Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [13]
“Yuck,” said Mum, whose own maternal hugs are stiff, reluctant and brief. “We just weren’t raised that way.” And then her eyes went pale and she spoke to me very slowly, as if explaining her culture to an alien visitor. “We are terribly British: stiff upper lip, no public displays of affection. It’s how my mother was raised, and it’s how we were raised—and I don’t think it did any of us any harm.”
I refrained from pointing out that my grandmother, Mum and Auntie Glug had all spent time in institutions for the mentally unhinged. In any case, Mum would have countered the diagnosis, “Highly strung, I think you mean. There’s nothing wrong with being that kind of bonkers. It has nothing to do with not being hugged enough and everything to do with being so well bred, and that leads to chemical imbalance. We’re like difficult horses or snappy dogs; it’s not our fault. It’s in the blood.”
In keeping with their arm’s-length style of parenting, the Macdonalds of Waternish were remarkably unimaginative when it came to naming their children. Boys were Allan or Donald and, at a stretch, Patrick. Girls were Flora. My grandmother, an unwelcome surprise, arriving twelve years later than her siblings, was Edith, but everyone called her Donnie. Before Donnie reached her teens, her father, Allan Macdonald, died. How he died is a matter of some dispute. Mum says Allan Macdonald broke his neck in a riding accident, but a distant Macdonald relative told me that he died from a bad cold.
“Well, that might be,” Mum says impatiently, “but a broken neck certainly didn’t help.”
In any case, the result was the same. Granny’s father was dead and her bad-tempered brother Donald inherited the estate. The death duties were crippling. Bad-tempered Donald sold every valuable painting and antique on the estate. He divorced his wife, citing exasperation at the way she ate apples, and he sent his son, Mad Cousin Patrick, away with her. Then he retreated to a tower on the north side of the house where he stayed for the remainder of his life while dry rot ravaged the rooms and a thick growth of green slime crawled over the cold stone walls down the hallways and into the kitchens.
Meanwhile, Granny’s mother, who had not been provided for in her husband’s will because everyone kept thinking she’d die in the night of a bladder infection, sat in a basket chair in her bedroom waiting in vain for the Grim Reaper. It was so cold in the house that she went everywhere with an Aladdin paraffin lamp and she always wore at least five cardigans, the longest one on the bottom, layers and layers of shorter ones on top of that and a thick shawl around her shoulders.
And then there was my grandmother’s elder brother, Shell-shocked Allan, a desperately good-looking but very sensitive man who had run away at the age of seventeen to fight in the First World War and had been gassed in the trenches, leaving him delicate and scarred. He kept a hundred cats and carried on a secret marriage with the village postmistress, with whom he had one son, named, of course, Allan (but known as Wee Allan to distinguish him from his father, which worked well until Wee Allan grew into a six-foot-four man of considerable if gentle bulk).
“So Waternish House was quite suffocating by then, full to overflowing with damaged people and Muncle’s stuffed animals,” Mum says. “Moldy heads with bared yellow teeth and glassy eyes all leering down from the walls.”
My grandmother escaped this Dickensian shelter to stay with the crofters who lived and worked on the estate. From them she picked up fluent Gaelic. She learned how to sneak up on razor fish by walking backward along the beach. She collected carrageen and swam in the warm currents of the Atlantic with wild otters and seals. She galloped her family’s crossbred Arabian Highland horses bareback across the heather. She spent her nights in the natural, warm clatter of the housekeeper’s lodge, a cottage made entirely of corrugated iron, so that nobody could hear anybody speak whenever the wind blew or whenever it rained, which