There were other tests of character too, which had been in place long before Chamberlain delivered his speech to the nation. Bathing, for instance, if such a word can be applied to something approaching such torture, occurred at seven every morning, when Mr Simms would walk up and down the bathrooms issuing orders to the boys to jump into baths of icy Dunbar mains water. There followed prayers and early morning drill, now laden with extra significance. The school was divided into patrols: Lions, Wolves, Woodpeckers, and Owls. Each patrol would be instructed to jump up and down, arms swinging forwards and back, up and down, and over the shoulder. There were punishments, of course, which Mr Simms liked to deliver with one of two slippers, made all the more sinister for him having christened them with childish names. ‘White Tim’ was a large rubber sports shoe he kept in the junior classroom cupboard, whereas ‘Painful Peter’ was another rubber slipper but much smaller, enabling him to carry it round in the pocket of his plus fours. Boys were constantly being thrashed over desks and tables, and their first beating was ceremoniously referred to as ‘Father’s Hand’. It was not long before Randolph received that baptism.
Randolph was probably the most unpopular, most peculiar, unhappiest little boy who had ever had the misfortune to set foot in the school. It’s hard to know what came first – his queer and disjointed ways, or Mr Simms’s reign of terror and his clear disgust at having to deal with such an odd, unresponsive and seemingly backward child. Whichever way round it was, each fed the other. The more unsettled Randolph became, the stranger he appeared to his peers, and consequently the more he was loathed. Randolph’s strangeness had its foundations in his insecurity and profound inferiority complex, but also in a certain arrogance that came from being his father’s son. Paradoxically, it would be the understanding of his birthright and its privileges that would eventually pit him first against his father, and then against the lawyers seeking to deprive him of them. Given how his personality would develop, Randolph’s greatest misfortune was to be born to a family of such achievements and to a world that expected so much of him. And yet he understood that this made him special. He was trapped between liking himself too much and too little.
Randolph admits that his behaviour in the years leading up to the terrifying, barbaric medical act performed on him as a young man, a last resort to bring about a change in him, was ‘bolshy and obstructive’. He was, he remembers, prone to alarming his peers by ‘running madly around in circles and falling down in a crazily bizarre manner, and uttering the most idiotic of monosyllables [sic]’. He was always crying and showing off, trying to get attention, which earned him the nickname of ‘a baby, a babe, a bub, or a booby’. He also continued making what he called ‘bare-bottomed noises’, so that he was regularly making the dormitory reek and infuriating matron, who would enter and ask the boys, ‘Somebody is needing a dose, Garlies, is it you? Are you stinking?’
Randolph had no friends. Not only was he considered anti-social and rather disgusting by the other boys, he also seemed to possess no particular talents, not for sport, nor patrol, nor academia. During patrol, for example – Randolph was an Owl – he flailed about at the back so that in the end Mr Spurgin, the Owls’ drill master, had to move him to the front, so ‘he could … deal with me when I failed to live up to expectations’. His academic failings hit Lord Galloway particularly hard. On one paper, Mr Simms scrawled in red pen, ‘Lack of vocabulary makes you write nonsense!’ and, as even Randolph saw, ‘Mr Sims [sic] had no use for people who wrote nonsense in translation of Latin prose or History essay questions.’
Randolph did nothing to help himself. Believing that everybody around him burnt with hatred, he went out of his way to intensify those feelings, sinking into a well of self-pity and playing up to the part of school oddball. There was nobody to whom he could turn. He thought Mr Simms a bully and a sadist (the present headmaster, Mr Michael Osborne, an old boy, remembers him as ‘a daunting dome-headed bald figure, more austere than an ogre’); Miss Simms, Mr Simms’s spinster sister, who strode around in a milky coffee-coloured tunic with matching hat and feather, was guilty by association; even the maids ‘possessed a severity that would freeze the softest hearts’. On one occasion, when his turn arrived to see the school doctor, who at the beginning of every term set up his examination bed in Mr Simms’s study, he mounted such violent protest that he was dragged screaming and kicking like a wild cat by four boys holding his ankles and wrists. During school prayers he mumbled obscenities and made silly noises. Sometimes he giggled so maniacally and with so little apparent provocation that Mr Simms shouted at him in front of the other boys, ‘Garlies, don’t behave like a lunatic!’
