What to Look for in Winter (7 page)

I
f I'd stayed at home, would it all have happened? Or is this every runaway's question when chased down by shame?

It's certainly a question you might have wanted to ask of my uncle Clement, who, if he'd been able to stay at home at ‘Dunkeld', my paternal grandparents' home in Sydenham, or at his and my grandmother's grace-and-favour house at Windsor Castle, where he was organist and choirmaster at St George's Chapel, might not have married or become a father. Would his musicality, sheltered, have made him a more sung English composer of the twentieth century? Or would he have chosen, as he did, his own merry means of death as one of the seven Noble Gentlemen of Poverty at St Cross in Winchester? Fewer than a dozen of us went to his funeral at Basingstoke Crem.

Clement's son, David, one of my only two first cousins, who looks lugubrious and is funny, very handsome in the darker Italian fashion, stepped forward and stuck on Clement's coffin as it slipped through the curtains the label he had steamed off his daddy's last bottle of Gordon's Gin. ‘Mrs Gordon', Clement called it. For him, not mother's ruin at all, but quite possibly a mother's boy's compensation for that mother's absence.

Winchester Cathedral rang with voice at his memorial. He paid for his gin by giving maths tuition to the children of takeaway proprietors and late-night shopkeepers, ambitious for their children's rise up the slippery pole Clement had negotiated by ignoring or perhaps remaining innocent of it. He saw the sad and funny, not the worldly, in the world.

McWilliams do this thing of fading out. They die young and they stay in touch with the aid of telepathy, of not writing letters and certainly not making telephone calls. They tend to eat unhealthily, to be musical and scholarly to the point of dust in their habits, with strong genes for
self-effacement, religious faith (C of E in the rest of the world and Episcopalian in Scotland, or converts to Roman Catholicism), medicine and spying. They have been explorers and teachers but mostly they have been naval surgeons, musicians and secret poets. Their habits are gentle and they have a sweet tooth. Almost sickly thin in youth, they may get tubby later. It could in only some few cases be something to do with drink. It is not hard to see why they were only briefly kings of Scotland. My daughter Clementine compares them favourably with that reproductively inefficient animal, the panda. ‘McWilliams are rubbish at dating,' she says, ‘but pandas are
really
rubbish at it.'

Clement himself loved the detective stories of Edmund Crispin, King Penguins, of which he had collected almost the entire run, the music of Buxtehude, Wilkie Collins. He knew his Bradshaw intimately, which of course gave him heartbreak as the railways were privatised. He slept from time to time on park benches. He wrote operas for children, preferred tinned fruit, and hummed as though continually about to hatch.

My father was not a drinker. He was a Capstan Full Strength Navy Cut untipped man. He gave up after his stroke, simply smoked seventeen in a row in the hospital and never again. Not that there was long to go. His stroke had hit him while he was walking along reading a Posy Simmonds book in Charlotte Square. Perhaps it was an excess of pleasure that felled him.

Up ahead of Clement and me is my robust Cousin Audrey. A dead ringer for Christine Keeler, Cousin Audrey is a Champagne girl, and I hope she won't mind if I say that she is now to the north of seventy, in her cloud of fragrance purchased at Jenners, the Queen of Edinburgh department stores, and surrounded by the ghosts of terriers and horses. Cousin Audrey is my mother's first cousin and is a Young of Young's Malt Loaf, delicious, healthful and profitable. Young's Malt Loaf will be remembered by some for its acronym: YOUMA, long since, to Cousin Audrey's righteous and splendid ire, munched up by United Biscuits, now a mere crumb in Nabisco, which may be just a corner
of Nestlé. Cousin Audrey keeps tabs on us all; she is
not
a McWilliam. McWilliams are mainly socialists and Cousin Audrey, to whom I can't not, as you will have seen, give her full title,
does
, energetically, use the telephone. She has graced stages from Pitlochry to London. One of her dearest friends, a Miss Balfour-Melville, she addresses as Miss Balfour-Melville. Miss Rosalind Balfour-Melville will this week be one hundred years old; we are in May 2008. For her birthday present she has requested a new white frock with a lot of wear in it. That's Old Edinburgh for you.

