There is a fortnight of amnesty at the end of the harvest, before the frosts take hold in the high glens, before the storm warnings for the Pentland Firth come through on the radio. It is the moment in the year when northern Scotland looks like the watercolours of the mid-nineteenth century, with umber touching the leaves above the stubble fields. Wind rises in the dark, despoiling the gardens and sending needle-scratches of silver across the lake. Rain comes at dawn, and I lie drowsing, composing letters to the dead.
Between sleep and waking, in the territories where nothing is irrecoverable, I have written three letters on our thin laid paper with its crimson impresa of a burdened palm tree. The letter to my father is the simplest: after our ancient joke about the Committee for Un-Scottish Activities, it is mostly about cricket, about the batsman Alastair Cook. The letter to the scholar Elsie Duncan-Jones, perfect expert on Andrew Marvell, is about the rediscovery of St Robert Southwell’s Latin poem on the Assumption of the Virgin – with its infernal parliament and its embassy to the upper world, Miltonic beyond coincidence. And I have written to Hew Lorimer about the bold design of the Hay tombstone in the old graveyard at Turriff, wondering if the stone is deeply enough cut to outlast many more winters.
Hew knew all that was worth knowing about Scottish stone and Scottish weather: his sculptures and inscriptions are all over the country still, in remote graveyards, on distant islands, in modest Catholic churches in the Lowland cities. Elsie’s knowledge of Renaissance poetry survives in the memories of her pupils as well as in the accurate, admirable essays and articles which she published during her long life. Both of them have come to mind in this rainy autumn dawn, not only as two of the dead of whom I have reason to think with particular gratitude, but also as two holders of keys to the past. When I was in my twenties, and they in their seventies and eighties, I used to visit them especially at this season of the year; my recollections are of conversations which led back beyond the mid-twentieth century, into ‘the world we have lost’. The regions which these conversations opened for me – scholarship before the assault on the universities; architecture before the all-out assault on the built environment of Scotland – are, in retrospect, of course, ‘kingdoms which we now lament’; but it is no small consolation to have known free citizens of those territories.
Towards the end of my doctoral studies I would visit Elsie often, cycling down Grange Road in Cambridge in the late afternoon, travelling against the flow of muddied college athletes returning from the football fields. She lived in a neat block of spacious modern flats, built in the grounds of a demolished professorial mansion. Her neighbours were mostly retired, I supposed, and mostly distinguished. It was beautifully quiet there in the large, west-facing room – modern, white, unexceptional – furnished with decent furniture of the 1800s, as though it were in a Georgian rectory. My memories of Scottish houses at that time are of almost the opposite: chill, high-ceilinged early-Victorian or Georgian rooms with predominantly modern furniture and assertive abstract or colourist paintings.
Elsie’s broad windows looked down into a little wood, paths crossing at the edge of the trees and a Victorian streetlamp marking their intersection. I cannot remember ever seeing anyone walking on that path, nor do I know where it went, nor who lit the lamp. In a sense, it would have spoiled everything to have followed it into the shadows. This mysteriously placed lamp was a fixed point to which our conversations often returned. It was the lamp which lit the way to Narnia; it made the path through the trees a way in to a territory of the imagination. We must have talked mostly about Renaissance poetry, our common profession after all. But there were long conversations about Scotland as well, and about Stevenson’s Master of Ballantrae, which led to the only disagreement between us which I can remember. My suggestion that Jacobitism would have appeared to many Scots the only possible position was countered by a sharp, very Marvellian, reminder about Stuart tyranny and its consequences.
But what I remember most vividly is that we talked often of autumn and evening, of the twilight paintings of Atkinson Grimshaw, of Elsie’s own recollections of Birmingham in the early years of the war. She had written a flawless memoir of her student days, which seemed to me then the opening of a potentially great autobiography, but she never took the project any further. She remembered Edgbaston on autumn evenings, the Victorian street-lamps unlit, a parlour window on which a late-Georgian hand had diamond-scratched a pastoral name, Clarissa or Clarinda. And the diamond scratch showed in the last of the light as the blackout curtains were drawn painstakingly across the window.
John Meade Falkner, the Edwardian poet and novelist, had a particular interest for us both. His dreamy and melancholy poems about remote English churches, about time passing and quiet decay, evoked places and sensations familiar to Elsie but almost exotic to me. At that time, Falkner’s poems could only be bought in what remained of their original inter-war edition, the whole stock of which was held by one bookseller in Notting Hill. Falkner discoveries filled our correspondence after I had moved back to Scotland.
