An Unlikely Countess: Lily Budge and the 13th Earl of Galloway
Louise Carpenter
A vivid and moving portrait of the inimitable Lily Budge, who overcame poverty and class to become the 13th Countess of Galloway, and one of Scotland’s most colourful eccentrics.Randolph Stewart was lobotomized as a teenager after a crude diagnosis of schizophrenia. When the operation went wrong, he was hidden away by his aristocratic parents in a mental institution and then taken in by a sect of monks. By the time Lily Budge met him in 1975, he appeared a shy and lonely tramp. In reality he was the future Earl of Galloway, heir to a fortune and a title considered to be linchpin of the Scottish establishment. Lily, an extroverted character from a working-class family, would join him in a powerful bond of love that challenged conventions, made national headlines, and led to enormous heartache.A vibrant portrait of 20th-century Scotland, ‘An Unlikely Countess’ is also a profile of two unforgettable characters, and the doomed love that they shared.
AN UNLIKELY COUNTESS
Lily Budge and the 13th Earl of Galloway
LOUISE CARPENTER
Copyright (#ulink_66489e97-cc39-51d1-b67d-ca1fe1d01f19)
HarperPerennial An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
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This edition published by Harper Perennial 2005
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2004
Copyright © Louise Carpenter 2004
PS section copyright © Louise Tucker 2005
except ‘An Unlikely Countess’ by Louise Carpenter
© Louise Carpenter 2005
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Louise Carpenter asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
‘Small Town’ Words and Music by Lou Reed and John Cale © 1989, Screen Gems – EMI Music Inc/Metal Machine Music/John Cale Music Inc, USA Reproduced by permission of Screen Gems – EMI Music Ltd, London WC2H OQY
The publisher and the author gratefully acknowledge Randolph Galloway, the Estate of Lily Budge, The Stewart Society, Joseph Bonnar, William Mowat Thomson, Michael Thornton, and Roddy Martine for permission to reproduce photographs and press clippings from private collections.
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Source: ISBN 9780007108817
Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2013 ISBN 9780007391707
Version: 2016-08-05
Dedication (#ucf13a56e-c035-5d39-ba39-258efe8aad8f)
For Tom
and
Randolph Galloway
Epigraph (#ulink_4af9d7b7-d768-5585-a5dd-21060031b22d)
I am very fond of the good soldier Schweik … Iam convinced that you will sympathise with thismodest, unrecognised hero. He did not set fire to thetemple of the Goddess at Ephesus, like that fool of aHerostratus, merely in order to get his name intothe newspapers and the school reading books.
And that, in itself, is enough.
JAROSLAV HAŠEK, The Good Soldier Schweik
Contents
Cover (#uab45efde-9e69-5e93-b831-0d04863a3538)
Title Page (#u4ce15e9d-0b21-55bb-9f9c-d1f1f3e68884)
Dedication (#ucf13a56e-c035-5d39-ba39-258efe8aad8f)
Epigraph (#ub5d36ed5-73dd-5cd1-81ec-5f9b7f9dbcc9)
PART ONE (#uee5e850a-33b6-59ad-987f-0b862237e624)
1 The Most Caring Place in the World (#u7716b87d-7baa-54eb-bfce-ddb9f3fe820c)
2 The Beginnings (#uca9e64d2-f178-5e02-813a-ce68ee79c5ff)
3 Virescit Vulnere Virtus: Valour Grows Strong from a Wound (#u94f4d52b-b156-5f3d-a857-1deb9b691618)
4 Tea or Coffee, ma’am? (#u48c3a11e-cc6f-5bbb-9565-7c71439e55ae)
5 Happy Days are Coming (#u5ac07208-8723-5241-bc87-45692c2f5ce7)
6 Becoming Mrs Budge (#uf39d1f47-f255-5685-87a1-2ddf81f1dadd)
7 Lobotomised Patients Make Good Citizens (#litres_trial_promo)
8 Carnival of the Animals (#litres_trial_promo)
9 A Crazy House (#litres_trial_promo)
10 Anglo-Catholic with Charismatic Overtones (#litres_trial_promo)
PART TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
11 Poor Love (#litres_trial_promo)
12 My Home is My Castle (#litres_trial_promo)
13 A Shoddy Day and Age (#litres_trial_promo)
14 Will the Earl Get a Crumb of Comfort? (#litres_trial_promo)
15 Here, Sir! (#litres_trial_promo)
16 I Would Have Hated to Commit Murder (#litres_trial_promo)
PART THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
17 We Have the Name Darling, but Alas, We do not Have the Game (#litres_trial_promo)
18 Poor Margot is Ghastly (#litres_trial_promo)
19 Never Judge a Person until You’ve Walked a Mile in their Shoes (#litres_trial_promo)
20 New Places to Wear Diamonds (#litres_trial_promo)
Afterword (#litres_trial_promo)
P.S. Ideas, Interviews & Features … (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Approaching Lily: Louise Carpenter talks to Louise Tucker (#litres_trial_promo)
Life at a Glance (#litres_trial_promo)
Top Ten Favourite Books (#litres_trial_promo)
A Day in the Life of Louise Carpenter (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Book (#litres_trial_promo)
An Unlikely Subject by Louise Carpenter (#litres_trial_promo)
Read On (#litres_trial_promo)
If You Loved This, You Might Like … (#litres_trial_promo)
Find Out More (#litres_trial_promo)
Select Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#ubaff66d6-83a8-54ec-bcd1-74bd2bcc6dfc)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PART ONE (#ulink_ad2c10c6-0bfa-54fb-8c2e-4942f72e9aa8)
When you’re growing up in a small townYou know you’ll grow down in a small townThere is only one good use for a small townYou hate it and you’ll know you have to leave.
