1980
I got off the bus at Priory Cottages and waved at the driver.
“Thanks again for all your help,” I shouted as he climbed back up the steps and into his seat. Happy to assist when I’d boarded in Aberdeen asking if I could get off at the top of the road near Fyvie Castle, he’d just swung my weighty bag down the steps for me. He deposited it at my feet with a wink.
“What’s in here then? A dead body?”
I grinned as I watched the Elgin bus pull away and hitched up my rucksack onto my back, then grabbed the handles of the heavy duffel bag to pull it along on its base. It was far too heavy to carry. I’d stuffed so many books into it, it was bulging.
Soon I realised that the base would collapse if I pulled it for the next mile on this bumpy road riddled with potholes and stones, so I hauled the handles up and swung it over one shoulder, cursing the fact all the books were hardback. When Mum had asked how on earth I’d manage – “You’ll never be able to pull that heavy bag for a long walk!’’ – I’d laughed.
“Mum, I’m still only nineteen, not ninety. I’ll be fine, stop fretting.”
But as my shoulder began to ache, I realised that as usual Mum was right. This was not easy.
She’d shaken her head and muttered again about how ridiculous it was Dad had never let her learn to drive and I raised my eyebrows as usual about the word “let”. Under normal circumstances, Dad would obviously have driven me here himself, taking pride in my new job, but now I’d no choice but to get the train 32 to Aberdeen then the number thirty-five bus to Elgin. When I thought of Dad, I still always felt choked, tearful, but what was done was done and there was no changing what had happened.
When Mum and I had pored over the Aberdeenshire map to locate the castle, she’d pointed out Old Meldrum just down the road from Fyvie.
“That’s where my Granny Owen came from. Her maiden name was Forbes, which I’m pretty sure is a local name.” She chuckled. “She used to roll her ‘r’s so much, it was comical. When she said Meldrum, I got a fit of the giggles.”
Since Mum never talked about her family, I was fascinated, but as usual she changed the subject when I probed about this granny. I took a deep breath and continued along the narrow road, pausing now and then to shift the weight by swinging the bag over to the other shoulder.
The word Owen in my head, I then smiled as the lines of one of the poems I’d studied for my Higher English came to mind, since my back was hunched and stooping with the weight. I muttered the words to myself as I trudged along. “Bent double, like old beggars under sacks/ Knock-kneed, coughing like hags…”
And then I spent the next five minutes trying to remember the rest of the verse.
Soon I came to the entrance gates to the castle, two tall, elegant stone pillars with a wide iron gate in between. This was closed, but beside the right-hand pillar was a sloping wall with an ornate gate inside. I tried the handle and thankfully it pushed open. Presumably the main gates were only open during visiting hours. I continued shuffling along the road, looking up at the tall trees on the verges. Among the oak and sycamore, there was a beautiful copper beech on the left. Mum’s love of trees used to annoy me on family walks, but I now realised, as an adult, how useful it was.
There was a small loch on the right and I needed a break so 33 slumped down on the verge, under a beech tree, dumping my bag on the grass. I pulled out Mum’s thermos flask from my rucksack, wishing it had cold water in it and not hot tea, but it quenched my thirst a little anyway. I looked over the water where some ducks and moorhens were bobbing about. Behind them was a little stone boathouse with a wooden door painted green.
I looked up to where some sparrows were flitting about in the branches of the tall trees above me, chirruping and twittering. The whole scene was a bucolic idyll, this beautiful countryside and the blue sky with a few feathery cirrus clouds forming high above the low, puffy cumulus. I sighed as I remembered the only reason I knew the names for all the clouds was because of Len, and so tried to think of something else, hoping that this would all fade in my memory.
History was my love, not clouds and weather. I shoved my thermos back into my bag, lugged my heavy duffel bag up onto my shoulder again, and continued along the road, waiting for my first glimpse of the castle. The more I thought about what I was about to embark on, the more apprehensive I became. This was not jittery excitement about the possibility of new adventures, it was in fact a cold feeling of foreboding, almost a fear of what lay ahead in this, my first summer spent completely on my own.
But, as Mum had told me as she drew me into a tight hug at the station that morning, I could do anything I wanted. I deserved to be happy now, she’d whispered, and everything would work out fine. That was so like Mum: though she too had been unbelievably sad about what had happened, her first thoughts were only ever about me. She’d swept my wayward hair off my forehead and told me to look to the future. Given my past, surely that was the only possible way.
I had just left the loch behind when I passed a row of trees on the left and let out a gasp. I flung down my bag and took in the 34 sight up the slope before me. There it was, the pink sandstone castle with turrets and the crow-stepped gables I’d read so much about. It really was the fairytale castle I had seen in the photos. I smiled, picked up my bag and continued walking along the drive. My cumbersome luggage felt somehow lighter and my spirits lifted as I approached the dark oak entrance door. Everything was going to be fine.