small siblings on religious retreats, which simply made them naughtier. She would listen to them read their collects every Sunday, and ask them questions. ‘Who was David?’ she asked Kathleen. ‘A ma..a..a..n,’ replied Kathleen, irritatingly if accurately. ‘Well, did you think I thought he was a pig?’ Elma snapped. She also tried to make Kathleen eat mutton fat; Kathleen just developed a technique of hiding it in her pocket. ‘Kathleen has got quite sensible about her food now,’ Elma would say. ‘These things, of course, only need a strong hand.’ Kathleen, meanwhile, was slyly dropping little packets of mutton fat in the gutters of the streets of Edinburgh.
Great-Uncle William had poor sight: he didn’t notice when they used a red-hot poker to brand numbers on the backs of a set of polished mahogany chairs (the chairs were being pupils in the children’s school, and they needed to be able to tell them apart, so they knew which one had taken its turn at reading, and which one was due to spell). There was an ancient chest, a family heirloom through the Skenes, which had belonged to Bonnie Prince Charlie: the little girls labeled each drawer of it with the names of their dolls, and on one occasion cut a piece of cloth off the old kilt that lived in the secret drawer to make a plaid for their doll Gerald. The kilt too had belonged to Prince Charlie, he’d worn it on his escape to the Isles, or so it was said. Uncle William never noticed any of these things. He didn’t even always notice whether or not the plates were in place when he dished out the stewed prunes, much to the children’s delight. He was not a fool about the children, though. When they waylaid the serving staff, hijacked their uniforms and served dinner to the grown ups Uncle William would never quite let on whether or not he had noticed.
On one occasion while Elma was away Podge devised a way of missing church. Uncle William asked her if she would like to be punished now or wait for Elma to return; Podge was scared enough to prefer to wait for Elma. In fact Uncle William was not strict. There was a tawse in the house, but it was more often used on him in play than it was on the children. Podge had merely been infected with something of Kathleen’s fear of men.
Although later in life Kathleen would say that she had only ever been interested in male creatures, this was not true. She recalled herself having had girl dolls, but having ‘put all kindly but firmly to bed with measles. So, through life, let all females be kindly and comfortably disposed of, so that my complete preoccupation with the male of the moment be unhampered!’ Her boy doll (Gerald—he of the plaid), ‘a sailor boy with blue eyes and brown curls’, went ‘everywhere with me’, and was ‘my idol, my baby, my love’, so Kathleen recalled. Podge, on the other hand, clearly recalls a small Kathleen trailing her beloved girl doll Rosie around. Certainly Kathleen, however she may have seen herself, was not one to dispose of women. Far from it: she spent plenty of her adult time delivering babies, caring for their mothers and looking after her female friends in trouble. At this stage she did not like men at all.
When she was quite small she had a frightening experience on the way home from school—a ‘drunken ruffian’ grabbed her on the street and tried to make off with her. Presh ran after to try and kick him, but by then Kathleen had bitten him hard on the hand and made her escape. Podge was more horrified by the idea of biting someone so dirty; but for Kathleen it was the root of a fear of men, which lasted into her teens, and of a lifelong distaste for alcohol and its effects. ‘Should someone lurch, or the slightest bias appear in his gait, my blood ran cold with terror,’ she said. Her later line was more sophisticated: ‘A man is disreputable who can deliberately risk losing his self-control in public.’
In Edinburgh at that time it was very difficult to avoid drunks, and perhaps Kathleen imagined that all men were likely to behave in a frightening and drunken fashion. Certainly when she was seven and their uncle took them all aside to tell them that he had bad news for them, she and Podge both assumed that he was going to prison. Kathleen quite expected that any man might have to go to prison at any time, being as they were the embodiment of evil. In fact the bad news on that occasion was the death of their father.
The Canon had tried hard to put things in order for his children before he died, but, as he wrote to William three months before his death, knowing that he had not long to go: ‘I have no notion what my young ones are to do by and by, unless the Mrs. (who is in Sheffield and very poorly) takes them under her protection more or less… Before she went abroad she very positively declared she would have nothing to say to any of them…’ He was buried beside Janie at Carlton, and Rosslyn had a ferret in his pocket for the funeral. Mrs. Parker continued to have nothing to say to them, but she made good some years later when she paid for Roslyn to go to Oxford (where, legend claims, he kept a baby elephant, because the rule of Worcester College was ‘no dogs’).
When Kathleen was about twelve another frightening man appeared in her life: her cousin Willie. He stayed at Inverleith Row for about a year, and he was old enough to have a latchkey, and wicked enough to stay out at night after the front door had been double-locked. Kathleen’s bedroom was on the ground floor overlooking the garden, and Willie would tap at her window in the small hours, demanding entrance. She would have to creep in silence across the dark dining room and the cold marble-floored hall, and silently unlock the door for him. ‘The rage of the young man was terrifying if the bolt, bar or chain made the slightest sound. More strange and terrifying was he when in the dark and silence he would be ingratiating and affectionate.’ Kathleen feared, hated and adored him in equal proportions. He would do an alarming impersonation of a hunchback and tell her it was useful in avoiding the police. ‘Neither then nor when I grew up did I have the faintest notion why he wanted to avoid the police… I thought it meant that he was some unthinkable evildoer.’ What form his ingratiating affection in the dark hallway took is unknown, but whether out of fear or loyalty she never betrayed him.
Presh had rather more of a secret relationship with Willie. They became friends during the year he spent in Edinburgh, and after he went back to his own family (Janie’s elder brother Felix Skene, a clerk in the House of Lords, was his father) in London they wrote to each other. In one of his letters, he wrote:
Hotel des Iles Britanniques
Monaco
10 October 1893
Hello Prechie
Here I blooming well are—beastly drunk and dead broke—so [sic] my pal. We’ve been here four days. We came with a thousand and forty pounds between us. He brought £1025 and I £15. I won £55 the first night lost £80 the second and now am dead drunk [crossed out] broak. So’s my pal. Don’t tell your brothers where I am my people don’t know. I’ve not paid a bloody sou for my hotel bill. It’s come to 30 frcs a day. Writing to a pal to send me thirty, Don’t suppose he’ll. Applying for a situation as a waiter at the hotel here. Lovely women here Russian princesses by the score. One very smart one to whom I was sufficiently attentive when I first came down lent me forty Louis—plunged on rouge and lost then she wanted to save me hotel expenses by—well you know—sort of marrying me but I heard she was already married and well it wasn’t my fault and I was drunk at the time the wine’s so beastly cheap and good here and we get it for nothing as we don’t paid. Like a sweet Prechie write me a long cheering wholesome letter to do me good and I promise not to be drunk when I write again … ever … Willie.
Willie was always a reprobate, and Kathleen was not so sporting about that as Presh, who wrote back to Willie sending him five pound notes she could ill afford and, on one occasion, repeating a ‘pretty thick’ story about ‘Oscar’ and ‘the pit’. ‘Where did you get hold of it?’ wrote Willie. ‘Your character’s done for.’ Later he told her of ‘a rumour about in Scotland that Oscar Wilde has been released and all the Highlanders have fled to the hills. I wonder why.’ Oscar Wilde fascinated them all—they couldn’t work out what he’d done. Kathleen assumed he’d had an illegitimate child. Willie probably knew what it was—he was doing it himself not so many years later. For the time being, though, he satisfied himself with girls, and reported it to Presh:
