Around the Rowan Tree, Day 33

A date was arranged – December 14. We could not have known it was to be one of the coldest days of the century

Ifelt much better after working this out for myself. But I still felt the need of a confidant who could help me in a practical way with my problems. I could think of no one. However, as I had found so many times before, someone always turns up. This time it was to be my one and only sister-in-law in this country, Pat. I told her my problem about the arrangements for Mahri’s wedding.

“I’ve got an idea,” she said. “You know the chapel attached to your house. That would be just the very place to have the reception. How many people were you thinking of having?”

“Around 80,” I replied. “Well,” said Pat, “it would be big enough. After the war sister Eileen had her wedding at Inchmichael. It was a big wedding but they hired a marquee as well. Put it on the lawn.”

“I don’t think I could cope with a bigger wedding,” I said, “not at the moment. We’ve discussed it and Mahri and David are quite happy with a smaller one.”

“The chapel’s the very place then,” said Pat, “it couldn’t be more suitable.”

The whole notion of a chapel attached to a farmhouse may seem like a strange one to most people. For a large part of the early 19th Century the house had been occupied by the Playfairs, tenants who farmed the land.

Tenancy The last Playfair died in 1875. The neighbouring farmer at West Inchmichael, Ronald’s great grandfather, took over the tenancy of the land of East Inchmichael.

He didn’t need the house at the time, so the landlord let it to Bishop Germyne, a middle-aged man who may have been a friend or relative of the landlord, Lord Kinnaird, who owned much of the land leading to Dundee.

The middle-aged bishop, retired from a post in Ceylon because of ill-health, soon recovered in the fresh air of Scotland.

After the sudden death in 1876 of the Scottish Episcopal Bishop Forbes, Bishop of Brechin, he was offered the post. The good Bishop Forbes had lived in one room connected to Dundee’s St Paul’s Cathedral. There was no bishop’s house.

Bishop Germyne elected to stay where he was and Lord Kinnaird, a devout man of good works, built on the chapel for him at East Inchmichael.

Bishop Germyne’s wife was a bedridden invalid and part of the wall of her upstairs room was pushed through to form a doorway so that she could take part in the services.

The chapel was used for several years for services until Lord Kinnaird built the Scottish Episcopal Church at Glencarse.

In 1908 Ronald’s grandfather and family came to live in the house. Grandfather used the chapel for the reading of family prayers.

When his son Ronald, a bachelor, inherited, being of a less religious and more practical nature, he used the chapel as a potato store.

But when my mother-in-law came to live here things were different. She planned to use it as a beautiful drawing room for her own pleasure and for parties and gatherings. Because of the Second World War she didn’t have many, but she had it done up in a baronial hall manner.

She put in an enormous open fireplace above which hung a stag’s head complete with antlers. On the opposite wall, french windows were pushed out to the green garden. A new oak panel floor was laid. Otherwise little else was changed. Windows still pointed heavenwards and the thick, curved, wooden beams were still in full view, vaulting towards the high apex of the roof.

Expert I knew Pat and her daughters were expert at catering. Ronald was pleased with the idea. “The very thing,” he said. “I would have suggested it but I didn’t want you to be burdened with all the catering. That’s good of Pat. She always comes up trumps when she’s most needed.

“And the service can be at Kinnaird Church where Linda and Richard were married.”

The minister was approached, the same good man that had christened Kathleen. He was only too pleased. A date was arranged – December 14. We could not have known it was to be one of the coldest days of the century.

As always there were other unforeseen difficulties. Ronald had fallen and broken his leg a month beforehand and, much to his annoyance, had to be pushed up the steep incline to the small red sandstone church in a wheelchair, anathema to such an independent man.

It was arranged for a few photographs to be taken of Mahri entering the church. It was such a pretty little church almost hidden among trees with hills and an old red sandstone castle in the background. Mahri, a picture in her long flowing white dress, almost froze and went up the isle shivering.

How much this was due to nerves and how much to cold, we were never sure. A neighbouring friend and farmer was to play ‘All for Mahri’s Wedding’ as the bride and groom emerged from the arched church door. Since his fingers froze, this proved impossible.

But once we got back to the farmhouse all was rectified. The heating had been on in the chapel for days. It was lovely and warm. The delicious buffet went without a hitch.

Before midnight the bride stepped into the waiting car all done up with balloons and trailing cans, while the kilted groom was lifted sky high by his brothersin-law and deposited in a barrow. After a quick hurl round the farm yard he was unceremoniously shoved into the car after his bride.

Diplomatic Apart from the wedding, that was a bad winter. We had thought perhaps that the frost would be severe for a day or two and then disappear. But instead it stayed and it stayed.

It was like being back in Canada. Half the pipes in the house froze. Poor Grant, who thought he had escaped from plumbing for good, found this was not the case. Everyone was in the same boat.

My father, now 87 years old, was becoming frail. All of a sudden it seemed he had shrunk into himself. Also he discovered that he had to go into hospital for an operation for a hernia.

When he returned he needed nursing. I made the sitting room, adjacent to the chapel, where such merriment had taken place only a short while ago, into a bedsitting room for him.

My father and Ronald didn’t get on all that well and since Ronald wasn’t well either, it was a difficult time and I had to be diplomatic.

The district nurse came down every other day to tend to my father and give him a bath. All the cold water downstairs was frozen, but fortunately we had two water systems.

The upstairs water wasn’t frozen. So that meant I had to trek down huge buckets of water from upstairs to the bathroom downstairs as my father couldn’t go upstairs himself. More tomorrow.