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