The serial: Largie Castle, A Rifled Nest Day 17

Worst of all were the young men who never returned and in the village, and on the farms and crofts, silence descended

When unable to go outdoors, Angus stayed in the nursery with meals sent up from the kitchen. Food, served on thick, white china, was plentiful but bland: eggs, beef, mutton and fish with milk puddings for dessert. Adults and guests dined downstairs on crested bone china, while the cook, maids and butler ate in the servants’ hall from willow-patterned plates.

In summer 1915 John returned. Sometimes father and children visited the steading where other children lived. However, they spoke in a tongue the Macdonald children were unable to understand, and to add to their feelings of separateness, they learned their three “Rs” in splendid isolation from Maude Harding, the Largie governess, while these local boys attended the school at Rhunahaorine.

It’s a wonder that John and Daisy’s children picked up so few words in Gaelic, as even the herdsman used it to talk to his cows and the highland bull. Invaded Although the war played no direct role on civilians in Kintyre, Germany’s U-boats, present in the water off Scotland’s west coast, threatened British shipping. However, no zeppelins invaded the air space and, unlike the Second World War, there was an absence of blitzkriegs or area bombings.

The government brought in rationing of sugar, tea, coffee, but Largie had plenty vegetables, soft fruit and fresh meat. Was it confusing for Angus to see his father leave home? John first left when Angus was 18 months and did not return until after his 2nd birthday.

Yet, deaths and casualties affected all corners of the country. Not one village or town escaped the arrival of the War Office buff telegram. The sight of the postmistress on her bicycle grew familiar; as her knuckles rapped on the front door, a curtain inside twitched at the window.

Whistling stopped, children became mute and the curtains were drawn. Angus hardly understood what had happened, but the dead men’s ghosts lingered in courtyard, stable, barn, passageway, and drive, their personalities permeating their old haunts.

Then it all came much closer. Fortunately John was back from France at the time. On a morning in the first week of October 1915, the postmistress’s bicycle climbed Largie hill to deliver a letter from Violet, who was heavily pregnant (she was to give birth to her first child, Andrew on December 21st).

She had offered her name as next of kin for her youngest brother Tempest, serving in France with 3rd Battalion Grenadier Guards, in case he was wounded, captured, or killed. It communicated news of the young officer’s death on September 27 near Hill 70 at Puits during the Battle of Loos.

Since Tempest was orphaned at the age of eight, the older Daisy and Violet had become his substitute parents. At the time of his death their young brother was barely 18 years old and had joined the Guards in April of that year, after he finished his training at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. Absent uncle It was a terrible shock. Cosmo Lang was not there as a source of comfort. He had stayed at Largie earlier that month but had returned to York two weeks previously. However, Daisy’s brother, Lewis, a naval officer on HMS Hardy of the Grand Fleet, paid a visit on October 14 and stayed for a week.

Born in 1897, Tempest was the baby of the family, but his was a sad, short life. After losing his mother when he was seven and his father a year later, he was sent to Summerfields preparatory school and then Winchester College from which he was expelled at the age of 15.

He then entered Dulwich College and from there was admitted to RMC, Sandhurst. Tempest was to Angus what Angus was to me: an absent uncle, a name, an image in a photograph and for us both merely a signature in a book given to our mothers.

John left home again in early 1916, and the months slipped slowly by before he returned, by which time Angus was almost three. Other men came back, some robbed of a limb or with disturbed minds. Worst of all were the young men who never returned and in the village, and on the farms and crofts, silence descended.

When, at last peace came in 1918, Angus was five and a half. Few were jubilant when victory was built on so much sorrow. Schoolmaster reports from Kintyre villages gave little mention of the war, in a collective desire to draw a veil over the trauma. The memoir of a Largie neighbour skims over these years, listing the names of the fallen but little else.

The country was in debt and farming prices were at an all-time low. The landowners had had their heyday, but for Angus and his siblings, life was only beginning. There had been other wars and they too had ended. Nevertheless, the adults knew that the recent cataclysmic events had sounded the death knell for the old way of life.

Most poignant were the absences, particularly of Tempest, whose signature in the Largie visitors’ book is seen, first in a childish hand as a schoolboy, then at various addresses in and around London, and finally at RMC Sandhurst.

Another absence was Thomas Nelson, an Argyll friend who lived at Achnacloich and was killed in 1917. A year later his widow, Margaret, met the French minor Impressionist artist, Paul Maze, from Paris and introduced him to the Macdonalds, before she married and had two children (Pauline and Etienne) by him. Memorial The community talked of erecting a memorial to the dead. John was determined to commemorate locally the Largie and Killean fallen and not have their names subsumed on an impersonal Campbeltown memorial stone. In the end they built one on a hill at Glenbarr looking out on to Cara to chastise the Broonie.

From his seat on the island’s southern shore, the Largie spirit could look over the sea to the monument and regret the deaths. The war took its toll; many looked older than their years. A photograph of my grandfather seated on a deck chair outside the castle taken shortly after the armistice shows him beginning to go bald.

I’ve explained why Angus’s first name was Charles. The Macdonalds supported the Jacobite cause, which meant they were loyal to Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender who tried to gain a victory in 1745 over the House of Hanover, the ruling British monarch of the time.

The most famous name associated with Charles or Bonnie Prince Charlie is Flora Macdonald whose reputation has not worn well.