Lifting the Lid: A Life at Kinloch Lodge, Skye For almost 40 years, Claire Macdonald and husband Godfrey have welcomed guests to Kinloch Lodge, now one of Scotland's best hotels. As this extract from her book about their life as hoteliers reveals, today's success seemed a long way off at the start During February 1974, with our April deadline for opening fast approaching, we struck a hitch. The required emergency lighting system necessary for the Fire Certiﬁcate had been installed by a ﬁrm of electricians from Glasgow but, to our horror, it transpired that the regulations according to the Glasgow Fire Authority were not the same as those of the Inverness County Fire Authority. We had no choice. Intractability on the part of those respon­sible for granting the Fire Certiﬁcate meant that all the newly laid carpets throughout the corridors had to come up, and then the floorboards. It seemed incredibly stupid to me and still does all these years later because, either way, electrics done according to the Glasgow regulations still meant lives saved in the event of a ﬁre. But my protestations were in vain and all the new wiring had to be redone, as did the estimates for the ﬁnal cost, yet again. All this time, we were competing against the clock. We had become so bogged down in decisions and choosing furnishings, not to mention endless dealings with bureaucracy, that suddenly we realised that we must turn our thoughts to staff for Kinloch and to the bookings. We had no book or reservation sheets for these and we entered the few bookings we had in a page-a-day diary. That we were ready to open on 3 April was little short of miraculous and involved the help of family and close friends. Godfrey's mother spent much of the two weeks beforehand on her hands and knees with a dustpan and brush; my sister Liv came up to look after Alexandra in exchange for us clearing off her overdraft; our friend Peter Leggate arrived and auctioned the old hotel furniture for which there was a surprising market; my parents helped by doing anything and everything that needed to be done. We were amazingly lucky to have all those willing hands to help clean, hang pictures and generally clear up, both inside and out, after the builders had ﬁnally departed. When we turned our thoughts to ﬁnding staff, word spread locally. One day we were approached by Millie MacLure, who came to ask us if we had a job for her. From the Isle of Lewis, she was married to Donnie, then a crofter from the nearby township of Drumfearn, and, during this frantic time, I got to know her really well. There is nothing like working beside someone else, cleaning public loos, both with our hands down the S-bends, to accelerate friendship. Millie had done a lot more in her life than cross the Minch from Lewis to Skye. She had worked as an au pair in Germany and was eminently capable at just about every­thing and very soon I counted her as my best friend on Skye. She handled all the secretarial work and was excellent with people, both staff and guests. Her quiet dignity and calm serenity are just what's needed in any tricky situation and she is also an extremely good cook. For the next two decades, Millie played a major role in our lives and it broke our hearts when she told us, after 20 years, that she and Donnie had decided to move to her home island of Lewis with children Margaret and Andrew. We also took on a married couple to live in and to be in charge when we were away. Both were completely new to the hotel business - he had been a sub-postmaster in central Scotland and she had worked in their local library. Seeking adventure, they applied for a job with us. Well, they were certainly right in that respect but, in truth, their idea of helping to run a hotel was extremely wide of the mark. Mrs H was supposed to help me cook and serve dinner. I should have smelled a rat when, at their interview and as I was waxing lyrical in my descriptions of the sort of food that we intended to give our guests, she said, "Yes, we'll be needing to get in a good stock of Baxter's soups, then." I thought she was joking, but she wasn't. As 3 April approached and I had yet to see Mrs H roll up her sleeves and make anything at all in the kitchen, doubts crept into my mind. These doubts were conﬁrmed on The Day, 3 April, when I was busy cooking dinner for our very ﬁrst evening as hoteliers. I had nipped back to our house that afternoon to check on Alexandra, who was being looked after by Sheila MacPherson, a friend to this day. All was well, Alexandra was happy with Sheila, so back I went to Kinloch to ﬁnd Mrs H having a bath. When she eventually appeared in the kitchen, she was all dressed up and seemed surprised when I offered her an apron. She told me that she was going to mingle with our guests, all six of them. I remember very little of Mr H - probably just as well - and sufﬁce to say that the pair had gone within the week. They were not missed. Sheila, from Alness in Rossshire, was married to John MacPherson and they lived down towards the Point of Sleat. We also employed two sweet girls, Linda and Pauline, who had answered an advert my mother had put in the Lancaster Guardian, one of our two local newspapers back in the Lune Valley. They quickly learnt under Millie's expert instruction and were hard working and a great asset. Our ﬁrst year was a harsh lesson in people management: we got through 34 members of staff in that time, a fact in which we take no pride. By the close of our ﬁrst season, we were left with just Millie MacLure and Iain MacEachern. Iain could do anything and did it well. He started as the gardener at Kinloch but, following the departure of another couple, he