When Cousin Audrey is puffed out, she declares, ‘Whew! I'm peched.' When she's feeling dotty, she says, ‘I know you think I'm up the lum.' Cousin Audrey is an alumna of a now-defunct Edinburgh school called St Trinnean's, which is, you understand, not remotely the same as being a girl from St Margaret's, which is quite distinct from Lansdowne House, George Watson's Ladies' College, Heriot's or St George's, which as it happens is where I went. St George's is to the naked eye intensely Scots but to the understanding of mockers of a tubby wearer of its uniform in the nineteen-sixties, almost up-itself English.

My plaits often got filled with chewing gum on the bus or tied to the seat handles. The girls did the gum, the boys the tethering. Maybe it was the scarlet cockade on my beret embroidered with St George piercing his curly dragon and those four nouns from ‘The Knight's Tale', TRUTH, HONOUR, FREEDOM and COURTESY. In summer, we wore white gloves with our lightweight, fine puppystooth check, A-line coats; in winter the older girls sported a suit, known as a ‘costume' and a cardigan in a shade named Ancient Red. I was only a ‘big girl' for a year, but during that year was privileged to enter the mysteries of the Senior-style undergarments: white knickers, navy knickers, white cotton suspender belt and stockings, in the shade Aristoc ‘Allure', the colour of strong tea with evaporated milk. There was a racier option, American Tan, that was a shiny auburn, the tea without the milk. The uniform came from Aitken & Niven or Forsyth's;
it goes without saying that there were distinctions between the two shops. Forsyth's had a slightly swingier clientele and had perhaps less Old Edinburgh tone; it sold sportswear (tennis, croquet, skiing, cricket) and you sat on a polar bear to get your shoes fitted.

One of the things people ask, if they notice that you are female and gather that you might have been schooled in Edinburgh, is ‘Were you at one of those Jean Brodie style schools?' There is of course no such thing; how Miss Brodie would have abhorred this sloppy generalising. But there's no denying the precision of the echoes for St George's. We were superbly taught by fine Scotswomen, mostly unwed, who had been unmanned by war. We started Latin and Greek before these languages could alarm us, while we were yet in our baby-pinafores.

My parents could not afford the fees. I got some kind of scholarship. My mother's parents paid the rest, and I think minded. My parents fought about it. My father was vehemently agin private education. (I believe he married two women who may at least once in their lives have voted Conservative.) My maternal grandfather was self-made and highly suspicious of education beyond the respectable zones of business, boxing and golf. He read the
FT
and the
Reading Gazette
. He was quite right about the power of learning for its own sake, its huge and blessed leverage for freedom, the vital key it hands you should you require to escape.

Cousin Audrey's hot on business too and to this very day often berates me, quite correctly and very loudly, for my pointlessness and the pointlessness of what I laughably do for a living. Nonetheless, she has in her time loyally attended readings given by me and at least one gentleman known in the wider world to be ‘that way'. She's a bonny heckler and one of the bravest souls you will ever meet, a glamorous spinster of the old school, shrewd, courageous, greatly loved and on her own. She reads the right-wing press with close attention. It broke my heart when I suggested the
Guardian
or the
Independent
and she took up both. I feared for her imbalance. Her favourite paper is now
officially the
Independent,
her favourite man in the world Boris Johnson, with two little pouches for my sons Oliver and Minoo. She is a man's woman and has the hairdo to prove it, confected weekly by her dear friend Muriel Brattisani, of the famous Brattisani family, whose lobster and chips and cairry-oot Champagne are the talk of the entire globe.

My German publisher wrote to me once describing Oxford as ‘the Omphalos of the known world'. He went on to become Minister of the Arts for Germany and then, with some relief, the editor of
Die Zeit.

Anyhow, Edinburgh knows that it is the centre of the known world and
wheesht
to your omphaloi. Has a doughnut an omphalos? We're talking baked goods here. Omphalos? Can you export it? Well, of course you can, and we are an emigrated race, the Scots, bringing our notion of civilisation wherever we go, bridges, sugary snacks, books and stories, fighting and drinking.

