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

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      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 СКАЧАТЬ