Drumtochty Castle

Drumtochty Castle

Drumtochty was our school, set in the Scottish Highland hills an hour’s drive south-east of Aberdeen. Auchenblae village is the last outpost on your way, then two more miles into the narrow glen, through the stone pillars flanking the gate, past the long green stretch that was once our playing fields and up the drive winding steeply through the trees. ‘So, where’s the school then Dad?’, asked Emilia on our visit. Right on cue, the green canopy opened. The high flag fluttering, the battlements, the lofty arched windows of our old school dining room below. Impressive even if not the characterised castle of history. It was built as a family home in the early 1800’s. In WW2 it was owned by the Norwegian government and after that was a boarding school. My school. I can picture my first arrival there, that autumn afternoon so long ago, cars parked on the gravel and parents standing chatting. I met Mr John McIntyre. John was massively older than me, eight to my seven. We were smaller than the other new boys and were to be friends.

Drumtochty. The scents. Cut grass in summer, cold snow in winter, the pine forest always and the taint of washed flagstones and boiled vegetables in the entrance hall. Half a lifetime later John and I were to walk into country hotel for a beer, turn to each other and say, ‘Drumtochty’.

Robert Langlands was our headmaster, loved and feared in equal measure. His ‘ahem’ clearing his throat gave miscreants early warning of his approach, perhaps by his intent. He taught us French on his rare visits to the classroom. Mrs Langlands’ taught us Latin or would have done except her visits were rarer still. I will tell of other and better teachers in a moment! The Langlands had four children in their family, three daughters and a son and the school was their school too, amongst a hundred boys. That must have been odd for the daughters especially. There were two dogs, Rab a Labrador and Clover, a short-haired terrier bitch whose unpleasant smell did nothing to curb Rab’s amorous advances. The family quarters were somewhere above the second-floor classroom corridor, bottom treads of the stair were as much of that realm as we ever saw.

My first classroom, form 1, had a large bow window overlooking the glen towards the embracing slopes of Finella Hill, a fine prospect had we thought about it. The teacher was elderly, Mrs Horne, whose self-appointed task was to imbue in us a sense of our insignificance. Pinheads on the planet. Fair enough and she got us started on reading. My first ever book was Enid Blyton’s Five on a Treasure Island. I read the whole first page before the matron’s ‘good night’ and, lying in the dark, it dawned on me that if I could read one page, I could read the next and so the book.

Next year, Form 2. The mistress was elderly (and sharp-eyed) Miss Cameron. I passed a note to the rather snooty boy at the next desk. ‘What have you got there?’. Miss Cameron insisted I bring it forward. Horrors. In innocent lack of real intent, I had suggested that if he showed us his I would show him mine. ‘So that’s what you wrote,’ she said and gave my palm a firm smacking with her twelve-inch ruler. I lay awake that night fearing my awful crime would be reported to Langlands. I might be expelled, and my parents hear the reason. I prayed to God, and he listened. Miss Cameron may have been too proper to mention it elsewhere, or maybe she did and raised a laugh in the staff room.

Our general antipathy towards piano lessons owed to the ministrations of the inappropriately named ‘Miss Jolly’. Baton in hand, she would sit beside the unfortunate and rap his knuckles at each wrong note. Scottish Country Dance classes on Monday evenings were presided over by two gentle ladies from Aberdeen, Miss Kinninmonth and Miss Birse. Learning some semblance of the activity would have spared much blundering about in later life, but John and I, incapable and sniggering, were banished and so had a weekly reprieve, unbeknownst by Langlands, to sneak off and do as we liked. There was no reprieve from arithmetic. Much better was our art teacher, Mr Kelly, a cheery fellow, in a green corduroy jacket who came weekly from Aberdeen. On our first lesson, he gave me a soft 4B pencil. I had never known of such a wonderful thing and drew the intertwining branches of a tree outside the classroom window.

And English. I am a little older now. I remember the teacher with fondness and gratitude. Clive Mountain. His hawkish appearance and black-framed spectacles belied an underlying fondness for us and the subject in hand. Composition, précis. I was surprised the rest of the class found something so easy so difficult. And alone amongst my peers, I even saw the point of poetry - standing at my desk and reciting Wordsworth’s Composed Upon Westminster Bridge. Thoughtful thank you from Mr Mountain.

