Читать книгу Living with the Laird: A Love Affair with a Man and his Mansion - Belinda Rathbone - Страница 7

‘YOU’LL NEVER GET ANY PLEASURE FROM THIS PLACE,’ John’s father had told him repeatedly over the years. And by most accounts other than his own, he made every effort, or lack of effort, possible to ensure that his prediction would prove accurate, and that his eldest son—his principal heir—would fail at the role fate had dealt him.

The ancient system of primogeniture, which decrees that the eldest son is heir to the entire family estate, is still going strong in Scotland. From birth he is groomed, pressed, and moulded by family and society into his role as landowner—in Scotland, the laird. Primogeniture is based on a feudal system that has changed remarkably little since the Middle Ages. Whilst in England the march of progress and the greater population have blurred the rigid lines of the class system in recent times, Scotland still offers a clear window on the past. Its unspoilt view of the pastoral countryside of the Lowlands, and of the vast shooting estates of the Highlands, owe much to the persistence of primogeniture. Eighty-eight per cent of Scotland is privately owned, and if you buy one of those clan maps they make for the Scottish tourist trade, you will find that it is still largely owned by the families who drew the lines centuries ago.

The landed classes. Since knowing John I have come to better understand the meaning of this term. In Scotland it means not only that these people have land but, once landed, that they intend to stay. Forever. It is almost as much of a personal failure for a Scottish male heir to leave the ancestral home behind him (read, lack of commitment) as it is for the American to stay (read, lack of enterprise). It is no accident that in colloquial Scots, when they ask someone where they live, they ask them where do they ‘stay’. In Scotland it is not so much that one owns a country house as much as it is the other way around. In America, though we could all trace our family history through various houses and buildings, few amongst us know where they are, or if indeed they are still standing. And we don’t really care. After all, we Americans are largely the descendants of second sons who expected to strike out on their own.

I was raised with a relatively strong sense of my own family history. On my father’s side the Dutch merchant class of New York City and upstate crossed with Puritan New Englanders. When I was a child my grandmother still lived in the Greek Revival house that her grandfather had built in 1830 on the main street of Greene, New York. Everything in that house, from the pair of stuffed pheasants on the dining room sideboard to the old toys in the attic, was woven into a warm, fragile tapestry of my father’s American childhood. On my mother’s side, worldly and artistic Europeans with intermarriages of French, Italian and English connected in her parents’ marriage with a long line of Quaker Philadelphians. At home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I grew up with antiquities collected by my great-aunt when she lived in Egypt, Victorian furniture from the house of my Philadelphia great-great-grandparents, Irish glassware and French china. There were family portraits in oil, silhouette and daguerreotype. These family treasures came together in our own house from so many different sources, now mixed with my father’s collections of modern European art, English delftware and pre-Columbian pottery, that the pieces of my family history took years for me to unravel. In spite of these tangible artefacts there were so many sources, names, places and stories to remember about them. So few cousins, so far away. There was no tying them in with a single family house or even a single family name.

It was the critical difference between my background and John’s. John could reach into his family history effort-lessly, with hardly a leap of the imagination, for the stage was still set in his native Scotland. On the shelves of the library he could handle the very books his ancestors had consulted. He was sitting in their chairs, looking into their mirrors, literally walking in their footsteps, shaded by the trees they had planted, sheltered by the house they had built and carrying on the same name. This was continuity to be envied. Yet it comes with a price.

In Scotland a man of John’s class is himself less important than his name, his ancestral home and his estate. He is merely a link in the long family line stretching before and after him, and his duty is clear: to keep it up. Rural gentry like those of John’s family have stood their ground for so long that they are depended upon to remain in place as part of the stonework of society’s foundations, part of the general effort to keep things just the way they have always been. Whilst in school I was raised on stories of the pilgrims, the early homesteaders, the gold rush and the life ethic conveyed by Emerson’s ‘Self-Reliance’, of Thoreau’s ‘castles in the air’ and Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself ’; John was made to memorise a succession of kings and queens. Thus I grew up with one myth of the possible—of wide-open spaces and eternal movement—and John grew up with another, that of the security of a closed gate at the end of the drive.

THE SUMMER BEFORE we were married I spent two months at the Guynd, from late June to late August. Was it true, I needed to know, what John’s father had said—that he would never get any pleasure from this place—when it showed all the potential for being a paradise? In what way was he meant to defy his father’s fatalistic words?

Since my first visit to the Guynd, our courtship had carried on in New York and in London, where John still had a flat. We had also travelled together, getting to know each other’s friends and family, daily life and work. No American beau of mine had ever been so open, so curious and so delighted by the people and places I had to show him. He arrived in New York with all the exuberance of a schoolboy let out to play or a sailor home from the sea. In my apartment, the top floor of a brownstone building on East Ninety-second Street, he quickly made himself at home, unpacking his grey duffel bag (hiking boots, a few shirts, a bow tie or two just in case of an occasion, and a quantity of loose tea, not quite trusting that the right thing could be found in New York City), pottering in the kitchen (don’t you have a wok? where do you put the compost?) and sinking into the sofa with the Financial Times(delighted to find he could buy it out of a box on the corner of Fifth Avenue).

