WHEN I FIRST VISITED SCOTLAND in my late twenties, I expected to be welcomed home. I knew from my mother, who was enamoured of my father’s French–Scottish ancestry, that the MacColls ran the place. My father was the eighth Dugald in his line. When we learned the ‘Skye Boat Song’ at school, I knew my own ancestors had played a part in this rich history. One of the Dugalds had been in the boat guarding Bonnie Prince Charlie as he fled the invading English to the Isle of Skye, my mother said (although if you google it, Dugald the guard doesn’t come up straightaway). The MacColls were poets whose names and verses rolled off their Highland tongues.
Imagine my shock to learn not only that the MacColls weren’t running the place but that no one I met in Scotland was named MacColl. We didn’t even have a Tartan in the coffee table book at the B&B we stayed in. But how beautiful was my country anyway, with its mountains and lakes and majesty; how much I felt I’d come home after all. Walter Scott said it right: ‘Breathes there the man with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land!’
My father was very clever, but he didn’t like us kids much, a truth it took me some years to accept. It’s possible it wasn’t personal—he disliked most people—and I do think he may have disliked me less than he disliked my brothers, although it’s equally possible I’ve imagined that.
On his weekends off, Dad did the garden in the afternoon and then drank beer and smoked cigarettes while he listened to Johnny Cash: ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’ and ‘I Walk the Line’, or even ‘The Long Black Veil’. His humour, which my mother later described as ‘adult’, was often hard to understand. He would ask, ‘How old are you?’ Seven, you’d say. ‘Do you want to live to be eight?’ Yes. ‘Then shut up.’ At one time I think I may have believed you could be killed for talking, which was not an easy cross to bear when you liked to talk more than just about anything.
Dad was oddly against the Cuisenaire rod system used to teach mathematics when I started school, in which colour-coded bars of different lengths are used to demonstrate addition and subtraction. He went to see my teacher. ‘She knows that black plus white is tan, but if I ask her to add seven plus one, she looks at me blankly.’ The teacher nodded sagely. ‘All in good time,’ she said, ‘all in good time.’ My maths never improved.
I’d sometimes make myself stay awake until Dad came home from work at midnight or one in the morning and we’d talk. I don’t remember much about the conversations, just that he noticed me and spoke to me. One night when I was nine I cooked him an Irish stew while I waited. I knew he liked the mixed herbs so I put in the whole jar—not right at the start, but bit by bit until I saw there was none left. It wasn’t a failure of Cuisenaire to help me understand the amount required, just an inability to recognise that a little of a good thing doesn’t mean a lot will be better. When Dad arrived home, he sat down and ate the stew and said it was delicious. He put so much pepper in his potato—Deb powdered mash—that it was charcoal grey on his plate, so perhaps a bottle of mixed herbs was about right.
Dad set high standards. Once, when we were looking at a report card where I’d done well, an average of six on a seven-point scale, he focused on the subject I’d been rated a five in. I asked, ‘What would you do if I got straight sevens?’ There was no hesitation in his reply: ‘I’d tell you to get eights.’
If people visited our house, Dad would go into his bedroom to hide until they left. It was a great joke among us kids—Dad has his paper bag over his head today so he doesn’t have to be anybody. If he was caught before he got away to the bedroom, he was good company and people always liked him. That was the odd thing. Once, when a visitor made it through the front door before Dad could reach the bedroom, he went out into the backyard instead. He managed to get my attention through a window. I had to sneak out with his beer and cigarettes.
He told me once that his own father had done the same, shunned visitors, hidden if someone came to the house. My grandfather was André Dugald—André from his French mother—the older of two sons by seven years. The younger son, René Michel, was preferred by their father, who was Dugald Sutherland, DSM, an art critic and keeper of the Tate Gallery in London in the early twentieth century. The Dugald before Dugald Sutherland was a Scottish Presbyterian minister at the fire and brimstone end. I don’t know the Dugalds who preceded the reverend, but feel certain we’re never more than six Dugalds of separation from Bonnie Prince Charlie.
Before he’d turned twenty, my grandfather had served as an officer in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in World War I. After the war, he worked in Malaya before emigrating to Australia on the toss of a coin (America was heads). In his thirties, he married my grandmother and refused any financial or other help his family offered. His letters home—DSM’s personal papers are held in the University of Glasgow Library—are full of self-recrimination. In one, he mentions a sketch DSM has sent him and makes the point that he knows nothing about art and will not make a fool of himself by pretending to know anything. This kind of self-deprecation might have been standard with the Dugalds, but what surprised me about my grandfather’s letters was the sweet love he expressed for his son, my father. He says he wants to provide the best for his son—Pip, they call him—says he can’t believe how bright Pip is, what a marvellous boy he is turning out to be.
The letters were written before my grandfather went away to his second war. He enlisted in the Australian Army in World War II, lying about his age as he was over thirty-nine by then. I think he might have gone to earn money. He served in Egypt and came back suffering from what I assume was post-traumatic stress disorder. He was in a special hospital for some months. There are no letters to England from then on.
Among my father’s personal papers there are only a few photographs. My favourite is one of him at two or three years of age in shorts and a woollen coat—a gorgeous, cuddly child by any account. He’s in the left of the frame, running along a sandy shore full-pelt. Although the shot is low-contrast grey, you can see the energy in his limbs, an energy I never saw in the man. On the other side of the shot is his father, crouched down, arms open, waiting to receive his son in a hug. It is so full of love, this photograph, on both sides.
In another photograph, my father looks about ten. He’s dressed for a party in a pirate suit. His father would still have been away at war. He has a cutlass at his side, an authentic hat, a vest and ragged pants. I don’t know who took the photograph, my grandmother most likely, but the look on my father’s face is one of quiet disdain. He is saying, ‘I hate this stupid suit, I hate you taking a photograph, I hate my life.’
In the university library in Glasgow, there is a letter from my father, written when he was eleven, to his grandfather, DSM. He says he bought a cricket ball from a boy in his class and his dog Tim is highly excited. That afternoon, he has been across the road where a new house is being built to play tag with his friends. He is trying to make model aeroplanes but he is not much good at it.
Reading the letter made me realise my father was once a boy with a boy’s sensibility. Like all of us, he was a product of his circumstances. His father’s absences, first at war and after the war, suffering the effects, were not something he signed up for. Neither was his role among the Dugalds. I don’t intend to excuse him—there is probably no excuse for disliking your children—but he didn’t sign up for the life he had. None of us do.
My father was not flawless. He was a talented writer from a young age. He came to drink. He drank a lot. In brown swimming trunks, he looked more vulnerable than you could ever imagine a full-grown man might look. As I say, I never really understood him, although he was once the second most important person in my life. I would certainly wish him well in his next.