I was never homesick, not really, but on a walk might pick up a stone and throw it in the direction of Aberdeen where it would surely prefer to be. The school was benign, albeit within the constrictions of the time. Minor transgressions were rewarded with a ‘punishment run’ before breakfast: down the front drive, along the narrow road and up the back drive. Even on a grey winter dawn it was alright except for the obligatory cold bath after - once I had to break a thin layer of ice on the surface and lie gasping for the stipulated ten seconds timed by an older boy, ‘older’ being thirteen. Spartan trials to make men of us. Corporal punishment was gym shoe or slipper on bottom, sore but deserved. It wouldn’t do today but that was then. One time Mr Mountain was to give me the slipper for something I hadn’t done. I refused to bend over. ‘So, you really didn’t do it?’, he said mildly, and I was touched at his fairness. Roald Dahl’s book Boy tells of his boarding school in the 1930s and the persecuting treatment from psychologically twisted masters. Drumtochty was nothing like that. Mind you, there was one games coach, nineteen years old and down from Edinburgh’s Fettes public school. The force of this deviant’s beatings was abuse. There was also portly Mr Whitwell, with military whiskers. He taught history and would have a boy over his knee and reinforce each historical date with a smack on the bottom. That wasn’t all about history and one day he was gone.

In the high summer, we would take the stony track up to a clearing on the back hill. The school handyman, Harold, a stocky shy sort of chap if I remember, had made a dam in the stream so we could swim. Supervised. Down on the playing fields was cricket. My end of term report said I was a promising batsman and after Drumtochty I scarcely played the game again. There was athletics practice in anticipation of ‘Sports Day’. At long jump, Mr Mountain promised a chocolate bar to the first who bettered eleven feet. My turn next. With committed focus, I flung myself at the run-up and soared with abandon. ‘Well, that’s that then,’ said Mr Mountain.

Twilight lingers long on Scottish summer evenings. Others in the dormitory long asleep, I would wander the corridor in my pyjamas, bare feet on wooden floorboards, and stand in the soft air by the open window and gaze at the blackening silhouettes of the pines. Mrs Mac, our silver-haired dormitory matron came upon me and made me a mug of cocoa. She taught us to make our beds complete with ‘hospital corners’, a skill for life. One evening, Langlands was on his late rounds. Wakeful in my bed I stared up at him and smiled. He bent and kissed my forehead. In juxtaposition was the rumour of his having been a commando in the war. It may have been true. The rumour that Rab had dragged his wounded master clear of enemy fire will not have been true.

In winter we played rugby or were taken on rambles through the forest, up and along the firebreaks, strips left clear, we thought, for our convenience. Between lessons, we would huddle around the stove in the main hall and, on the bell, return to our desks and enjoy the fading heat in the seat of our shorts. Frozen inkwells. In the hard winter of 1963, the drive was snow blocked. We watched enviously from the dining room windows as a couple of the staff and some older boys set off trailing sledges down the drive to the road and the grocery van from Auchenblae. At Halloween night, there was the dark magic of goblins and witches. Drumtochty had its own maleficent presence, the Green Lady, lurking in the dark trees above the front drive. We never ventured out to check.

The boiler was in the gloomy back premises. We shouldn’t have been there, John and me, staring at the burning coke. It must have been difficult for Langlands to find service staff in our remote glen. Some were from Spain. But the boiler man, Eddie, was a true Scot. He must have read something in our schoolbooks for one day he shoo-ed us away from our boiler: ‘Allez, allez,’ he shouted. We asked if he knew what ‘allez’ meant. ‘It means git oot o’ here.’

We were aware of the wider news of the period, sort of. In 1952 the USS Flying Enterprise sank in a storm off the English south coast. In maritime tradition, the captain had stood saluting from the bridge until the last possible moment for which he earned both the Lloyds Medal for ‘meritorious service’ and our small boy respect. There was the 1955 Cyprus crisis, the Greek-Turkish conflict in which the British were peripherally involved. Mr Langlands asked me where Cyprus was. I didn’t even know what it was. My penance was to draw a map of the eastern Mediterranean. Next year was the Suez crisis, where and whatever Suez was.

Saturday was film night. We carried benches from the dining hall across to the senior classroom. Closed shutters, expectant silence, the agreeable sound of Mr Mountain’s 16mm projector. Flickering Laurel and Hardy comedies. And adventure films: prehistoric monsters in The Lost World and a German flying ace in The White Hell of Pitz Palu. On Sunday evenings we were invited to the Langlands’ private drawing room where we sat cross-legged on the carpet and listened to classical music. I requested my grandmother’s favourite, Oklahoma! John said it wasn’t classical. I confidently appealed my case to Mrs Langlands and lost. I had a record player, a Philips Autosonic Disc Jockey, a purchase supplemented by my earnings during the holidays picking fruit in people’s gardens. I arranged a concert in the senior classroom. The benches were promisingly filled. ‘The first record is Singing the Blues,’ I compered reverently, ‘by Tommy Steele.’ And played it. ‘The next is Cumberland Gap by Lonnie Donnegan.’ My audience began to fidget. ‘This is Elvis Presley . . .’ Mr Mountain passed by on the grass outside the window with an amused smirk. Inside, gaps appeared on the benches.

