’t doing so badly after all. It had actually made it through the most challenging years of the century safely to the other side. That the house still remained in the family who built it, whilst others had become hotels or schools or retirement homes, if they stood at all, was nothing short of a miracle. This was not the time to feel ashamed of its chipped capitals and missing balusters, its pot-holed drives and overgrown garden.

For those with vivid memories of its glory days, though, it must have been another matter altogether to feel it slipping out of control. A newspaper clipping in the Colonel’s diary (taken over by the faithful Mary) tells that in April 1924 the Guynd was advertised ‘For Sale by Private Bargain…about 950 acres…Mansion House…situated in extensive policies, 5 public, 10 bed and dressing rooms…4 arable farms and a Home Farm.’

‘John,’ I ventured one evening, ‘did you know that your father put the Guynd on the market in 1924?’

‘Not a good market, I guess,’ said John.

A year and a half later no buyer had emerged and the house and grounds were withdrawn from the market, though some farmland and furniture were sold off to cover death duties. Mary advertised for paying guests and kept the house running, hosting the occasional visits from family and friends. Finally Mary moved to a cottage in the neighbouring county of Perthshire when full-time renters came forwards to take on the Guynd. The Geoffrey Coxes, a Dundee family who had made their fortune in the jute business (Dundee, they say, owes its one-time prosperity to the three J’s: jute, jam and journalism), had the money and fresh initiative to bring the mansion house up to modern standards, particularly the onerous task of installing central heating and modern plumbing. Many much larger country houses were not so fortunate, which spelt their ruin. It is fair to say that the Coxes, though they paid a bargain rent for the Guynd of 350 pounds a year, were its saviour in those precarious times.

Meanwhile Tom was stationed all over Britain with the navy. Finally, aged forty-five, his heart was won by a young woman more than twenty years his junior, the witty and well-born Doreen Mary Joan Lloyd (this was the point at which my family and John’s converged; she was ‘Aunt Dodie ’ to my cousins in Vancouver). Doreen was the eldest daughter of a respectable English-Welsh family from Wimbledon. Her father was a London lawyer and amongst the founders of the world-renowned tennis tournament. Her sister Joy remembers that Dodie was ‘head over heels’ in love with Tom. Though her parents were anxious about the wisdom of their daughter’s choice of so much older a man, there was nothing to be done. Tom and his ‘darling wee girl,’ as he fondly addressed her, were married in 1935 and settled near the Guynd in a rented house, where my John was born less than two years later.

For John growing up, visits to the Guynd were enchanted. The promise that it would someday be theirs again—entirely theirs—shone like a pot of gold. All that space! Oceans of lawn, caves of rhododendrons and paths through the woods, where huge beech trees with their smooth grey trunks rose to a fluttering green canopy. There was the lake, and the walled garden, abundant with sweet-smelling flowers and vegetables, and the burn to paddle his feet or follow along its gurgling way.

When war broke out again in Europe, John’s life as a child changed little except he might have noticed that his father had disappeared. Tom, having just settled into married retirement, was posted as British consul in Esbjerg. In April 1940 the Nazis invaded Copenhagen. Tom missed his train back to Esbjerg, being embroiled on the platform in an argument with the conductor—so the story goes—and was taken prisoner. Exactly a week before, his second son, Angus, was born.

I found Tom’s wartime letters in the library desk, tied in neat bundles, every one stamped censored in bold black type. Searching for clues to the pain he allegedly suffered for some months in solitary confinement, I learnt only that he was put to work raising vegetables for the Germans. Boredom was the only form of suffering his letters expressed. ‘If there was never anything to tell you about my extraordinarily dull life in Esbjerg,’ he wrote to Doreen from Germany, ‘I’m afraid there will be even less I can write from here.’ His letters consist of requests for luxuries such as Players cigarettes and dried figs, necessities like gardening shorts and hats, and Penguin paperbacks. Though a somewhat futile gesture, he also attempted to direct his wife as to the management of affairs at home.

