THE GUYND: A SCOTTIISH JOURNAL
By Belinda Rathbone
Quantuck Lane, $23.95, 224 pages
REVIEWED BY MURIEL DOBBIN
In the opening lines of this intriguing memoir, the author acknowledges that she knew when she married the man, she was marrying his 400 year-old mansion. What she didn’t realize was that she was also marrying his country and the world of entrenched tradition that is Scotland.
A New England historian who clearly cherishes the past, Ms. Rathbone has a perceptive eye and a voice both wry and dispassionate as she writes of her years of marriage to John Ouchterony, 26th laird of The Guynd, whose devotion to her was transcended by a passion for a bygone way of life.
She recalls how she launched with enthusiasm her life in a once grand house in northeastern Scotland that had been home to five generations, and in the end, found that she could not compete with a world in which things are “kept as they have always been and, to a remarkable extent, still are.”
She describes her husband as an “aristocratic country rustic” with a “living sense of history.” While he spent years living in London home was his ancestral estate in Scotland. One of his Scottish characteristics was that he disliked throwing anything away.
And that meant anything. Like lengths of old string, empty preserve jars, cast off furniture, broken lamps, and 50-year-old dance cards as well as a regiment of china stamped with the family crest.
Ms. Rathbone’s first exposure to the interior of the Georgian country house called The Guynd — pronounced like “wind” — testified to a remarkable degree of stamina and optimism that let her believe she could change it and its master.
The house could have been a setting for a Gothic melodrama, with its “vast front hall smelling of the damp of stone walls and old carpets,” 14-foot classical columns, all painted black, rising from its corners, and a single bare light bulb suspended from the ceiling.
It was a house that once took nine servants to run, and Ms. Rathbone found herself housekeeper, chambermaid, cook and nanny, while her husband was the gardener, plumber, and odd job man.
She came to see the house as evidence of an ancient family closing in on extinction and choking on past traditions. “Scarcely a day went by when we didn’t feel the weight of its history upon us and the mandate to hang on.”
The value of Ms. Rathbone’s comments lies in her insight into a fading yet still viable past in Scotland, where as she reminds, 88 percent of the country is still privately owned, with clan maps illustrating continuing ownership by families who drew property lines centuries ago and in many cases haven’t seen reason for change.
It was a world of ancestral responsibility based on the system of primogeniture decreeing that the eldest son is heir to the entire family estate. Noting that in England, progress and increasing population had blurred the class system, Ms. Rathbone comments, “Scotland still offers a clear window on the past.”
After years of being the chatelaine of The Guynd, and the mother of a son likely to inherit it, Ms. Rathbone came to question the Scottish preoccupation with a bleak and bloody past.
She was perplexed by social gatherings preoccupied by arguments over the leadership qualities of Prince Charles Edward Stuart, otherwise known as Bonnie Prince Charlie who played an arguably disastrous role in what they called “the ’45.”
That was the battle of Culloden in 1745 when Scottish hopes died and the world of the Highlanders was brutally crushed in succeeding years by English armies.
She even came to question the ostensible friendliness of Scots dealing with strangers. “I suspected they engaged you in conversation only to confirm you were a foreigner. They were sizing you up.”
Her recollections suggest she did her best to adjust. She tried to fit into a rigid social structure, and conducted an ongoing battle to modernize and make comfortable the house while aware that her husband was untroubled by the archaic chaos of his surroundings.
One of her domestic triumphs was to uproot mud brown linoleum that disfigured the floors, a battle lost by her unhappy mother in law to a tyrannical husband who made his sons stand at attention at the foot of his bed every morning to receive their orders for the day.
Slowly Ms. Rathbone reached the melancholy conclusion that she and her husband were reliving the roles of his parents who were so estranged they occupied different parts of the house. She came to wonder whether the historic mansion with its bleak memories, was the source of conflict and disappointment and the ruined marriage of her husband’s parents.
She also came to fear that The Guynd might prove the rock on which her own marriage would founder. She recalls ruefully how she and her husband seemed to be slipping into the roles of his parents “as strangers to each other, or, just as often, enemies. Our little squabbles and resentments, built up into deep piles, unresolved and unresolvable, had gathered like so much junk in the basement.”
She reached the conclusion that her husband didn’t wish to investigate that basement. “To John it was part of the structure of the house. It felt like home and he dared not disturb it lest it fall down. The duties of his legacy were bound to a house.”
To her credit, Ms. Rathbone was saddened rather than angered by her strange domestic dilemma. She recalls a moment of frustration when she complained to her husband, “You’ll never change.” “I don’t have to change,” was his quiet reply.
Writing from Cambridge, Mass.,where she now lives with her son, Ms. Rathbone sums up, “Having married the man and his house, I discovered they belonged first to each other … . This fortress of a house and of a man had defeated me.”
Muriel Dobbin is a former White House and national political reporter for McClatchy Newspapers and The Baltimore Sun.
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