I liked porridge. Just as well in a Scottish boarding school. We were all okay with robust brown bread, although the news one day that there was to be white bread caused a stir of excitement. My hatred was liver which I could manage as small fragments, wrapped in mashed potato or, preferably, by sneaked it to the floor under the table. This latter strategy was finally spotted by stiff-natured matron, Miss Herdson, successor to Mrs Mac. She made me pick it up and eat it, on which revulsion, my stomach washed its contents across the table, excusing my ever having to eat liver again. At another mealtime, Mr Mountain called me a ‘poltroon’, a knave, but I mistook the word and caused a stir at lunch by telling the young teacher, Miss Stephenson, that he had called me a prostitute. She was later to become Mrs Mountain.

In free periods, older boys were given licence to wander within the school’s grounds and if John and I wandered farther who was ever to know? I remember a moment on the back hill when we looked at each other and hugged in affirmation of the bond we felt. We fell out at times for about five minutes. As to physical fights, we had none. John in his single-mindedness did have one with Biffo McRae from Glasgow. Biffo was bigger than John but did not win for the simple reason that for all his modest stature, John had, and still has, vice-like hands. He held Biffo’s wrists to eventual stalemate. If you were going to fight with John, keep clear of his hands. This was known.

The pair of us were agreeable boys, but with a waywardness that tried the staff. An example. An incident. Imagine two boys with a titanic sized balloon, perched on the deep windowsill at the high back of the school ready for launch to the kitchen yard below. It was wobbling and filled with water. The why and how would need longer telling. Suffice to say it jumped the gun. Glug. Water washed over the bed below and across the floorboards. ‘Ahem’ and rising footfalls on the stair! Langlands contemplated the flood and the limp piece of rubber in the middle. He shook his head. We were called to the staff room that evening. There was a tolerant air of amusement from some but not from Langlands. We were to be separated. Separate in the dining hall. Separate in class. Separate going down to the games fields and separate coming back. Separate. Next Saturday night after films, in forgetfulness, we were carrying a bench back to the dining hall, me at one end and John at the other. Suddenly Langlands loomed above us and tried not to smile.

I became a teller of stories to my dormitory. Tobor the Great, was a film. The reverse spelling of Tobor gives the clue. A small boy has sneaked into the inventor’s laboratory and he and Tobor became friends. Towards the film’s climactic ending, the boy is locked up by bad men. The boy pleads telepathically to Tobor for rescue. Over and over. ‘Tobor. . . Tobor.’ The camera cuts to Tobor in the dark laboratory, zooming in on his glass eyes. ‘Help me Tobor.’ ‘Help me Tobor.’ Ping! The eyes light up. It is surely one of the most dramatic moments in movie history, except my listeners were asleep and me talking to nobody.

I spent my thirteenth birthday in bed, with the mild flu going around. Langlands came into the sick room. ‘Hmm, a teenager’, he said. Thirteen, and in the final term, the Common Entrance examinations for entry to senior schools. Our invigilator was the Auchenblae church minister, Reverend Macleod, stout and with curly black hair. We called him ‘Curly Sambo’. His Sunday sermons had weighed upon us for five years, but he had our attention now. White collar notwithstanding, he helped us. Question on the exam paper - who was the doubting disciple? ‘Well, you all know that of course - Thomas.’ Who wrote Great Expectations? The answers were provided offhandedly and without there being anything untoward since we were credited with knowing the answers already. Where is Cyprus? I knew that one. Had he provided a mistaken answer we would all have been rumbled, us boys, the school, the church

As the summer holidays neared, I lay awake excited to imagine the train home to Aberdeen, the steam puffing, the clattering wheels on the rails. The end of term play was Mr Mountain’s adaptation of the 1930 parody of school history lessons, 1066 And All That. The refrain of the Roman Soldiers was fitting:

We’re going home . . . we’re going home

We’re on the road that leads to Rome …

Next morning, the old Bedford bus with its familiar whining transmission and grinding gears, passed down the drive and out between the stone pillars. ‘We’re going home,’ we sang. We were, but I looked back and felt an unexpected stab of sadness.