We cannot know how much of this early behaviour had its foundations in a genuine and innate mental condition and how much of it was the result of profound unhappiness and childhood confusion exacerbated by a wildly inappropriate environment. If one were to hazard a guess, it would be a combination of the two. However bizarre Randolph’s behaviour was at Belhaven, he seems to have been capable of self-examination. In his unpublished memoirs which are drawn on here, it is around this period that he first starts to refer to himself in terms of being considered ‘mad’ and ‘a lunatic’. He uses the words freely, at times almost with a degree of relish. Shortly after his eleventh birthday, for instance, at the end of October 1939, he contracted the measles and his behaviour became what he calls ‘distorted and ‘slightly mad’. ‘I was gripped to hypnotism with fright and terror,’ he later wrote.
That Britain was once again at war with Germany raised Lord Galloway up to his full military potential. He had maintained a keen interest in the Territorial Army in the inter-war years, and now he raised and commanded the 7th (Galloway) battalion of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. (A year later he was to retire from the battalion on medical grounds. He was appointed Honorary Colonel but, undaunted, he would raise the local unit of the Home Guard.) Whenever Lord Galloway and Randolph were resident at Cumloden at the same time, Lord Galloway desperately searched for proof of some kind of development in his son. He was usually disappointed. During tea in the dining room he liked to fire general knowledge questions at Randolph, which Randolph could never answer. ‘Don’t pretend to be so silly, foolish boy!’ the dowager countess would snap.
It was not long before the effects of war began to be felt at Cumloden. The house began to receive evacuees, who were housed in its outbuildings, and during the Blitz in the autumn of 1940 extended family from the south began to arrive. Sometime between 14 September and 14 October, 34 Bryanston Square, where Randolph had been born, received a direct hit. Lord and Lady Galloway decided that Lady Antonia was no longer safe in her boarding school in the south of England, so they pulled her out and brought her back to Cumloden. Randolph clung to the hope they would do the same for him. They did not. In light of the increased bombings, it was decided that Belhaven should be evacuated to Dinnet House, an ancient Scottish mansion with poor electricity near Aboyne on Deeside, in north-east Scotland. As a consequence Lord and Lady Galloway considered the location quite safe enough. Randolph was to go back to school.
It was, Randolph wrote later, ‘rather awful’. The boys now worked mainly by candlelight, due to the antiquated and constantly malfunctioning electricity mains, and when it began to snow the school was cut off from all civilisation. Randolph felt more trapped and abandoned than ever. He wanted the comfort of his family. Matron would not do. From a window he would watch the snow fall, his cheeks hot and wet with tears, knowing that with every new inch piling up on the railway tracks, it was becoming increasingly unlikely that he would be able to go home for the holidays. ‘Nevertheless,’ he wrote, ‘my attitude did not stop the snow from falling, the more I cried the heavier the snowfall turned, leaving me a tear stained wreck before the night was out.’ Cumloden, home to his much missed mother and sister, the familiar and comforting faces of the staff and increasing numbers of relatives from the south, felt a long way off. Randolph began to dream of escape. In these dreams, he would be running down the school drive carrying his luggage, Miss Simms in pursuit, wearing the deerstalker hat that had suddenly replaced the coffee-coloured boater since they had arrived in the Highlands.
In December 1941 Lord Galloway decided to move Randolph to Chartridge Hill House, a boarding school near Chesham in Buckinghamshire, a decision that might very well have been shaped by the school’s proximity to the London doctors Randolph was about to see, and his father’s desire to get him into Harrow (Belhaven records state