The dwindling photos of Largie newborns may have been due to events far from home also

Family photographs tell a story, not only in their content, but by the frequency with which one or other child is photographed. John and Daisy spared no expense in taking snapshots of Jock, their firstborn.

As a baby, bonneted and swirled in fine cotton, he is either wheeled in a chariot pram around the Largie garden, propped on his father’s arm, or with his parents helping him build a sandcastle on the shore. Of Angus there is little.

John was affectionate and also loved his eldest daughter, Douna. When very young, she suffered from a temporary blindness. Nobody knows what caused it and, in spite of being comforted by Margaret Dempsey, their Ulster nanny, John insisted on cradling Douna in his arms until she recovered. But John’s principal affection went to Jock, his firstborn and heir. Birth order or the practice of primogeniture, was too important. It made John Largie’s 20th laird and Jock the 21st.

Traditional

This procedure, where the first son takes all, is an arrangement whereby families follow the ancient strategy, of maintaining a family line where younger siblings are left to fend for themselves, as the family’s influence and power depend upon it.

Unfair though this is, it is how ancient British landed families survive, off-setting or minimising the effects of gambling debts, death duties, or inheritance tax, failed business ventures, and spendthrift children.

Division into caste is rife. In traditional schools, brothers are distinguished by labelling the eldest ‘major’, the second ‘minor’ and the third ‘minimus’. However, the second son (‘minor’), Angus might inherit greater wealth than his older brother and therefore overtake him and become ‘major’.

Thus equality between the Macdonald brothers was possible, something unthinkable with the Gladstones where my father was never allowed to forget that he was only a second son, a ‘minor’, without wealth.

Still, by the time Angus appeared in 1913, the camera at Largie played a more sporadic role. A darkhaired days’ old infant sleeps in Daisy’s arms, but the image fails to explain who it is. “DMM and one of us” is written on the photograph’s reverse.

Roses climb around the door-frame and since they bloom in mid-summer, the time when Angus was born, perhaps this is the first picture of him. The dwindling photos of Largie newborns may have been due to events far from home also.

As Angus moved from breastfeeds to solids, there were murmurs above and below stairs during those sabre-rattling, pre-war months of 1914. In the laird’s dining room and the servants’ quarters, men discussed if they would volunteer. On August 4 1914 war was declared.

During those anxious weeks, eyes turned westward towards nearby Ireland, a country in turmoil. But a month previously an Austrian archduke visiting Sarajevo was shot. That clinched it.

As the Largie visitors’ book testifies, a stream of guests stayed that summer: men dressed in civilian clothes, others in dark blue, and a number clad from head to toe in the colour of dust. Sometimes Angus entered the drawing room after tea to meet them.

Once or twice he saw a man in black trousers and jacket with a white collar and a crucifix around his neck. This was Lang or Taggart, as the family called him, who enjoyed the company of the Largie children.

With their regular features, well-laundered clothes, and a nanny to wipe their noses and straighten their hems and cuffs, it was easy to find them attractive.

Ridiculed

Doubtless, the archbishop suffered the Macdonald children more readily than the ones he had come across when he was (what is now patronisingly termed) a slum priest.

Nevertheless, contact with Daisy and John’s offspring became less frequent, when in 1914 not only the war impinged but the cleric abandoned the Tave for Ballure, situated three miles farther north.

At the end of the year Angus, who was unaware of the gravity of world events, saw that the hair of the man with white collar and crucifix had turned white.

Had he been old enough to understand, the young boy would have learned that Lang, in making a plea to the British public not to demonise Germany, was ridiculed and excoriated by the press.

If, at this time, the men in the young boy’s life were in a state of flux, the women remained constant. In the afternoons, if it was fine, as it was that summer, his mother pushed Angus in his pram.

Sometimes another lady came and no, the infant was not seeing double, although she was of a similar height to his mother and had the same eyes, pitch of voice, and hair colour.

This was Violet, Daisy’s identical twin sister. As she had done for his older sister and brother, Daisy treated Angus to rides in the donkey cart.

But where was Dochie Darroch, who put the animal between the shafts? Where were Rob and Sam? Even John departed Largie in January 1915, soon after Angus’s second Christmas.

While their father was gone, a favourite place for the older children to play was in the woods around the castle. Jock and Douna paddled in the burn, surrounded by bamboo and rhododendron.

Beyond, was a hill and on its brow perched the kennels.

Neglected

The keeper’s spaniels barked, howled, and pounded the wire of their runs, when visitors called. The two eldest Macdonald children often made a trip there, not just to stroke the dogs but to see what the keeper had caught. Sometimes they saw dead rabbits, moles, and foxes. But lately things had changed.

The pheasant coops were empty, and, because so many young men, including a keeper, had gone to the Front, sport on the estate was neglected. In peacetime, Largie earned more from its game rents and letting the castle, than from renting the fields. During the war all shooting for sport ceased.

Too young to follow his older siblings, Angus accompanied his mother to the walled garden where, at the end of a cinder path edged with slate slabs, they reached a border of michaelmas daisies, hollyhock, spiraea, and Canterbury bells.

A keen gardener, Daisy realised how neglected the space had become. At the greenhouse on the north wall, further horticultural chaos met them.

Trailing vines obstructed their entry. In the garden’s centre, a half dozen bottle-shaped yews surrounded a fountain. I’ve no idea if the fountain played during those blood-soaked years, for Angus to watch its drops of water glisten in the sun.

(More tomorrow.)

By Mary Gladstone