Those conversations were important for the world which they opened: memorials of the England of the seventeenth century. They come involuntarily to mind if I think of the shadow of leaded lights falling across a page of fading secretary script, of the view of bright stone spires and towers from the upper rooms of the Bodleian Library, under that diffused yellow light through blued mist which somehow has impressed itself on me as the light of Caroline England.
Winter in the tempered, marine climate of eastern Fife could appear an endless autumn – thin sunlight slanting on the grassy slopes to the sea, sea-fog in the Firth, the Bass Rock and the Isle of May looming in and out of the shifting mist and spray. Hew Lorimer’s many-towered castle had a long view down to the Bass Rock on the other side of the estuary. The hill behind sheltered it from the north, and its walled garden held fast the circuit of the sun, so that black prodigious hellebores came into flower there long before midwinter. The house came to fit around Hew like one of his peaty tweed jackets. He and his family had brought it back to life, repaired its nail-sick roof, recreated the garden after wartime digging for victory. They made something eloquent of their place and their time and their beliefs. Indeed, to have taken on such a house, and to have repaired it and filled it with a wonderfully diverse and idiosyncratic collection of furniture and pictures, was an extraordinary gesture of faith in the years after the war.
I have a strong memory of an informal party assembled at Kellie on a midsummer evening in the 1980s. It was, as I recall, brought together by the exchange of mutual thanks and a quiet celebration of the completion of the catalogue for the retrospective exhibition of Hew’s work. The younger members had climbed Kellie Law to look out over the Lowlands and the waters of the Forth. Then they had come down the paths at the edges of the fields on the slopes of the hill, gusts of warm and cool air from the banks and gaps in the hedges, and that odd smell like whisky-mash which hung in the air at the edges of fields in Fife twenty years ago. It is a peaceful smell in my memory, a smell of deep country, the smell of the depths of rural Scotland. It has vanished now, so I fear that it probably derived from some hideous agricultural chemical now rightly banned.
Once back on the level ground with the stair-towers glimmering through the trees, a fence showed light against the darkness, although the sky above was still lit in faint blue. Behind, amongst the group of guests still coming through the gate from the hill, someone was singing. It was one of the Scots airs known to Burns, one that had found its way into the Scots Musical Museum. ‘Craigieburn Wood’ or ‘The Gallant Weaver’, it might have been. It was of a piece with the hour and with the midsummer light filtering into the little wood beyond the castle wall. Then the groaning back gate, little used in those days, and beside it Robert Lorimer’s stone garden house. Closed up then and in an unfrequented part of the walled garden, it has that real Lorimer quality of looking as if it could always have been there, a seemliness and sensitivity to place which never compromised the integrity of the design.
The garden itself was crossed on cut stone paths or on shaved grass between the borders in their early summer depth of Celestial roses, the short-flowering Gallica roses. Then there were the local flowers: perennial white Lothian stocks, Cockenzie pinks, weaver’s pinks from Paisley, all with their different variations on the scents of cloves or pepper. A combination of an old, deep Scotland with memories of France: in Hew’s latter decades at Kellie everything was of a piece, everything had its history and its part in the narrative. These clove scents and the cool, soapy scent of the French roses accompany us as far as the back door at ground level, leading through the galley kitchen of the northeast tower, and through to the red painted stairs with the great platter of Wemyss-ware carpet bowls in the deep embrasure of the little window. Then up to the green-and-white of Hew’s sitting room on the first floor.
Hew sits at his ease by the unlit fire. He has dozed and read a little while the rest of the party has been out on the hill; someone has stayed with him and the supper has been cleared away. So now he is awake, as awake as the undarkened night outside the long windows. My memory shows me Hew in the heavy green-upholstered armchair, wearing a tweed coat and a checked shirt and a plain russet tie. Summer, so no cardigan or waistcoat. The panache of white hair. The big strength of his hands.
It is strange to see someone before your mind’s eye as strongly as that, after twenty years and more. But I can, and he is present as vividly as he was (another picture complete in the mind) one winter night in the armchair beside the fire in the big white drawing room, when the alarms had been quenched and a reel was filling that room with movement and pattern and music.
That midsummer night is exceptionally complete in memory. Hew’s book is lying by his chair – a work by Hilaire Belloc, an eighteenth-century pastiche called Clarinda or Belinda – he must have owned it since he bought it new. That was what he was reading by the late light from the tall windows. For someone who lived their life surrounded by such beautiful things, the only thing in the house which I can remember Hew pointing to with pride was one little picture of a pear, perfectly rendered, almost impossible to date, which used to hang on the white-painted panelling of that room. The sky outside never grew quite dark that night, the trees were silhouetted, but always with a tinge of blue behind them. Hew stirred in his chair, stumped upstairs to bed and the party drifted out into the courtyard and drove away.