Soon after Tom’s arrest, the Guynd, at Doreen’s consent, was requisitioned as a barrack for the Wrens. As many as fifty women moved into the house, sleeping in rows of cots covering the floor of the dining room, the library and the drawing room, with the petty officers in more spacious comfort in the upstairs bedrooms. Later, in 1942, the house became a residence for the head of the nearby naval base—the Admiral—his family and five male servants.

All in all the Guynd was spared the kind of destruction that many similar and much larger houses suffered during the war. (‘Wonderful old place in its way,’ said the Quartering Commandant as he stood before the castle in Brideshead Revisited, preparing to take it over. ‘Pity to knock it about too much.’) Even so, the Guynd’s recovery was painfully slow.

That first summer I spent there, nearly fifty years after the war ended, it still felt like a place caught in a transition between institution and home. Stripped down for the heavy wear and tear of wartime, it had never regained the intimacy of family life. Though women are known to be gentler tenants than men, signs of their occupation remained. Some of the windows bore the faint tape marks left from blacking them out every evening at dusk. The architrave in the library was pockmarked with holes where the Wrens had inserted sturdy clothes hooks. Inside the dining room cupboard the shelves, then used for bed linen, bore the humorous names they had given to their dormitories—‘Shangri-la’, ‘Sleepy Hollow’ and ‘Davy Jones’ Locker’. More than anything else it was the dreary brown linoleum, which covered the floors of every room in the house, that seemed to me such a stark reminder of the hordes of indifferent transients tramping through the place. I longed to tear it out.

‘Good quality stuff,’ John replied. He’d lived with it so long, he hardly noticed it was there. ‘Military standard, after all.’ This was known as high praise in his family. ‘Just look how well it’s lasted!’

Anything that lasts, in other words, earns its right to stay. With a philosophy like that, no wonder the house was so depressing. Someone had to break the mould, and that someone appeared to be me. One day I lifted a corner of the dreaded stuff and discovered that it wasn’t even tacked to the floor. The job of lifting it out of the dining room would take an afternoon. I accosted John at lunchtime. ‘The stuff isn’t even tacked to the floor! Why can’t we just roll it up?’

‘Did you notice the state of the floors underneath?’ John asked rhetorically.

‘So what! Anything’s better than that lino!’

That very afternoon we moved all the furniture into the hall and rolled up the several lengths of linoleum that covered the floor. John carefully measured each piece, and then tied them up with string so they could be neatly transported to the farm buildings for some as yet unimagined future use. Then we rolled up the old Turkish carpet in the hall, exposing smooth grey flagstones, and moved a large circular veneered table into the middle of the floor as a centrepiece—a surface on which to drop the keys or the mail, or to place a cheerful vase of fresh flowers. There was nothing to it. Only that one thing inevitably would lead to another.

And so it did. The dust was disturbed and there was no turning back.

THREE Winter Light (#ulink_2b0ba676-a14e-5d74-9c28-49b2291866cc)

I RETURNED TO THE GUYND IN MID-OCTOBER THAT same year. Arriving first in London, I helped John pack up his flat in Kensington as he was giving up his lease. Now that his attention was turning more fully to the Guynd, and our city life favoured New York, the London flat was not going to see enough use to be worth the expense of renting it. John’s London life, I felt anyway, had not been much more than a lingering postponement of his responsibilities at the Guynd. His London friends, gathering regularly for a pint or two or three at Churchill’s pub, seemed to regard his Scottish background as not much more than the uproarious stuff of English comedy, and John as the uprooted eccentric in their midst. His Scottish friends, on the other hand, went way back; they understood where he came from, and they actually cared.

In my spare time I had discovered the delights of Fulham Road, with its posh decorator’s shops like Colefax and Fowler, and Farrow and Ball, which unlike their American counterparts are open to the general public. I browsed the racks of fabric and wallpaper and compared paint swatches in earthy colours they deemed historic such as Georgian Green, Eating Room Red, Hay and Drab. At the prospect of waking up in that dismal master bedroom at the Guynd, I collected a bundle of wallpaper samples in bright floral motifs. In the shorter run a decent kitchen knife and a cheerful Italian ceramic salad bowl would make all the difference. Then we were off on the long drive to the Guynd, where I would resume writing and get a feel for the rapidly darkening days of late autumn in Scotland. My mother, who knew first-hand about the limits of British-style central heating, had shipped over a Vermont Castings wood stove for my study. We met it at the freight department of Edinburgh airport and somehow John managed to fit the entire bulk of its 110 kilos into the back of our new, second-hand Ford Escort, which meant that Foxy had to sit on my lap.