What I'm trying to get round to is my birthday, the 1st of July 1955, the birthday of Julius Caesar, for whom my third name is Juliet. In October I was christened at Rosslyn Chapel, burial place of the Earls of Orkney, scene of
The Lay of the Last Minstrel
by Sir Walter Scott, reputed resting place of, among other things, the Holy Grail and the True Cross and scored with a number of unexplained Masonic symbols. I wrote in a novel twenty years ago about this numinous jewel in stone. Of course, its anonymity has since been rather blown by Dan Brown. It contains among countless other solid beauties, the ‘Apprentice Pillar', a piece of carving so virtuosic that the chief mason is said to have murdered its maker, a mere apprentice, for his presumption, and then hanged himself in remorse. There is a small carving of the grieving master mason, his mouth an appalled hole. This pillar is depicted on the front of one of my father's volumes in ‘The Buildings of Scotland' series. Daddy died in the middle of writing
Dumfries and Galloway.
On the front of that volume is one of the Duke of Buccleuch's palaces, Drumlanrig House, out of which, not
very long ago, someone walked unnoticed carrying a small painting by Leonardo.

That's carry-out for you on a scale beyond even lobster. The painting has since been returned. The late Duke was once our Member of Parliament and I remember him canvassing in Thistle Street, a tall curly-headed long man, before he broke his back out hunting. His father, the old Duke, had a silver wine cooler the size of a cow trough into which I remember being put for fun as a small child. Like being in a huge deep ladle of precious reflective metal, it fitted me fine. All made to hold drink.

My lips had never touched liquor then.

I was an only child, but even then somehow stood aside from properly inhabiting a self, even though at the beginning it was a fairly chunky self to inhabit. I played with dolls, glass animals, and small unmatching china tea services that my mother collected in junk shops. Wherever she went, I was. I followed her stuck like a limpet to its home-scar. I loved the scent of her forearms and the smell of her hands that combined acetone, coffee, Atrixo hand cream and cooked garlic.

In our crescent lived many mothers of families to whom Mummy became close. Constance Kuenssberg was a doctor and the wife of Ekke, our doctor, who came out day and night for us.

Ekke's father had written to him when Ekke was a boy at Salem in Germany, the school set up by Kurt Hahn who later founded Gordonstoun. It was 1935 and the Nuremberg Laws had just been passed. In Ekke's father's letter were the instructions to walk out of Germany into neutral Switzerland, down into France, and thence to Great Britain. Ekke did this. He was interned as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man, which some have described as being a kind of university then, a virtuous Babel. On his arrival in Edinburgh, Ekke trained to become a general practitioner and married Constance, who was part of the Edinburgh establishment, being daughter of the Rector of Edinburgh Academy. This extraordinary couple did much to set
up the National Health Service in Scotland. Ekke's son is now still my stepmother's doctor.

For a more expansively raised generation I should say that you had, at that time (if you had shoes at all), indoor shoes and outdoor shoes, the line between each being the front door of any dwelling place. The purpose of these designations was cleanliness. It did not do to bring the outdoors in. You might spoil someone's good housekeeping. It was a matter of everything in its proper place.

The cold: each day was a fight to keep the cold outside where it belonged and not let it into the house, though houses were freezing inside too; there was an unsleeping vigilance against cold as it came in from the sea and down from the hills and off from the mountains and into our bones. If the air was not misty with human breath and surreptitious attempts at thaw, it was misty with the haar, the mist off the sea, of which some Edinburgh residents were in my childhood very proud as it was yet another way of keeping yourself
to
yourself.

It was not unusual to see people ski the winter streets. Mothers would pull children on toboggans to fetch the messages, which is Edinburgh for ‘do the shopping'. Old ladies walked as I do now that I'm blind in the snowless streets of London, side-shuffling along the pavement while nervous hands feel for the next railing. I cracked today into a column of sixties brick, the corner of what used to be a rather ritzy rehabilitation clinic. The bruise is coming up nicely. Today's blepharospasm doctor wryly remarked, ‘The clinic got out six months ago, or you might have been able to sue. It belongs to a property developer now and they're a bit more hard-headed.'

My mother's and my favourite junk shop was Mrs Virtue's, in a basement on a corner with her name up in subtly shaded sign-writing emphasised in gold. The steps down to Mrs V's had iron handrails curled to right and left. She herself wore a hairnet, a navy angora hat, a musquash coat, a pink-flowered pinny, many cardigans topped by a maroon one, a Clydella vest, fingerless gloves, varicose veins, stockings and socks, and what were called indoor shoes.