As the years passed, and since his wife had died, Hew lived only in the north-east tower, and cut his stone in the adjacent stables. The state rooms which his grandfather and uncle had repaired, and the cluster of tower-rooms at the south-west end, were now in the care of the National Trust for Scotland. The far tower which had been the domain of his painter uncle was abandoned, hardly ever opened.
Hew’s first-floor room had once, presumably, been the state bedchamber at the end of a formal enfilade. The first two rooms were in the public part of the house: a double-height drawing room, lit on either side by great tall windows, with a vaulted chapel off one corner, white-painted panelling, delft tiles round the fireplaces; then a high square room with painted Dutch landscapes in the panelling and a blue-fading verdure tapestry filling the depth of one wall. Hew’s room beyond (the enfilade doors were screwed shut) had a copy of Raeburn’s portrait of Thomas Reid let in above the fireplace. The ceiling was stamped with the heads of Roman emperors, in profile as on their coinage; vigorous plasterwork, inches deep.
Kellie Castle, as the Lorimers furnished it, was and is a rediscovery of the internationalism of the Scotland of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. So many Scots going to university in Holland, so many boats going to and fro between Fife and the Netherlands – so many boats that it is quite possibly fact, rather than pleasant urban myth, that the red roofs of Fife are the products of Dutch as well as Scottish kilns. And there are the fine tiles from Delft and Rotterdam which Hew’s father, Sir Robert Lorimer, deployed so lavishly round fireplaces. Dutch tile pictures – birdcages, urns, harlequins, dogs and cats – add their particular atmosphere of naive sophistication to the staircase at Kellie.
What is distinctive about the appearance of the rooms of Kellie, what is singular about them, was formed over generations of the Lorimer family. To some extent they partake of that extraordinary imaginative ability which allowed Sir Robert to recreate, absolutely precisely, the aesthetic decision which a Scottish wright of the 1690s would have taken about the detailing of a doorframe or panel. On occasion, he exhibited an extraordinary capacity to produce an arrangement of furniture and objects which suggested subtly the choices of a laird at the turn of the nineteenth century, with an exceptional eye and a budding taste (like Scott’s antiquary) for oak furniture and arras.
There is a Scandinavian, palpably northern, element to the castle. The mixtures of early-modern and arts-and-crafts furniture, the spacious rooms with their painted panelling, and most of all, the double light in so many of the rooms: the tall windows in more than one wall, the ladders of the shadows of the glazing bars when the rooms are lit by a low winter sun, or the overlapping shadows of leaves on the floor and walls in summer. The summer concerts of the early Pittenweem festival were in that drawing room, alive with the green shadows of the leaves. I remember George Bruce the poet reading there, performing a translation we’d made of Schubert’s little piece for speaker and piano, the ‘Farewell to the World’. Hew sat in his accustomed chair by the fireplace, at the middle of things, keeping the house alive. I suppose that John Lorimer’s paintings of rooms at Kellie fix the Scandinavian aspect of the house: the white clothes, the sparse rooms, the complex fall of the evening light.
Sometimes Hew and I would wander together through the public part of the house when the visitors were just leaving at the end of the afternoon. In the dining room, Hew points out where a cupboard had been added, on which his uncle John and a friend had painted two landscapes to match the painted Dutch panels in the rest of the room. Then, into the chapel by which Hew set great store. Often we went on into Hew’s own studio in the yard, whose dust had the quality of a southern road, a road in France or Italy, fine white stonedust, and I would listen to his curt, absolutely precise, explanations of how it was done, of how many things were done and made.
One October Sunday afternoon, Hew and I were roaming the house listening to heavy rain among the browning trees. No visitors had come – we crossed the darkened drawing room and opened the door to the far tower which had been the domain of his uncle the painter. It was abandoned, thrillingly empty, thrillingly dusty, except for a ping-pong table in one vaulted room, and a few sketches and unfinished canvases leaning still against the walls of the top-floor studio.
The top rooms of Hew’s own tower were unused, absolutely silent. On November afternoons you could look south over the tops of the trees and the backs of the crows, over the riggs stretching away to the red-roofed coastal burghs and the water. As the dusk came on, the lighthouse on the May swept its beam across the Firth and distant lights pricked out the outlines of the towns on the Lothian shore. Then quickly down the spiral stair – the top floor of the castle on winter nights had a bad reputation – and back to the fire and Hew dozing beside it. As he grew older, he retreated to a tunnel-vaulted room on the ground floor, its windows cut through five solid feet of masonry: Mr Badger gone to ground amongst Roman foundations, burrowed into abandoned works of giants.
