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

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      I saved my discovery to discuss with John over dinner that evening. ‘Did you know,’ I began, ‘that your father was the second son?’

      ‘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 СКАЧАТЬ