He read anything I put in his hands, ate anything I put on the table (his plate as conscientiously scraped as if a dog had licked it), looked with unequivocal interest at anything and everything in any museum or gallery I took him to in New York, not to mention everything on the way there. It was exhausting. But his dogged attention to detail slowed the rush of the city, and his observant foreign eye and the swift backhand stroke of his wit lightened my step on the pavement. His engineer’s logic combined with a bracing cynicism and a nose for the corrupt. All sorts of badly made things, for instance, were ‘good for business!’ he’d say triumphantly. He’d caught the devil at his game.

His intimate understanding of materials brought another way of appreciating almost everything, including works of art. ‘Wood,’ he might offer, admiring a work of modern sculpture, ‘is difficult to work with, in that it’s delicate and unpredictable, whereas metal is isotropic. It does what you tell it to.’ Isotropic. A brick wall curved in a continuous wave pattern, which I assumed was purely an aesthetic choice on the part of its maker, was very practical, according to John. ‘A sinuous wall is self-buttressing, and therefore doesn’t need to be as thick as a straight wall.’ The meaning of objects took on a whole new dimension. They had lives—even minds—of their own. A string, John told me in all seriousness, has a memory.

My friends regarded John as something of an exotic, unable to measure his worthiness on the usual scale. He had a wiry energy; there was something embattled and vulnerable about him, but also a toughness born to a tough breed. He seemed to be on intimate terms with the earth, the way a Scot—not an Englishman—would be. The reputation of his rather large house in the country awarded him a mysterious status. He was an Old World radical, an aristocratic country rustic. He used arcane expressions such as ‘the nether regions’ and ‘in days of yore ’ as if he really meant them. He possessed a depth of practical know-how and a living sense of history they couldn’t quite touch. With my mother he was completely at home; he knew she appreciated that depth, that sense, without having to say so, like a silent pact amongst the Europeanborn. At times I felt they understood each other better than I understood either of them. They shared the toughmindedness of survivors, an ethic of simplicity and economy, a conscientious reading of newspapers and a passion for plain, dark chocolate.

Visiting me in America, John said, was like a dream. How funny. It was the Guynd that was like a dream to me. He departed after a month with a reluctant flurry of lastminute packing to head back to the loneliness of his responsibilities.

Alone again in New York I listened to the strains of Elgar’s Enigma Variations and the soundtrack of A Room with a View, stared at the ceiling and wondered what was happening to me like some modern-day Henry James character, the innocent American about to be plunged into the murky depths of European aristocracy.

The responsibilities of the Guynd seemed awesome to me and yet, for some reason, I had been chosen. What was the point of romance anyway, I had always thought, if it wasn’t to take you somewhere you never expected to go, to make you intimate with a place or a culture in a way no other route could take you, to start life all over again from scratch, as a stranger in a strange land. Or, perhaps, in this case, to mend a broken connection, to complete the cycle back to my mother’s British upbringing. It was as if I were answering to some cosmic force. The beauty and the poignancy of the Guynd haunted me; it seemed to have called upon me to awaken it, a doll-house gathering dust in the attic. And John’s ardent pursuit showed no signs of letting up, even over the course of many weeks and an ocean apart. With no warning his excited voice from a phone box in London (breathless, out cycling in the rain, just had to call) would jar the streamlined images I had formed of my safe future as a New Yorker.

We became engaged on the night train from Paris to Zurich. This was thanks to my English cousin Cecilia, who lived outside of Paris and who was like an older sister to me. She had met us for dinner on our last evening there and presented me with a cameo brooch from amongst her family treasures ‘as an engagement present ’. Though marriage was a prospect we had both been studying seriously in our separate minds, we had not said anything to each other about getting engaged. After dinner in a crowded bistro Cecilia hurried us into a taxi to catch our train, beaming with goodwill and happiness for us, and we chuckled along with her excitement. We had booked ourselves into the most unromantic of sleeping arrangements possible, the third-class couchette.Whilst travellers with rucksacks mumbling other languages staggered through the door and wrestled themselves into their narrow cots below us and the train lurched through the night, we held hands across the two top berths, laughed and agreed that Cecilia’s gift had more or less confirmed what we already knew.

STILL, THE BIG TEST was ahead of us that summer. Was John really able to share his past with another, and was I equipped to take it on?

At the time I was at work on a biography of the American photographer Walker Evans. Much of the research was behind me, at least enough to spend two months writing without resorting to my original sources. I had packed some seventy pounds of notes, as it weighed in at Kennedy airport, and John had invited me to take over his mother’s sewing room as my study.

