Largie Castle, A Rifled Nest Day 100

Significantly, the baby’s parents chose affection over dynastic affiliation when they named their first son Angus.

Uncle Angus’s first name was Charles, chosen in respect of his paternal grandfather and because he stood in line to inherit a property, headed by Charles Lockhart who married Elizabeth of Largie.

However, Angus, and not Charles, was the name Simon and Caitriona preferred for their first son. In choosing it, they selected the name our uncle most closely identified with, the one he wished his friends, family and, above all, his army colleagues to use.

Unlike the regal-sounding Charles, and its Jacobite roots, the name Angus strikes a demotic, very Scottish note. Steeped in mythology, Angus as a name straddles the old world and the new.

No more so is this demonstrated than in the original words of the beautiful traditional lullaby Dream Angus which continues to enthral (in modern arrangements by singers like Donovan and Annie Lennox). Can ye no hush your weepin’ All the lambs are sleepin’ Birdies and beasties are nestled together Dream Angus is hurtlin’ o’er the heather Dreams to sell, fine dreams to sell. Angus is here wi’ dreams to sell. Hush my sweet bairn and sleep without fear, Dream Angus has brought you a dream my dear. List’ to the curlew cryin’ Faintly the echoes dying, Even the birdies and the beasties are sleepin’ But my bonny bairn is weepin’ weepin’ Dreams to sell, fine dreams to sell. Hush my sweet bairn and sleep without fear Dream Angus has brought you a dream my dear.

Associated with the god of dreams, Angus is a timeless figure in folklore. The mythical Angus offers forgiveness and reconciliation through his gift of love and dreams. As I conducted this search for Angus, I discovered that I too was finding a way of reconciliation.

In digging up and turning over so much of the past I realised that our family story, its bones and flesh, was lost when my uncle drowned.

In discovering who Angus was and what he had experienced and suffered, I was able to understand why my elders had behaved in the way they had done. Just as Simon and Caitriona’s son would one day take on the mantle of his dead uncle and inherit his land, another boy born two years later, on March 18 1948, became a symbol of hope. He was the fourth and last child of the Rogers and they too named him after Douna’s missing brother.

What was more, the boy bore an uncanny resemblance to his dead uncle. He grew up tall, dark haired, with large, handsome brown eyes. Daisy wasted no time in showering him with love and admiration.

Little Angus became her favourite grandchild, much to the incomprehension of the others and particularly me. I was born three months after Angus Rogers. I have photographs of us as toddlers playing and squabbling over a honeypot standing on a table placed on the gravel outside Ballure’s front door.

Compensate

In each snapshot, Daisy holds Angus on her lap or has her arm around him. In another she helps him complete a jigsaw. She is all eyes for Angus but not for me. At the time, I resented it even though my mother tried to compensate for Daisy’s neglect.

It wasn’t until I returned recently to those photographs that I saw things differently. As I pieced together the events leading up to my birth, I realised why Daisy had a particular fondness for my cousin. By favouring him above me and possibly her other grandchildren, she relived the childhood of Angus, her son.

When at breakfast she ordered from Robert McKinven a softboiled egg for Angus and not for me or my sisters, Daisy was merely apportioning love and attention to the boy who represented her lost son. I can now see how this fondness she felt for my cousin, was nothing to do with him per se or me, but a need for this old lady (now in her late 70s) to feel close to her own son.

If eggs for breakfast were a treat, so were other foodstuffs, particularly imported goods. All around were signs of austerity as the war against Hitler and the Axis powers had to be paid for.

Not only did Daisy try to move on, but the rest of the world was also doing its best to put the past behind it. At this time, Lieutenant General Percival at his home in Hertfordshire received a letter from an old friend in Malaya. “The Japanese,” he wrote, “are not hated here, as I expected they would be.

“Today, the first consignment of Japanese toys arrived and were being sold to Malays and Tamils by the Chinese shopkeeper, clearly labelled Made in Japan. I speak of Mersing where thousands of Chinese were slaughtered by the Japanese less than three years ago.”

This was 1948 when Daisy stayed with my parents in their Berkshire home after my birth on June 15. The year 1948 saw the founding of the welfare state by Atlee’s Labour government, while overseas the birth of Israel occurred. There was a mood of optimism in spite of continued food rationing and a scarcity of resources.

The past, at last, was being wrapped up and laid to rest. However, in the Macdonald family this was far from the case. Just as Angus Rogers and I were beginning to talk and try our first baby steps, something happened in Edinburgh to shatter my family’s equilibrium.

Self-publicity

The lid of Pandora’s box suddenly flew open. Walter Gibson lived up to his alias, which was ‘Hoot’ Gibson, after a Hollywood silent movie star of the 1920s and 1930s.

The original Hoot Gibson rode bareback in rodeos and, as a side-line, was an actor and stuntman performing dramatic, dare-devil acts. Renowned for his he-man, cowboy image, the Hollywood star made a lot of money and spent it in self-publicity, shouting about himself and his daring. He painted his name on the fuselage of his private aeroplanes, which he raced regularly and dangerously.

In sum, the original Gibson was neither silent nor passive but an exhibitionist. So, Walter Gibson earned himself an apt nickname, as he too was wellknown for his braggadocio and self-aggrandisement, and little else, at first. Perhaps he was trying to compensate for his size; he was small in stature and weighed only 7 stone (98 lbs).

“By favouring him above me and possibly her other grandchildren, she relived the childhood of Angus, her son