O Caledonia

The sixteen years of Janet’s life began in wartime on a fog-bound winter night in Edinburgh. Her father came home on leave and looked into the blue wicker basket. He strode to the window and stared out at the discreet square of Georgian houses and the snow dripping from the bare trees. “It’s about the size of a cat,” he said.

He returned to the war, and Janet and her mother went to live with his parents by the sea. The house was a square Edwardian manse, damp, dark, and uncomfortable as Scottish houses are, but set solid against the sea winds, facing inland into a beautiful garden and affording a warren-like sense of safety in its winding, stone-flagged passages, baize doors, and lamplit rooms where Grandpa wrote his sermons, his parrot made proclamations, and the blackout nightly excluded the warring world. The nursery in the attic overlooked the sea and Janet slept to the sound of foghorns booming out in icy waters; the lighthouse swept its beam over her ceiling, a powerful guardian. She woke to the cries of gulls. Someone gave her a purple silk flower, and she watched it growing towards her through the bars of her cot, as it came out of dimness, its petals lapped in all shades of mauve, violet, heliotrope. She did not know then that it was a flower but, as she lay gazing at it and as the days went by, she loved purple with an intensity that remained always. In that first memory she had found entrancement.

And so the babe grew, among her adoring grandparents, her anxious mother, and Nanny, in her blue print uniform, Nanny who knew best and could control the ceaseless battle for possession which raged between Ningning the grandmother and Vera, the mother. When Janet was fourteen months old, her brother, Francis, was born, and this brought about a change in the balance of power, for now Ningning could have Janet and Vera could have Francis, a baby each and a most satisfactory arrangement. Grandpa emerged beaming from his study, the blue wicker basket contained its rightful occupant. Vera’s pedantic friend Constance wrote to congratulate her: “In the manufacture of human pride, there is no ingredient so potent as the production of a son.” Ningning said it all sounded like something from the grocer’s. Nanny, always ready with a grim bon mot

, said that pride came before a fall. None the less, christening photographs show a happy family group, marred only a trifle by Janet’s gaping black mouth; she was yelling because the photographer had plucked her thumb from its comfortable residence in her palate. Nanny’s face lowered in the background.

At this time there were many Polish officers in the village. The Marine Hotel had been requisitioned for them. They were popular with the lonely girls and the more flighty wives, so that after the war some stayed on and married, while others left behind girls who were even lonelier now, alone with tiny children in the unrelenting chill of a Calvinist world. A home for these Unmarried Mothers was opened; it was named after Janet’s grandfather, a tribute which the family felt he should have declined. He silenced them with talk of Mary Magdalene.

The manse was always full of people coming to talk to Grandpa in his study, and on Friday evenings Ningning often gave modest dinner parties, modest because of wartime restrictions but merry in spirit. Nanny disapproved fiercely of these occasions, retiring to bed even earlier than usual with her stone hot-water bottle. She was a fearsome figure at retirement time, stomping about the kitchen in her huge white flannel nightie; her hair, which by day was scraped back into a tight bun bristling with pins, at night swung about her back in a wiry grey pigtail. “Tears before bedtime,” she would mutter as she banged the kettle about, obliterating sounds of laughter and, worse, the clinking of glasses. “There’s some should know better.” She flapped and thumped up the stairs to the nursery and settled creaking into bed with The People’s Friend and the cold air was suffused with peppermint as she sucked a vengeful pan drop.