LITMIR.BIZ

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and was I equipped to take it on?

      At the time I was at work on a biography of the American photographer Walker Evans. Much of the research was behind me, at least enough to spend two months writing without resorting to my original sources. I had packed some seventy pounds of notes, as it weighed in at Kennedy airport, and John had invited me to take over his mother’s sewing room as my study.

      This was the brightest and prettiest room upstairs, straight across the landing. Designed as an upstairs sitting room, it was more or less square with the intriguing feature of a rounded interior wall. A fireplace anchored the rounded wall on one side, and to the right of it, under a gilt-edged mirror hung high, was a lady’s desk. Its drawers were crammed with bundled letters, unwritten postcards, elastic bands, old photographs and dozens of used Vogue sewing patterns from the 1960s. The desktop, folded down, was just big enough for my laptop computer. A 1930s radio provided a suitable stand for my printer. There was a socket nearby, though of course not the right fit for my American equipment. John would fix that. Through two generous windows I looked out over the tenants’ grazing Angus cattle in the field in front of the house, the dark woods beyond, and, still farther, five miles as the crow flies, the straight horizontal line of the North Sea, reflecting a silvery blue or iron grey sky and some-times disappearing completely in the fog.

      Here, thousands of miles from the America of Walker Evans, I would use the steady tranquillity of this room to delve into his life and his art. His photographs of small-town storefronts, billboards and circus posters, rows of Victorian gingerbread houses or Model T Fords parked along a rainy street seemed all the more quaintly American at this remove, and all the more touching. Evans had wanted, he said, to capture what something would some-day look like as the past. He understood how profoundly the simplest thing—and often the neglected or rejected object—defined its moment. How did he acquire this visionary instinct for the telling detail? This fondness for the would-be forgotten? What aspects of his childhood had conspired to develop this genius? Somewhere in my notes was the stuff of the answer. I set to work.

      Yet as every writer knows there is nothing more tempting than manual labour to arouse one from one’s chair and give up the torturous task of writing. In a house like this one, even the simple movement of going downstairs to the kitchen to make another cup of coffee had the disadvantage of reminding me of the fifteen jobs vying equally for my attention.

      On my way back upstairs I might pick up a rag and a tin of wax to polish the wooden banister, enjoying the gleam of walnut veneer sliding under my flannel, emerging like a photograph in the developing bath. By cleaning and polishing I would become intimate with the house; I would arouse its dormant sparkle to waken and talk back to me. The ironwork supporting the banister needed dusting—no, rubbing, with a damp cloth—to appreciate that it was actually jet black, not grey. Back at the top of the stairs I would contemplate how to cope with the pile of old curtains and cushions that seemed for no reason to be heaped on top of a chaise longue, where clearly no one had ever been expected to lounge. Defeated by this problem for the moment, back at my keyboard, I set my mind to work again over a few precious clues to Evans’s child-hood. Foxy curled up on the floor behind me, waiting for the beep of my computer shutting down, knowing that then it would be time for a walk.

      As much as the urge to clean had never felt more powerful, so also was I increasingly curious about John’s family history, a family that was about to be mine. Whilst I was learning the story from John, bit by bit, there were many gaps in his information. I also knew, as the biographer knows, how differently the story might be told by other voices in other times. Later, after work, after a walk, I was determined to look more closely at a diary I had discovered in the library downstairs. Wedged between Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language and a stack of atlases, its black leather cover bulged with promising content, buckled tight with two thin leather straps.

      It was John’s grandfather’s, Colonel Thomas Ouchterlony.

      The name Ouchterlony, pronounced Och-ter-lo-ny, John had explained, dated from at least as long ago as the twelfth century, and is entirely local to the county of Angus. Its meaning derives from a hill called Lony, about six miles north-west of the Guynd, which the family claimed as their own back in the Middle Ages. Ouchter is Gaelic for ‘over’ or ‘on top of ’. So all the Ouchterlonys and the many variations on the name since (Ochterloney, Auchterlonie, Uchterlony, etc.) descend from this ancient clan on the hill.

      By now the Ouchterlonys are spread far and wide. John mentioned in particular a large exodus to Sweden in the eighteenth century. By the late nineteenth century the last heir to the Guynd had to reach several branches sideways across the family tree to appoint his fourth cousin once removed—John’s grandfather—as the last hope of keeping the family name alive in Angus. From the obituaries pasted in the latter pages of the diary I gathered that although the Colonel was new to the area (he had been called up from Devonshire) he quickly made his presence warmly felt with the local population both humble and grand. Gregarious, civic-minded, the exemplary military man, he understood that protecting the family name was implicit in his stroke of fate and immediately set about preparing the ground for his son and heir.

      In the Colonel’s steady, forward-slanting hand, this faithfully kept diary of events of family and estate revealed a surprising fact, that John’s father, Thomas, was not the firstborn son (the Colonel had six children altogether; first came Nora, then the three boys, John—known as Jack—Thomas, and Guy, and finally the twins, Arthur and Mary) and had therefore not grown up expecting to take over the Guynd.

      I saved my discovery to discuss with John over dinner that evening. ‘Did you know,’ I began, ‘that your father was the second son?’

      ‘Well let’s see, Nora was the eldest…’

      ‘Then John, known as Jack,’ I went on.

      ‘Uncle Jack, right. I never knew him,’ said John, grinding a carpet of pepper over his haddock. ‘So he was the first son? I guess he was.’

      It was clear that John had either never known this fact or forgotten it, obscured as it was in the dark corners of the mind where the might-have-beens or what-ifs lurk and are best left undisturbed. For the biographer, on the other hand, this was the stuff of a story, a key that turns a dutiful list of dates into a human drama. Was being the second son at the core of Tom’s disturbing jealousy towards his own firstborn?

      ‘Maybe,’ said John mildly, not quite as entranced with my research as I thought he might be.

      Armed with this narrative handle, I ventured further the following day into the Colonel’s diary, where it became increasingly clear that Tom was raised in the shadow of his older brother Jack, the heir apparent. So this was the proud young man in the uniform with his long Ouchterlony face, straight sharp nose and hooded eyes, who looked resolutely past my shoulder out of the picture frame in the basement. This was the man whose military medals were nestled in fitted purple velvet, snapped shut in a leather case and covered with dust. This was the boy whose glowing reports from Woolwich Academy dropped in my lap from the pages of his father’s diary. Here he was in the picture album, fourth from the left, dressed up as Bonnie Prince Charlie for an amateur theatrical by the lake.

      A gold engraved invitation to luncheon announced Jack’s coming of age in 1906. A marquee was erected on the lawn; floral archways decorated the drives. In Jack’s honour a young spruce tree was ceremoniously planted in a conspicuous spot along the edge of the lakeside lawn. Dinner and dancing for the tenant farmers and local shop-keepers was followed by a grand evening party for the gentry. A printed programme of toasts ensured that the right things were said by the right people, and all raised their glasses to the young lieutenant and future laird of the Guynd.

      First however he would have to prove himself in the larger world. Stationed in West Africa with the Royal Engineers, Jack was credited with directing the construction of the Great Ashantee Road in Ghana, which many believed was a monument of engineering skill amongst the finest in West Africa, and which earned him the title of major. In 1915, by then a married man with a child on the way, Jack felt that his duty was at the Western Front in France. On June 17, 1917, he was killed in action near Ypres. His commanding officer wrote a three-page letter to the family

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