To return to the epilimnion; this morning it came clearly to me that my father’s apparent absence of human demonstrativeness was just that, apparent. So intense were his emotions about buildings that he has left to me, and I believe to my half-siblings, a characteristic that sounds chilling — the capacity to be completely changed by a building, to be inhabited by it imaginatively and emotionally. Three times in my life I have been rescued by architecture. The flat where I’m staying now exemplifies this. At my blindest, I can still be consoled by the feel of the door handles in the studio where Liv and I work, their satisfying relationship to the human hand.
I used to be sorry for myself as a very small child because my father was so often away or, when present, actually utterly preoccupied by a building. It was only in my twenties that I even began to read this as not over-aestheticism but as deep humane connectedness. It is easy to misread so silent, so cultivated and so cool a character.
The history of architecture, the study of human habitations great and small, was not then fashionable. The National Trust was on a rescue mission, no mistake. The heritage business did not exist. Progress was the watchword; new was good. This leads me to a complicated personal muddle. It never crossed my father’s mind that what might be called a ‘social’ interest might be taken in great houses, but it may cross that of my reader, so much have the times changed. Great houses were being pulled down at the rate of one a week in Scotland, more in England, during my childhood; my father was, as it were, their protector, champion and physician. My father had no interest in who was who and indeed rather regretted anybody being anybody on account of his shyness about the personal. Naturally this made him an ideal friend of anybody who was used to being sucked up to; such people found themselves refreshed by his disinterestedness, his consuming interest. He engaged with houses, less so with home.
Where this is muddling in any account of my own life became clear to me in a horrible but revelatory way after the first ever interview I did when my novel A Case of Knives came out 1988. My trajectory, which has felt to me, naturally enough, just like my own life, is legible in various disobliging ways and it’s not lost on me that one of these involves what that genius Kingsley Amis calls hypergamy. He meant that a clever man who can make people laugh can marry any woman he wishes, even the most beautiful. It’s not the same for women. I mean that I started off what I think I still am, an Edinburgh girl, but somehow time and events have made me seem to be an Englishwoman; an Englishwoman, at that, of some privilege.
Then we did just stay in, visit, talk and think about houses. Some of these were small and some were not. What they had in common was that they were at that time imperilled.
Where were you when you first read Struwwelpeter? I don’t know if you can buy it now; it may be available from antiquarian or ‘special-interest’ booksellers. The first copy of it I found was certainly from the century before last. Its terrifying vigorous bossy pornography has set some of my rules for life. The red-legged scissor-man visited me only last night, oddly enough with the face of Richard Dawkins, with whom, how can one’s dreams be this trite, I was playing chess. Augustus the chubby lad—‘fat ruddy cheeks Augustus had’—is still, on bad days, my picture of myself, and, even when I got down to the pin man Augustus in my thirties, I still felt like the fat boy before he started rejecting his nutritious soup. I found Struwwelpeter under a bed I was sleeping in at Culzean Castle in Ayrshire, built by Robert Adam on a cliff over the sea. Daddy was restoring it, quite considerably with his own hands; the castle has a high oval rotunda with a sweeping exaltation of staircase, arising with composure like written music up inside its shell. Daddy would be up a trembly ladder with his cigarette, re-limning cartouches or re-plastering crumbled bits of Vitruvian scrollwork. I was never, while he breathed, not worried about my father. When he died, there was at least that; he couldn’t fall off a battlement or dive through a skylight. Or, indeed, he couldn’t ever again get arrested for trespass or burglary.
The grateful nation of Scotland had just given a wing of Culzean in perpetuity to the American people for the use of their President should he find himself on the Ayrshire coast. I was left to potter about while Daddy worked. I had at the time a broken right arm and dislocated shoulder so I had learned to draw and write with my left hand. I was four but was very proud that I had a duffel coat made for a fourteen-year-old to accommodate my plaster. I was sleeping in President Eisenhower’s bed, or at any rate having a rest in it, when I found Struwwelpeter. Who the Dickens can have left it there?
Culzean sits on the Ayrshire coast in replete beauty among its gardens. We would always be there for daffodil time, later in Scotland than in England, and the creak of daffodils as I walked among them and smelled the sea from within the castle ramparts was safety itself. The spring of the broken arm I spent secretly memorising Struwwelpeter, being spoilt by the tea-room ladies who gave me glacé cherries, and sitting atop one of the stocky little cannons that defend this gracefully parodic masterpiece. I tried daily, failed daily, to lift a cannonball. The balls were arranged in neat pyramids beside each gun. In the evening after a sunny day they held warmth until the light had gone and if you licked them the rusty salt taste was delicious. It’s the taste of oysters. Blood, iron, iodine.
Around 1960, the National Trust for Scotland hired a cruise ship from a Norwegian shipping line and invited archaeologists and other enthusiasts to take a tour of the Hebrides on the SS Meteor. Particular attention was to be paid to brochs, early structures sometimes so early as to be hardly perceptible to the uninitiated. My father was overseeing some aspects of the tour and giving informative evening talks.
For a greedy only child who was the only child on the ship, it was a taste of the high life. One evening there really was a swan made of ice at the Captain’s table and, during the day, a childless American couple made much of me. We passed the great organ pipes of Staffa and Fingal’s Cave, we stopped at Iona where I heard the turf praying. No one had yet spoken directly to me of God, so I had built him for myself.
I had not become a liar yet and I am not a liar now, but I do believe that we made harbour at the island of Colonsay, disembarked and toured its surprising tropical gardens that surround the pretty open-armed big house. It only takes one more squeeze of my memory to have it believe that we met the handsome wife of the island’s laird. She was nice to me, my false memory tells me, because I was the only child aboard and she knew that plurality can nourish a being.
One of seven children herself, and mother of six, she seems in my mind’s eye to be wearing a flowered dress and gloves. Knowing what I know now, I realise I must have made it all up.
Perhaps on account of my father’s absent-mindedness about my mother’s birthday, I felt some unease around 3 September each year. On her thirtieth birthday, her cat Nancy Mitford fell two stone storeys from her bedroom. My superstitious mother really did take this as an ill omen, to which she often referred, to do with cats having nine lives but herself just the one and her birthday being the day the Second World War began. On my own thirtieth birthday, I was making supper when a large white rabbit fell from the sky. It screamed horribly, for its back was broken. Our neighbour from the flat next door kindly despatched it. Or should that be our neighbour from the flat next door despatched it, kindly?