It was cold but the countryside was deceptively green. As we drove over the gently whipped hills of Fife in the thinning light we noted that the winter wheat the farmers planted in August was just beginning to sprout like grass, It was Halloween, but I was not expecting to see any sign of the occasion in Scotland.

On our way north through Kinross we dropped in on the Adams, old friends of John’s whose ancestors were the Adam Brothers of architectural fame. Like John, Keith Adam and his wife, Elizabeth, were struggling to hang on to their oversized family pile. Blair Adam, as the house is called, can be spied from the highway. Just after we passed the sign for Kelty, John told me where to look for it. Perched high on a hill, its roof is just visible for a moment behind a thick grove of trees. Leaving the main road we travelled along a narrow bumpy road that at some indecipherable point became a private drive, reaching the entrance to the house as we rounded a hairpin turn at the top of a steep rise. At least twice as big as the Guynd, Blair Adam was also a great deal more eccentric. ‘It’s been added on to at various stages,’ John explained at our approach. And propped up at various others, I judged from the row of buttresses flanking the east wall.

Keith welcomed us into a small front hall at the east end of the house, then on through to an enormous room—as big as a ballroom—which connects the two wings of the house and which they call, with typical Scottish understatement, ‘the corridor’. Yet the scale of this room was made comfortable by the presence of large sofas and armchairs, antique tables and faded Oriental carpets; it had that layered, cluttered, tea-stained effect—what the French call le désordre britannique, and which somehow the Guynd had managed to get wrong. John remembered visiting Blair Adam as a child when on a rainy afternoon buckets were dotted here and there on the floor catching leaks from the roof, and on one occasion when a piece of the dining room ceiling fell into somebody’s soup plate. The roof actually caved in over a section of the house when Keith was about three years old, and eventually it succumbed to ruin. At that point in the century, when the idea of living in a grand house became synonymous with roughing it, and frugality with good breeding, a generation was born that took such mishaps for granted, and their mission was clear. Slowly but surely Keith and Elizabeth would recapture whatever they could of the place for the next generation of Adams.

In the corridor that night all was dark except for the light from a huge crackling fire. Katherine and Louisa, the Adams’ twin twelve-year-old daughters, were hosting a Halloween party. About eight or ten girls sat in a circle in the glow of the fire playing word games, anticipating the terrors to come. Suddenly two figures (the twins’ older brother and cousin) emerged through a far door in the shadows, hunched over in overcoats and cackling like ghouls. One by one the girls were plucked out of the circle, blindfolded and led through the ‘chamber of horrors’ (the larger of the two dining rooms), where the boys, holding each one firmly to their delighted screams, directed their feet over broken skeletons (croquet mallets), dipped their hands in raw intestines (cold spaghetti) and witch’s blood (tepid soup) and finally hustled them outside and into the haymow for ghost stories and pizza.

Keith’s twin sister, Rita, was also there that evening. An old girlfriend of John’s, she was frankly fascinated to meet me, wondering, I supposed, if I was some airheaded American with stars in her eyes or whether I really had any idea what I was in for. She sat in a generous armchair with her ageing English pointer, Jonah, dozing in her lap, fixed me with her mischievous sharp hazel eyes and started to test me for reactions. ‘Awfully gloomy house, the Guynd, isn’t it?’ I answered her with my eyes and she let loose a laugh like a machine gun, and we began then and there to bond in sympathy for living with John, the one having given up (why had Rita given up, I wondered, when clearly she and John had so much in common?), the other fresh to the task. ‘Tell me,’ she asked in a loud whisper, ‘is there still an egg timer by the telephone?’