The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
The serial: Largie Castle, A Rifled Nest Day 1
Yet, surrounding his memory was hesitancy, a lack of clarity and rawness. Something connected with his death hurt my mother
My parents’ families were surprisingly similar: both grandfathers were Scots, one from the Highlands, the other the Lowlands. Born in the 1870s, each man owned a country estate and lived in a Scottish baronial mansion or castle, built in the mid 19th Century.
After leaving Eton, grandfathers John Moreton Macdonald matriculated at Magdalen College, Oxford and Hugh Gladstone at Trinity College, Cambridge.
Marrying within 12 months of each other (April 1906 and January 1907), they chose brides from South-East England’s Home Counties; John’s Daisy came from Hampshire and Cecil from Hertfordshire.
The firstborns of each family arrived in January 1908, the Highland family naming their boy Jock and the Gladstone baby, John. Each couple added two more boys and a pair of girls to their brood. My father was the Gladstone’s second son and fourth child; my mother was the Macdonald’s fifth and youngest. Sadly, both sets of grandparents lost one of their children: when Elisabeth Gladstone was 15 years old she fell ill from meningitis and died.
Professional soldier
Although the Macdonald fledglings survived childhood, their luck ran out after they came of age.
When war was declared in 1939 all six boys (now young men) from the two families entered the armed services to fight for their king and country against Hitler and the Axis countries. Angus, the Macdonalds’ second son was the only member of either family to become a professional soldier, serving as a commissioned officer in the regular army.
He joined the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, and travelled with his battalion to Malaya.
In December 1941, when the Japanese invaded, he took part in the peninsula’s defence.
Two days before the Fall of Singapore (February 15 1942), my uncle was ordered to escape to Sumatra, where he boarded a ship bound for Ceylon.
Two days into the voyage, a Japanese submarine torpedoed the liner and all, except a handful of passengers and crew perished.
While I was growing up, I knew little about Uncle Angus, who suffered from exposure and drowned in the Indian Ocean on March 2 1942.
He was the absent one, his youthful image trapped in a black and white photo on Mummy’s dressingtable in her bedroom.
Standing by her jewellery box, hair brush, Kirby grips and powder compact, Angus’ picture served as a shrine to her own lost youth. Because he lived longer, his name held more significance than the memory of my father’s older sister.
More importantly, out of her three older brothers, Angus was Mummy’s favourite. He was also destined for a high social position and would inherit an ancient title and become the 25th Lockhart laird, owner of the Lee and Carnwath property west of Edinburgh.
When I was young, I vaguely registered I was deprived of an uncle. Since Mummy told me that Angus was “lost” and not “dead”, I imagined him marooned on a desert island and one day he would find his way home. I was so convinced he was still alive that I hid in our loft and wrote him letters that began: “dere Unkel Annges...”
I may have lost Angus but I had plenty more uncles. There were six in total. Jock, my mother’s oldest brother was perpetually remote, still troubled by the amputation of his right leg after stepping on a land mine in northern France in 1940. Simon was my mother’s least favoured sibling so we seldom saw him.
Close relationship
On the Gladstone side was Jim, my father’s younger brother. Dad zealously guarded their close relationship from his children, so this uncle also became a distant figure.
John, the eldest Gladstone, lofty in height and in attitude, was overbearing to the young. Of the uncles “by marriage”, Henry, spouse of Mummy’s sister was, if not avuncular, a conscientious, advisory figure. Perhaps his role as a clergyman encouraged it.
The other was Roddy, who was very posh. He drove a Jag and, as British ambassador to Copenhagen, then Brussels, he even rode around in a Rolls.
During his second ambassadorial posting, he had a chauffeur called Poot, who looked like Odd Job, the bodyguard of “Goldfinger” in the James Bond film. Uncle Roddy seldom talked to anyone, least of all children.
Uncles, supposedly genial and indulgent, are different from fathers. I pictured Angus, had he been alive, as attentive, affectionate and generous.
What my father failed to give, he would provide: pens, crayons, books, bicycles, skates, skis, even boats, ponies and when older, a shiny, new car.
This abundance was merely a dream. Angus was permanently absent, his photo encased in a light tan leather frame and the only way I could get at it was by climbing on to a chair and peering into his image on Mummy’s dressing table.
He shared the frame with my grandfather, John Ronald Moreton Macdonald, both men lost to her.
I liked to compare the two. Angus on the left, smiling into the camera, proud of his bushy moustache and looking far more mature than his quarter-century and John, clean-shaven, Edwardian in flavour, with a stiff, round, shirt collar.
I accepted these men died before their allotted span: Angus at 28 and John, 48.
An unknown
Angus interested me most. He was an unknown, a tabula rasa or clean slate and, like the picture of the proverbial donkey at a fairground, I could pin a tail on to him wherever I wished.
All kinds of feats, qualities and kindnesses belonged to him, as he would never have to measure up to them.
Yet, surrounding his memory was hesitancy, a lack of clarity and rawness. Something connected with his death hurt my mother and even made her feel ashamed.
When families keep children in the dark, they imagine the worst. What, then, was it about Angus? Was he hero, coward, monster or victim when he drowned on the night of March 2 1942?
My mother died in 1982, 40 years after Angus lost his life and my father 19 years later in 2001.
Following both parents’ deaths I wished to know more and it was the discovery of Angus’s letters to my mother that prompted me to find out.
These short documents were the nearest I could get to finding my lost uncle: one written from India in April, 1939 and the other in August 1941 from Malaya, the first in ink and the second type-written. I had to discover what actually happened to him and took up the quest. (More tomorrow)