The serial: Largie Castle, A Rifled Nest Day 12

If John was manly, courageous and upright, he owed these attributes to a fleet of men and women downstairs, behind the green baize door

Ican imagine her well-ordered world. How innocent-sounding was a knave then, once a term for a male servant, but even in Granny’s day it had the ring of someone undesirable.

He was a rogue, a tricky customer but never, as it is now, associated with the openly unsavoury, or futuristic as the knave of hearts is used to name the informal area being explored by the Phoenix spacecraft on planet Mars.

Why a book on Patience? The author, W. H. Cremer Jun, with those post-nominal letters suggest his American origins, as the Brits give their names handles for social ballast, so that mister or esquire suffice, but never junior.

Firstly, Cremer Jun was known as a toy-seller to “little folk,” the word ‘children’ was not then coined as he never includes it in his advertisements. To supply the best for his “little patrons,” who are encouraged to “learn from their amusements,” he searches the workshops of France and Germany for the best he can find.

Instruction

Cremer Jun also sold children’s books, especially instructional manuals. John’s one on Patience has an exhortatory title worthy of Robert Baden-Powell of the scouting movement: Patience by Perseverance.

As a late Victorian’s answer to today’s stockingfiller, the book provides on its front cover a wily instruction for a child of the Empire, the biggest the world ever saw: “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try and try again.”

I remember Mummy repeating the phrase when I knitted a ribbing in moss stitch or darned a hole in my gym slip, schooled my pony to turn on the forehand, or practised my French verbs. I wondered how many times I should try before I was entitled to give up.

I weighed up the advice and couldn’t agree with the stoical dictum. Just as I couldn’t agree with turning my cheek, the usual advice from the pulpit. How many era have been saddled with this advice? And did it stem from my grandfather’s generation?

I have modified this epithet so that my daughter is regaled with the Churchillian dictat, ‘never, never, never give up,’ which is more contemporary.

Cremer Jun’s little book aims at more than diversion. It has an imperial motif, giving the nod to hierarchy. Each game has a name: King, Queen, General, Admiral, Sultan, Duchess, Emperor, Engineer, and Rifle Corps. I admit it includes less status-loaded themes like Garcon, Windmill, Baby, Fox, Lion, and even the Rejected. It’s the word, ‘Patience’ that intrigues.

Wasn’t there a Gilbert and Sullivan opera called Patience? Cremer Jun gives no date for his publication but the opera, opening in 1881, was a satire on the aesthetic movement and was the first show in London to employ electric light.

I can well believe that middle class Gilbert & Sullivan devotees would have come down hard on anything purporting to the beautiful or useless, the aesthete in other words.

When John was at Magdalen College, Oxford, a hard core of undergraduates berated anyone displaying the least trace of the pansy within their cloisters. W.H. Cremer Jun catered for those his card games a call for robust imperialism. I’m sure my grandfather followed those strict codes of manliness, courage and reserve. Or did he?

Attributes

If John was manly, courageous and upright, he owed these attributes to a fleet of men and women downstairs in the castle, behind the green baize door, who saw to it that his food was cooked and served, the cutlery and china washed and stacked.

They also laundered his clothes, cleaned his boots and rooms, and tended his wife and children; his animals, both domestic and wild too. These were his staff or servants.

In literature, there are well-known alliances between the high and low-born, the most celebrated being Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. The French playwright, Moliere demonstrates in his drama this upstairs/downstairs mindset of idealistic, impractical masters and their down-to-earth, knowing retainers.

The cerebral, religious John had one such manservant who even served as ersatz father to Mummy, Douna, and her three brothers after John’s death. He was Robert, the butler, who was never known by his surname, McKinven, unlike Whetton, the butler at Capenoch, Dad’s childhood home. We called him Robert, but he was Rob to his peers. Highland society was less formal and more intimate than that of the Lowlands or England.

Robert was sensitive to The Other World, the domain of elves, fairies, and broonies. He was wary of the Largie Broonie and never visited his room at the top of the tower, especially after dark. Everyone at Largie listened to what my grandfather said but he could not easily hear them, or his wife and children.

While the Broonie was neither seen nor heard in the castle, although his deeds were noted, Robert was always visible but seldom spoke. That was his job: to serve silently.

A butler is the soul of discretion and enablement. Presiding over the dining table he moves noiselessly from one person to the next, hearing what they say but never admitting to listening; far less, repeating what he hears, in the basement in the servants’ hall where cook, housekeeper, kitchen maids, footmen, and others reside.

Solemnity

As senior member of staff, Robert took his job seriously. Others chuckled at his solemnity. A West Highland boy from the islands (born on Islay) with an Englishman’s airs and graces. When Lachlan, the footman from Perthshire where houses were bigger and posher, asked his superior if he had come across a butler’s revenge, Robert blushed, nervously adjusting the right corner of his bow tie. He knew but wasn’t going to admit anything.

We knew Robert as a monosyllabic old nag, sitting at Ballure on the step dividing the kitchen from the pantry, reading The Herald.

We never met his twin, Sam the shepherd, and I guess that when they got together on the hill, they spoke in Gaelic, a language outlawed by the authorities and spoken by herdsmen, shepherds, and gamekeepers to the cattle, sheep, and dogs, and to the Broonie, of course.

(More on Monday.)

© 2017 Mary C Gladstone, all rights reserved, courtesy of the author and Firefallmedia; available in hardcover and paperback online and from all booksellers.