came to work inside. The son of a crofter from Islay, he had served in the army as a commissioned ofﬁcer and had a natural conﬁdence with people. He had no experience whatsoever of the hospitality industry but then neither had we - we were all learning at the same time. Within a few weeks, he became an accomplished barman, housekeeper and cook. The couple Iain took over from indoors had been a disaster. Engaged to be married, she was a good cook, he a complete twit who loved to regale guests with tales of his sporting prowess. One day we saw him pick up a water jug, in mid conversational flow to several guests, take a great swig from it, wipe his mouth with the back of his hand, burp loudly and carry on recounting tales of his skills with a gun or rod. The facial expressions of the guests mirrored how we both felt - shock and disbelief. We learnt later that his water-jug-swigging was a frequent occurrence that we had missed on previous occasions. He was a hopeless boozer and the ﬁnale came with the arrival of her parents, appalled at their daughter's choice of ﬁancé. There was a very public row between the four of them, ending with them all driving away, out of our lives forever. The date is engraved on my heart, 4 July, the anniversary of American Independence but far more relevant in our lives as the start of the Glasgow Trades Fair. This is the annual fortnight when Skye ﬁlls up with all those who come from the island but live and work in Glasgow and it was our busiest time. I de-veined sweetbreads that evening for the ﬁrst time in my life - the departed ﬁancée-cook had put them on the menu, along with a more straightforward roast. I've never liked sweetbreads since that day - nothing to do with their taste, everything to do with association. Early in our life at Kinloch, a sweet girl from West Linton, who had done Celtic Studies at Edinburgh University, came to help us. She met and married a young architect who had dropped out of architecture and was working as a gardener and living in a small house belonging to his employers, over at Ord. Alasdair and Jenny Alldridge came into our life and have been a part of it ever since. Alasdair decided to use his architectural training and was offered a job with Wittet's, the Elgin architects who opened an ofﬁce in Broadford, with him in charge. Jenny worked part-time in the kitchen at Kinloch, where, amongst many other things, she baked the best bread of any of us. The trouble was that their house went with Alasdair's job at Ord, so leaving the job meant they were looking for somewhere to live. We offered them a potential site on the shore, at the bottom of the garden, warning them that they would always have hotel guests wandering around, as they sauntered down from Kinloch to walk along our shore. This didn't put Jenny and Alasdair off and they built themselves a house on the site of the old kennels, Jenny doing as much of the physical backbreaking work as Alasdair, and they employed Alec, who then lived at the Kinloch farm, to help with the really heavy work. Having moved in, they settled down to life within the Kinloch compound and subsequently, over several years, their three children were born, Ruth, Tommy and Jack. Our children became great friends, even though they were older, and Jenny was patience itself with each of them if they went down to play. As they grew older, Ruth, Tommy and Jack each worked at Kinloch after their schooldays were over. It was extremely handy for them to have part-time work a short walk away and extremely handy for us having them. Jenny is a great help to me, these days, in the preparation for our cooking dems at Kinloch. She is diligent and ﬁts in preparation for demonstrations between her other work and commitments. When we embarked on running Kinloch as a hotel, the room to the right of the front door on entering was a public bar. It's a pretty room with a ﬁreplace and we kept a ﬁre burning there and in the large drawing room for most of the year. Having a public bar was a mixed blessing. It was good because visitors came and enjoyed a drink or had one of the bar lunches we served during those early years, mostly consisting of leftover dishes from the preceding night. Our lunchtime guests were very well catered for - we charged just £1 a head. This plus side of the public bar boosted our cash flow, but the minus side involved some of the locals. Kinloch is a mile off the main road which, in those days, was a single-track road with passing places and anyone coming just to drink had almost certainly been banned from the other, more accessible bars. It wasn't hard to spot trouble when it walked through the front door because it was so well dressed. For men of that era, who had been through National Service, it was essential to be smartly turned out before going out to get completely drunk and some people when drunk become extremely destructive - the kitchen door at Kinloch bore a gash from being attacked with a carpet sweeper by one of our visitors whose target had been an agile member of staff, lucky enough to get the door shut between him and his would-be assailant. There was a door from the public bar into the entrance hall and another, beside the bar, leading towards the kitchen and the combined draughts made this room one of the coldest in Scotland, despite the brightly burning ﬁre. Licensing laws required us to keep the bar open throughout the year and it was this, plus the nuisance factor of the occasional drunken rampage impinging on the peace of the resident guests, which made us decide to close it down, have a restricted licence and turn the room into another sitting room. We closed off the door leading towards the