Largie Castle, A Rifled Nest Day11

Elizabeth needed her only son in the drawing room, for him to be seen and not heard, able to amuse himself, and while away those wet afternoons

The most fanciful story of my grandfather is when he saw The Bird. In Gaelic culture, this meant he, the Largie laird, was about to die. Mummy said it was large and white but could not tell if it was a swan, goose, gull, gannet, or albatross. I picture it as a snowy owl with a penetrating gaze. After Jock, the 21st Largie laird, was severely injured in France, Granny asked if he had seen The Bird. He confessed that none of any description had come into his vision, while he lay on death’s door in his hospital bed.

At that critical time, the Macdonalds took the absence of The Bird as an indication that Jock wouldn’t die. In the end, he outlived all his siblings.

Apart from his second sight and a belief in the supernatural, John was successful, adventurous, and bold. Like his predecessors and father, he was an expert yachtsman, who could judge the tides and treacherous currents off the Kintyre coast and in the Irish Sea.

He was familiar with the West Highland weather, the Atlantic storms, the rain breaking over the islands, and the balmy peninsula’s climate with its frost-free, temperate winters. Customs

My grandfather often sailed to Northern Ireland to stay with his sister. John had a profound interest in France, its culture, literature, customs, and cuisine. He was a keen farmer and kept Highland cattle that won prizes at agricultural shows all over Scotland.

The Largie laird looked after his property, cultivating many species of trees. Interested in the spoils of the late Victorian plant-hunters who brought back shrubs and other exotic plants from the Himalayas, Asia, South America, and Australia, he planted at Largie rhododendrons, azaleas, bamboo, and monkey puzzle trees.

But like Achilles, the ancient Greek hero, John suffered from a physical defect which set him apart from others. Had he not been very deaf, he would have entered politics and taken a more active part in public life.

His disability suggests that my grandfather, although well-born, intelligent, courageous, and expert in several fields, was flawed. His scholarship (he was to publish in 1915 a three-tome History of France) was good but not great.

He was no match for the social historian, G. M. Trevelyan, John’s contemporary from a similar social background, or the earlier British historians, like Edward Gibbon or Thomas Babington Macaulay.

It’s unfair to label him an also-ran, but nobody could claim his work was up there at the top. Another contemporary was Winston Churchill, the eldest son of a duke’s younger son. Because Churchill inherited no castle or country estate, he pushed his talent farther than John and, of course, he lived longer.

If we want to find out what my grandfather looked like as a boy, I have his photo, taken at Mr John Moffat’s Edinburgh studio at 125 Princes Street. Can you imagine it? John Ronald and his mother trotting up in a cab with no cars or concrete but plenty soot and horse dung.

There he is, Mummy’s father, my grandfather standing in a bare room as if on stage with a painted backdrop of panelled dado and large gothic window, to suggest an ancestral pile, as Moffat knew Mummy’s papa was gentry, the 13-year-old 20th laird of Largie (his father, Charles, having died in 1879 when John was only six). Watchful

He is a proper little Lord Fauntleroy, dressed in velvet breeches and jacket, satin waistcoat, fine lawn cravat, stockings, and buckled shoes. His short, dark hair closely cropped (ready, I presume, for his first half at Eton) and his brown eyes, watchful and wary.

He looks intelligent, not rumbustious but quiet and self-contained, as is evident in the books he owned. I have a few: Bacon’s Essays and the poetry of Shelley, Francis Thompson, Keats and Coventry Patmore.

However, there’s one slim volume, a navy-blue, cloth-bound, manual on card games that intrigues me more. It was a present to John for Christmas, 1884 when he was 11 years old, and his widowed mother (if it was she who gave him the book) chose a manual on games of Patience. All 29 of them. Can you believe it?

Not a water pistol (if they existed then), or a bow and arrow. Mind you, under the guidance of the Largie gamekeeper, I’m sure he had the chance to shoot, and his father, a keen sportsman, who kept a pack of otter hounds, would have left him a set of Purdeys or the like.

Elizabeth needed her only son in the drawing room, for him to be seen and not heard, able to amuse himself, and while away those wet, Kintyre afternoons playing Patience, just as today his great, greatgrandchildren peer into a screen and play solitaire, only no cards are flipped, but a mouse is clicked.

I said there were 29 games, each diagrammed with cards whose primary colours, the reds, blues and greens are indistinct at best and smudged at worst. But there’s one – I only discovered it the other day – like a door into a secret world, hidden on the end cover after the author’s advertisements.

Someone (who I don’t know) has added game number 30. It is clock patience with a pen and ink diagram, circular, of course, and the instructions on six lines at the foot of the page.

The hand-writing is small and well-formed, obviously not a child’s, with Roman numerals for the hours. It most likely belongs to the same person who inserted John’s name at the front of the book but whether it was him, who added it, or his mother, or even a fond aunt, I will never know. Quaint

I also have a copy of a portrait of my grandmother, Daisy, as a five year old with twin sister, Violet, painted by Ethel Mortlock and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1885.

Dressed in red coats and hoods, they stand in a wintry Hampshire field. The connection is that Daisy played Patience.

She also read books, practised, not petit point, but gros point embroidery in thick, vibrant coloured wools. But later in life she loved Patience.

It was quaint the way Granny referred to the jack of the pack as the knave, the word capturing another world, a Victorian era of hansom carriages, top hats, music halls, and cavalry charges. When she played cards and discovered a knave, she announced it with her oh, so confident, brigadier-general’s daughter’s aplomb. More tomorrow