A Scottish theme appears to be seeping, unbidden, into this blog like the North Sea haar that comes in off the Firth of Forth. I am reading Christian Miller's account of her early life:
As the youngest child of an aristocratic family living in a highland castle in the 1920s, her clear-sighted memoir describes a life of privilege, but one defined by duties rather than rights. With an autocratic father only a step removed from the Mitford sisters' Farve, siblings away at school and a vast house peopled by servants and ghosts, the young Christian would hug the carved angels which flanked the hall fireplace in the hope that they would come alive and play with her.
Leisure time was spent gathering sticks for the schoolroom fire or picking up stones in the fields, while reading was confined to hours when nothing 'more useful' could be done. On Sundays the only permitted recreation was the making of clothes and toys for the local orphanage. Lessons in weaving involved setting up the pattern of the family tartan on a small loom, and making scarves with wool dyed from lichen, bark and herbs. Treats were few, and birthday presents inclined to the purely practical, including a full-sized set of carpenter's tools for the seven-year-old girl.
While visiting cousins would arrive in their Harrods outfits, Christian wore handmedown jerseys gathered around the waist with dog collars still proclaiming their erstwhile owners' names, and tennis shoes with holes cut into the toes to allow space for growing feet.
Writing fifty years on, Christian recalls details such as the cook whisking a sauce with a tiny sheaf of bleached birch twigs, the forget-me-nots painted on the porcelain handle of her mother's bedroom door, and the labels on the linen cupboard shelves: 'bath towels - dogs and boys'.
The sense of continuity within the castle and the wider estate, (itself almost a self-sufficient community), its history and traditions, are all the more acute when you consider that the way of life described has vanished almost entirely over the course of the last seventy five years. So remote does this time seem that apart from an odd reference which places it in the twentieth century, it could almost have been written a hundred years earlier.
This is an affectionate but unsentimental look backwards, and anyone wishing to discover something of the scots character could do worse than to start here.
Dovegreyreader was commenting recently on a cover's suitability for its book; the child's portrait by Glyn Philpot which Canongate have used for this book is an apt choice.