It seemed, at least to my twenty-five-year-old self, that Hew had been the fortunate inhabitant of an arcadian Scotland. He had moved with open eyes through the austere beauty of the farmtowns and the old burghs, down long perspectives of wind-bitten avenues, under painted ceiling beams and plasterwork like deep-printed, hard-frozen snow. But he had also borne witness to the destruction of almost every fine building that could be destroyed in the 1950s and 1960s. In Aberdeen in the last days of the war, he had tried without success to prevent ‘an attic full of manuscript music – seventeenth-century, eighteenth-century’ being burned by an officious sergeant in charge of billeting. He had fought through the 50s and 60s to save the ancient towns on the Fife coast, only to have every one of them surrounded and strangled by expensive pebbledashed estates in the 1980s. All too often, my questions (with which he was not invariably patient) were about what a place had looked like before the wreckers moved in.
There was an awkward evening once when my father came with me to supper at the castle: the quiet collision of two sorts of Scottishness. Hew’s views seemed in that context remote and absolute (his father having been the paradigmatic Scottish aesthete). My father (whose father was the equally paradigmatic Scottish engineer) had been radicalised by the war, and believed in slum-clearance and starting again. My father’s views were those of a profoundly humane person of his precise generation, but Hew held a view which seems increasingly of today, or even of the future: for the preservation of texture in place and life, for the preservation of the uniqueness of place, because that is the soil from which the uniqueness of the person grows.
The thing that united them was a shared perception of geography, a reading of the map. They had both spent long periods on the continent, and both were good linguists. Neither had spent very much time in England, and, quite tranquilly, neither of them felt any great need so to do. This could be heard in the way they both spoke: different degrees of old Scots educated speech, retaining a touch of local pronunciation in a sounded r, a just-perceptibly broadened a.
The conversation took us down the winding stair into our coats, and across the gravelled yard to the studio, colder inside than outside in the November night. Stone-dust lay deep, and a wall of palpable cold hit us when the door was opened. Here Hew had invented and reinvented the broken sculptural tradition of Scotland, out of a profound sense of Scottish place and Scottish light, but with recollections of the sculptors of France, especially Gislebertus of Autun. The big book on Gislebertus, with its smoky deep-toned black and white plates, was always near the top of the pile in Hew’s sitting room in the tower. Perhaps his simplest reinvention is the figure of a shepherd boy now at Ardkinglas in Argyllshire; Hew told me that it was meant to be King David as a boy, David as a Scottish shepherd, with his kilt and his horn trumpet. The cow’s-horn instrument is of the same material as the horn serving spoons still found until recently in farmhouses in deep rural Scotland. It is only one example, one of many, of Hew’s gift for reinvention, for filling the gaps of a disjointed history.
On that November night, the last great limestone Calvary had gone, but the scaffolding (up which Hew could swing himself by his arms in his seventies) stood there still. Small maquettes and memorials were left in the studio; nothing else. As it turned out in the end, Hew’s last design was my father’s gravestone.
Once, only once, did I make the mistake of going back as a casual visitor after Hew had died and the Trust had taken over completely. I found the place in the hands of agreeable English people peddling a conventional fantasy of patrician Good Old Days bearing no relation to the angular, molto cattolico reality. The new order had even rearranged the altar furniture in the little chapel to make it look Anglican.
I went back once more, to give a memorial lecture and felt haunted and oppressed, despite being surrounded by friends on a flawless day. I was troubled, as I went round with Hew’s kind son, by the rooms having frozen as in my twenty-fifth year. I felt suddenly and horribly the sheer force of time in my own life – surrounded by worn and faded things that had been bright and good when last I was in that room. And I was haunted too by a less rational disquiet. The fifty-four-year-old public man with his lecture notes was almost scared that a dark-haired boy in a grey tweed jacket would be going out by the far door down the enfilade, and that that boy would be (of course) myself. The self who, hot and exalted with dancing reels, went out into the yard of the castle to smoke some time in the early 80s of the last century, and looked up at the shadows of the dancers on the drawing-room ceiling. A moment that encapsulated all that I valued about Scotland at that time: the frosty night and the stars, the crackle of gravel underfoot, the music and firelight within.
It is seldom a good idea to go back. Recently I thought the same in Cambridge, a city which seemed to have gained one excellent noodle-bar and lost most of the things that had mattered most to me. It is better to concentrate on the present place: on the thickening strew of leaves beside the water, here in Aberdeenshire, on the cold which will descend any day now to end these equinoctial days of wind and rain and ambivalence. Frost comes, the air falls quiet, and with the hard frosts (in many respects) things become simpler.