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.
I RETURNED TO THE GUYND IN MID-OCTOBER THAT same year. Arriving first in London, I helped John pack up his flat in Kensington as he was giving up his lease. Now that his attention was turning more fully to the Guynd, and our city life favoured New York, the London flat was not going to see enough use to be worth the expense of renting it. John’s London life, I felt anyway, had not been much more than a lingering postponement of his responsibilities at the Guynd. His London friends, gathering regularly for a pint or two or three at Churchill’s pub, seemed to regard his Scottish background as not much more than the uproarious stuff of English comedy, and John as the uprooted eccentric in their midst. His Scottish friends, on the other hand, went way back; they understood where he came from, and they actually cared.
In my spare time I had discovered the delights of Fulham Road, with its posh decorator’s shops like Colefax and Fowler, and Farrow and Ball, which unlike their American counterparts are open to the general public. I browsed the racks of fabric and wallpaper and compared paint swatches in earthy colours they deemed historic such as Georgian Green, Eating Room Red, Hay and Drab. At the prospect of waking up in that dismal master bedroom at the Guynd, I collected a bundle of wallpaper samples in bright floral motifs. In the shorter run a decent kitchen knife and a cheerful Italian ceramic salad bowl would make all the difference. Then we were off on the long drive to the Guynd, where I would resume writing and get a feel for the rapidly darkening days of late autumn in Scotland. My mother, who knew first-hand about the limits of British-style central heating, had shipped over a Vermont Castings wood stove for my study. We met it at the freight department of Edinburgh airport and somehow John managed to fit the entire bulk of its 110 kilos into the back of our new, second-hand Ford Escort, which meant that Foxy had to sit on my lap.
It was cold but the countryside was deceptively green. As we drove over the gently whipped hills of Fife in the thinning light we noted that the winter wheat the farmers planted in August was just beginning to sprout like grass, It was Halloween, but I was not expecting to see any sign of the occasion in Scotland.
On our way north through Kinross we dropped in on the Adams, old friends of John’s whose ancestors were the Adam Brothers of architectural fame. Like John, Keith Adam and his wife, Elizabeth, were struggling to hang on to their oversized family pile. Blair Adam, as the house is called, can be spied from the highway. Just after we passed the sign for Kelty, John