Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [16]
Auntie Glug has inherited from her parents a holy belief in the restorative nature of gardening and animals and she is unapologetically earthy. Several years ago she went to India and came back wearing salwar kameez and eating with her fingers (the salwar kameez didn’t last—not practical in the winter and she kept setting them alight with her cigarettes). She is also the only person I have ever met who has returned from that country enthusiastically endorsing its latrines. “Very sensible,” she said, “all that healthy squatting.”
From where I am sitting in her morning room, she appears in her garden as something ancient and essential in our people. Warped by the old Victorian glass windows; morphed by an old shirt of my grandfather’s and a pair of tie-waisted corduroys; shadowed by India, over whom she bends once in a while to consult and pet, she gives the impression of being ageless, genderless, doggedly Macdonald of Clanranald but also a product of East Africa, of that particular time and place when there were really no limits on how well or badly, sanely or madly a white person had to behave. “Don’t talk to me about behaving,” Auntie Glug says, giving one of her badger growls. “Bugger that.” (As a result of Auntie’s standard nonconformity—gardening until midnight while teaching herself Spanish, controlling air traffic over Dundee while knitting and teaching herself Spanish—it is sometimes a little difficult to tell when her natural eccentricity crosses into territory better understood by the professionals.)
No Macdonald of Clanranald is entirely at home in a house that does not have animals and ghosts. Accordingly, there is in Langlands Lodge the ghost of a little white dog (killing, as it were, two birds with one stone). My cousins say they’ve heard it clatter up and down the stairs at night, and until my grandmother died in 1993, she saw it with such persistence she began to doubt it was a ghost at all and began to leave milk and food for it on the landing.
Uncle Sandy is two million percent Scottish and a pilot. He plays the bagpipes at all our family funerals and weddings, kitted out in the proper attire (a mere glimpse of his bagpipes and sporran makes Mum weep). Uncle Sandy can tell you next week’s weather just by looking at the clouds over the Sidlaw Hills; he can dead reckon the speed of the wind to within a knot or two and he can tell, without looking, when the rooks have come in from the fields to roost in the forest near Langlands. Because of his job, he is off traveling much of the time, but when he is home, he stations himself in the kitchen and cooks the kitchen to a steam, as if the act of leaving behind frozen tubs of chili and freshly baked bread and bottles of plum jam means that he is never really gone from Langlands.
It is in this creaking, ghosted home, fragrant with Uncle Sandy’s cooking, the BBC ancient-rhyming the Shipping Forecast from the kitchen and the old grandfather clock in the dining room creaking as if time hurt to tell, that I touch the corner of my grandfather’s war in two scraps of paper. The first is his enlisting agreement, signed June 13, 1940. “I swear by Almighty God that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty King George the Sixth, His Heirs and Successors, and that I will as in duty bound, honestly and faithfully defend His Majesty, His Heirs and Successors, in Person, Crown and Dignity against all enemies, and will observe and obey all orders of His Majesty, His Heirs and Successors, and of the General and Officers set over me. So help me God.”
There appears my grandfather’s signature.
Below that was written “Have you received a notice paper stating the liabilities you are incurring by enlisting?” Next to which my grandfather had penned, “Yes.”
“And do you understand and are you willing to accept them?”
“Yes.”
MY GRANDFATHER’S FATHER was a vicar in the Church of England. “There are bishops and vicars going back as far as you like