kitchen, immediately cutting down on the cold, and built lots of white- painted bookshelves, transforming it into a very attractive room, invaluable in providing more sitting space for our increasing number of guests. Welcoming the paying public into what is, essentially, your home is strange at ﬁrst. Godfrey and I have always felt intensely personal about Kinloch and, at the end of our ﬁrst decade, we made it our home, building a small extension at one end and selling Ostaig House, where we had lived for eight years. From the start, we wanted our guests to feel really welcome - to relax and recharge their batteries, which is surely what a holiday is for. We soon realised that some people staying away from home feel insecure, which is why, I am convinced, regular guests often prefer to stay in the same bedroom each time they visit us. Among our ﬁrst guests were a Church of England vicar and his wife, staying in one of our best rooms, and they asked us to send off postcards they had written to friends. I have to confess that we read them as soon as they were out of sight and were delighted to see how much they enjoyed staying at Kinloch. What they particularly enjoyed was having their shoes cleaned by "The Lord." We didn't know which Lord they were referring to but suspected it was Godfrey. Early on, a remarkable couple came to stay and they would return to Kinloch for two weeks at a time, twice a year, from then onwards. We grew to love them second to my own parents. Roland Shaw, a Bostonian, and his German wife Fee, pronounced "Fay," abbreviated from Felicitas, were both very tall. At six feet, Fee was always elegant and smelled delicious. Roland was much taller and took shoe size 17. This intrigued our children as they grew older and were allowed into the Shaws" bedroom - always Room 1 - where they could put both feet into one of his shoes. He was a great man not only in stature but in all that he did and had done during his life. He had interrupted his time at Princeton to come to Britain to ﬁght as a bomber pilot during the last World War. After the war, he ﬁnished his studies at Princeton, continued at the LSE, joined the American diplomatic service and was posted to Germany, where he met Fee. He became a ﬁnancial journalist and ﬁnally joined the oil industry. By the time we met the Shaws, Roland had started up his own oil company, Premier Oil, of which he was the chairman and chief executive. They had two daughters, Alexandra and Victoria, and we grew to look forward to their visits keenly. Roland was a workaholic, unable to leave his ofﬁce behind wherever he went. Fee improvised a desk for him, bringing a cloth with her which she put over a small chest in their bedroom window. In our early years there were no telephones in the guests" bedrooms and the only one was tucked into a cupboard under the main staircase. Folding himself into this cupboard for hours on end must have been dreadfully uncomfortable, but dear Roland always joked about it. Along with a number of our other regular guests, he heaved a sigh of relief when, after about 12 years, we installed telephones in each bedroom. Another two favourite guests who arrived in our ﬁrst or second year were schoolteachers from the prestigious King Edward's School in Birmingham. One taught botany, the other classics. Roz and Jean came to stay every summer until last year when, for the ﬁrst time, they decided to remain at home. They would spend a day with us and then, heroically, plan a day to take our three girls off on a trip of fun combined with education. Our son Hugo, who was born in 1982, longed to be allowed to join them but was deemed too young until he was about seven, when he was permitted to go too. Roz and Jean returned slightly bewildered by how much he knew about wild mushrooms, courtesy of Godfrey, and by how keen he was to learn anything he was taught unlike, it must be said, our girls. We knew and loved so many of our guests and I've always maintained that 99 per cent of people are very nice but the remaining 1 per cent can be stinkers. There were always surprises throughout our 40 years, perhaps more so at the beginning when, in our naivety, we never expected the unexpected. For instance, we took a reservation for a single man who duly arrived in an Aston Martin over which everyone drooled but, disappointingly, he didn't live up to the glamour of his car. He arrived in the front hall, took his suitcase from whoever was carrying it and proceeded to unpack armfuls of his clothing right there in the hall. Our polite suggestion that this would be better done in his bedroom fell on deaf ears. Other guests arriving and having to step around him and the increasing piles of clothing on the floor looked amazed in case it was house rules for everyone to unpack in the front hall. Eventually we got him to his allotted bedroom and he seemed fairly normal from then on until his departure, when he decided to go by bus and asked us to look after his Aston Martin. To choose to travel by one of the infrequent buses rather than his superb car seemed eccentric, to say the least, but off he went and we wondered when we would ever see him again. It was quite a responsibility being put in charge of an Aston Martin and he didn't even leave us the keys. Eventually he must have posted these to us because he requested that someone drive it to somewhere in England, which we arranged. He was completely harmless but distinctly odd. This is an edited extract from Lifting the Lid: A Life at Kinloch Lodge, Skye by Claire Macdonald, published by Birlinn, on 7 August. To pre-order a signed copy (£17.99 plus p&p), visit www.claire-macdonald.com or tel: 01471 833306.