This was the brightest and prettiest room upstairs, straight across the landing. Designed as an upstairs sitting room, it was more or less square with the intriguing feature of a rounded interior wall. A fireplace anchored the rounded wall on one side, and to the right of it, under a gilt-edged mirror hung high, was a lady’s desk. Its drawers were crammed with bundled letters, unwritten postcards, elastic bands, old photographs and dozens of used Vogue sewing patterns from the 1960s. The desktop, folded down, was just big enough for my laptop computer. A 1930s radio provided a suitable stand for my printer. There was a socket nearby, though of course not the right fit for my American equipment. John would fix that. Through two generous windows I looked out over the tenants’ grazing Angus cattle in the field in front of the house, the dark woods beyond, and, still farther, five miles as the crow flies, the straight horizontal line of the North Sea, reflecting a silvery blue or iron grey sky and some-times disappearing completely in the fog.

Here, thousands of miles from the America of Walker Evans, I would use the steady tranquillity of this room to delve into his life and his art. His photographs of small-town storefronts, billboards and circus posters, rows of Victorian gingerbread houses or Model T Fords parked along a rainy street seemed all the more quaintly American at this remove, and all the more touching. Evans had wanted, he said, to capture what something would some-day look like as the past. He understood how profoundly the simplest thing—and often the neglected or rejected object—defined its moment. How did he acquire this visionary instinct for the telling detail? This fondness for the would-be forgotten? What aspects of his childhood had conspired to develop this genius? Somewhere in my notes was the stuff of the answer. I set to work.

Yet as every writer knows there is nothing more tempting than manual labour to arouse one from one’s chair and give up the torturous task of writing. In a house like this one, even the simple movement of going downstairs to the kitchen to make another cup of coffee had the disadvantage of reminding me of the fifteen jobs vying equally for my attention.

On my way back upstairs I might pick up a rag and a tin of wax to polish the wooden banister, enjoying the gleam of walnut veneer sliding under my flannel, emerging like a photograph in the developing bath. By cleaning and polishing I would become intimate with the house; I would arouse its dormant sparkle to waken and talk back to me. The ironwork supporting the banister needed dusting—no, rubbing, with a damp cloth—to appreciate that it was actually jet black, not grey. Back at the top of the stairs I would contemplate how to cope with the pile of old curtains and cushions that seemed for no reason to be heaped on top of a chaise longue, where clearly no one had ever been expected to lounge. Defeated by this problem for the moment, back at my keyboard, I set my mind to work again over a few precious clues to Evans’s child-hood. Foxy curled up on the floor behind me, waiting for the beep of my computer shutting down, knowing that then it would be time for a walk.

As much as the urge to clean had never felt more powerful, so also was I increasingly curious about John’s family history, a family that was about to be mine. Whilst I was learning the story from John, bit by bit, there were many gaps in his information. I also knew, as the biographer knows, how differently the story might be told by other voices in other times. Later, after work, after a walk, I was determined to look more closely at a diary I had discovered in the library downstairs. Wedged between Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language and a stack of atlases, its black leather cover bulged with promising content, buckled tight with two thin leather straps.

It was John’s grandfather’s, Colonel Thomas Ouchterlony.

The name Ouchterlony, pronounced Och-ter-lo-ny, John had explained, dated from at least as long ago as the twelfth century, and is entirely local to the county of Angus. Its meaning derives from a hill called Lony, about six miles north-west of the Guynd, which the family claimed as their own back in the Middle Ages. Ouchter is Gaelic for ‘over’ or ‘on top of ’. So all the Ouchterlonys and the many variations on the name since (Ochterloney, Auchterlonie, Uchterlony, etc.) descend from this ancient clan on the hill.

By now the Ouchterlonys are spread far and wide. John mentioned in particular a large exodus to Sweden in the eighteenth century. By the late nineteenth century the last heir to the Guynd had to reach several branches sideways across the family tree to appoint his fourth cousin once removed—John’s grandfather—as the last hope of keeping the family name alive in Angus. From the obituaries pasted in the latter pages of the diary I gathered that although the Colonel was new to the area (he had been called up from Devonshire) he quickly made his presence warmly felt with the local population both humble and grand. Gregarious, civic-minded, the exemplary military man, he understood that protecting the family name was implicit in his stroke of fate and immediately set about preparing the ground for his son and heir.

In the Colonel’s steady, forward-slanting hand, this faithfully kept diary of events of family and estate revealed a surprising fact, that John’s father, Thomas, was not the firstborn son (the Colonel had six children altogether; first came Nora, then the three boys, John—known as Jack—Thomas, and Guy, and finally the twins, Arthur and Mary) and had therefore not grown up expecting to take over the Guynd.

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 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.