The serial: Largie Castle, A Rifled Nest Day 14

In a spirit of noblesse oblige, John and Daisy wafted through the throng, welcoming each guest both the titled and the most humble

When Mrs Macdonald received that telegram, in the buff envelope that we all fear, she caved in. I could see how it was, Robert might have said. She gave up. Angus was lost, the telegram said. Lost at sea. Robert thought: I knew what that meant; lost meant they found no body to prove he was killed. Lost meant he was either blown to pieces or he was laid out cold in the jungle, exposed on desert sand, lying on a mountainside, or bobbing on the ocean waves.

Mrs Macdonald wanted to leave the castle and go up the road to Ballure and asked me to come. I agreed even though I’d be a cook and not the butler. Now I prepare cod pie, shepherd’s pie, beef stew, and herrings in oatmeal.

I know that dish. We went out as boys with the boat to catch herring in the bay. I cook mutton too. There’s plenty of that, although Mrs Macdonald doesn’t like it. She prefers cauliflower and macaroni cheese. Tragic events Her appetite is poor and she drinks little. She’s restless having suffered all those tragic events. She once received dozens of visitors, and her sisters were her mainstay, especially Violet, her twin. But Violet has died.

I liked to serve these ladies in the castle. It’s not the same here, although I carry the main dish into the dining room with as much ceremony as I did at Largie. I present the food with dignity no matter who the guests are, even when Esther and her children visit. I could do without them. What an unruly lot! Three spoiled, cheeky girls. Big girls who don’t know how to hold their tongues. I pity their teachers. If they’d had mine, they’d know about it.

I serve them properly, but Mrs Macdonald insists I place the dish on the side-board so they may serve themselves. To save me work, she’s bought a dumb waiter, that sits in the centre of her dining table. Times have changed. You wouldn’t believe that they now serve themselves, when I remember the laird had a valet and Mrs Macdonald a lady’s maid.

Now she washes her dishes herself, cooks breakfast on my days off, although I prepare the vegetables for her lunch, before I go out. I know my place. I stay in the servants’ quarters, but she still worries about me. “What’ll happen to Robert after I die?” she asked her daughters. She knows that Sam has gone; so have all my family and I seldom visit the islands now.

“I must find a place for him to live,” she said. She worries about me just as I worry about her. Twins of a sort, we’re like peas in a pod but not the same one. Our pods are different.”

Not only the 21-year-old McKinven twins, but the whole neighbourhood were present at Largie on June 22 1911 to celebrate George V’s coronation.

It was a balmy day, and the Macdonalds’ friends, neighbours, and estate workers were determined to enjoy themselves. Sam directed the traffic, many guests arriving by foot, but the rich came by pony and trap, while the richest sailed in by car. Social mix The shy Broonie kept away from the crowd. It’s my guess he sulked on Cara and refrained from chucking stones over the water. The Largie garden party was a good social mix: landowners’ wives rubbed shoulders with the partners of shepherds, carpenters, and gamekeepers.

Farm-hands tossed the caber; mothers chivvied their children to run a three-legged race or the egg and spoon. Refreshments were restricted to tea for the women, beer for the men, and the children drank lemonade. Each child received a present of a Coronation mug, heralding a new era from the peaceful, fat Edwardian years. Most Kintyre people were unaware of what was about to happen in the world at large.

In a spirit of noblesse oblige, John and Daisy wafted through the throng, welcoming each guest both the titled and the most humble. Their two children, Jock and Douna, were tidily dressed, their collars and cuffs starched and sandals polished to a high shine.

For that afternoon Nanny Dempsey was in charge of the Macdonald children, ensuring they steered clear of the courtyard pond.

Exactly two years later in 1913, Daisy gave birth to her second son. Arriving in what is now seen as a lull before the storm, Angus entered a far from stable world as nobody denied that clouds were forming over Europe and that war with Germany was a possibility.

However, life in Kintyre was a world apart, and all at Largie appeared peaceful. John may have been only the third owner and occupant of the castle but his land had belonged to the family for generations.

This rootedness and sense of belonging was a decided advantage for Angus. In having lived in one place for so long, the family took on a mythic pallor, that had the effect of subordinating all those born into it.

The Largie Macdonalds’ ancestral line served as ballast for each generation in turn. As the second son of Largie’s 20th laird, Angus lacked for nothing: a home delivery with a midwife in attendance, nursemaids, a relaxed mother, interested father, regular feeds, fresh air, a spacious room, and, above all, silence. Air of calm Jock and Douna’s voices may have occasionally interrupted the infant’s sleep but generally an air of calm surrounded baby Angus. In June 1913 John was busy working on his magnum opus. Gone were those rumbustious days of Angus’s grandfather, Charles.

On July 25, a month after his birth, two clergymen arrived at Largie to baptise him.

Considering the men’s senior positions in the Anglican church, you would have thought that Angus was the most important infant in the country. The first, Byrd Spence Burton from Boston, Massachusetts, ended his career in the 1940s as Bishop of Nassau (and towards the end of the decade he also baptised me).

The other, Cosmo Gordon Lang, Archbishop of York, had only one more rung of the ecclesiastical ladder to climb before he landed a bulls’ eye.

Some thought it overkill to bring in an archbishop for the occasion. However, Lang and John were close and had met when the former was a simple clergyman, decades before he was to become, in 1936, the chief obstacle to Edward VIII retaining his throne if he married the twice divorced Wallis Simpson. More tomorrow.