LOU REED, ‘Small Town’
1 The Most Caring Place in the World (#ulink_dd0b5e43-68dd-5453-b209-fecd660f7bb0)
On 15 May 1979, on a draughty platform at Waverley Station, Edinburgh, Lord and Lady Galloway, fresh to their titles and in a muddle with their luggage, were preparing to board a train headed for London. ‘If I can have this opportunity of going to the House of Lords, I shall take it,’ Lily Galloway had told their French lodger, Marie-Laurence Maître, in their tenement flat as she packed.
Lily, dressed in a bottle-green velvet suit, which was a touch thin at the elbows and cuffs, but brushed up on the lapels, struggled as usual with their trunks while Randolph Galloway walked ahead, hands clasped stiffly behind his back. If anybody had cared to study their expressions, in him they would have observed a vagueness, as if he inhabited another world, one he did not much care for but from which he could not escape, and in her the opposite, the alertness of a proficient nurse in constant anticipation of a crisis. Randolph was easily unsettled by noise and commotion – as a child he would become quite hysterical if a train blew its steam – and he was prone to wandering off. Lily would have to maintain vigilance.
Their brief wedding announcement had been published in the court and social pages of the Daily Telegraph on 1 November 1975. Lord Garlies, then heir to the Earldom of Galloway, had married Mrs Lily Budge, youngest daughter of the late Mr and Mrs Andrew Miller, of Duns, Berwickshire. In February 1976, following their church blessing, a large photograph of them appeared over a page of the Edinburgh Tatler with a brief caption outlining how the reception had taken place at the Caledonian Hotel in Edinburgh. The picture alone revealed that Lily was some years older than her husband and would not by any stretch of the imagination be capable of providing an heir. And while blessed with a mop of thick black hair and two rows of straight, pearly white teeth, she could not be described as a beauty. To those in Scotland who followed the births, deaths, and marriages of the aristocracy, the announcement that the 12th Earl of Galloway’s son and heir had married came as a shock. The reception had not taken place at the family seat of Cumloden, Newton Stewart, and the 12th Earl of Galloway and his daughter, Lady Antonia Dalrymple, did not attend the party.
Randolph Galloway, recognised by the Stewart Society as head of the Stewart clan, noted in Burke’s Peerage, Baronetage and Knight-age as the 13th Earl of Galloway, Lord Garlies, Baron Stewart of Garlies and a Baronet (Sir Randolph Keith Reginald Stewart, 12th Bart. of Corsewell, and 10th Bart. of Burray) was now about to take his seat in the upper house. He stood at over six feet and possessed a broad, athletic build. He had thick black wavy hair, parted and combed back from his high forehead, a strong square jaw and light, piercing blue eyes, sometimes hidden behind heavy black-rimmed spectacles. He was slim and handsome in the new three-piece suit, picked and paid for by Lily.
On arriving in London unscathed by drama, Lily and Randolph went to 20 Great Peter Street, SW1, the clergyhouse of St Matthew’s, Westminster, offered by the Vicar Prebendary Gerard Irvine. (Shortly afterwards, they would move to temporary accommodation in SW5 and thereafter use a series of cheap tourist hotels such as The Hansel and Gretel, £12.65 a night including VAT and breakfast.) The following day, 16 May, Randolph took his seat and Lily settled herself on the red leather pews of the Peeresses’ gallery, front row, first in. She watched over him proudly as he sat mute on the Conservative benches in front of her. He did not deliver a maiden speech, which was for the best.
Outside the gates of Parliament, she posed for a photograph. ‘The Lords is the most caring place in the world!’ she later told a newspaper reporter. ‘If I had my way we would live in London permanently.’
When Lily was not guiding Randolph about the wood-panelled corridors or sitting in the chamber, with her eyes attentively trained on him in the manner of a dog to its master, she could be found in one of three places: in the House of Lords’ stationery cupboard, availing herself of as many complimentary cards and envelopes as would fit into her handbag; on the telephone to family in Scotland, a service which was also complimentary; or in the tearoom, knitting needles in hand, eating tea and toast with the Scottish peeresses who befriended her.
There was nothing in Lily’s outward appearance to distinguish her from the other peers’ wives except perhaps a little weariness. She was set apart principally because she had no interest in behaving as expected. Her occasional guests from Scotland saw that she liked to congratulate the other wives on their appearance – ‘My, Lady so and so, what a dear little hat you are wearing today’ – and every morning, on entering the House, she made a point of inquiring after everyone’s health – ‘Good morning Mr Skelton [then a junior doorkeeper], how are you? And how is your mother? Oh, will you send her my regards?’
Lily and Randolph considered themselves to have an important patron. The 17th Earl of Lauderdale, Patrick Maitland, a well-respected Scottish hereditary peer, former MP for Lanark, former reporter for The Times, and one of the last men in Britain to make use of a large ear trumpet, had come to know them through the ecumenical pilgrimages he organised to St Mary’s Kirk, his private chapel in the parish of Haddington, not far from Edinburgh. They were, he had long ago concluded, a very curious couple, at times exasperating, but of the sort that he found himself drawn to helping, often against his better judgement. When Lily had asked for his help in completing the necessary paperwork to propel Randolph to the House of Lords, however, he had had few misgivings. He had lent a hand, confident, as was she, that the act of elevating Randolph to the role for which he had been born might be the making of their marriage. Now that they had succeeded, within days of their arrival Lord Lauderdale found to his dismay that his good deed had returned to torment him. Lily sought him out whenever she could, falling into step beside him as he puffed his way down the corridors, or crying out to him across the tearoom. Soon, Lord Lauderdale found himself darting behind pillars to avoid her, not easy for a man of his girth. On the rare occasions that he escaped Lily’s notice, he would watch with bemused fascination as Lily and Randolph huddled together with furrowed brows, poring over the weekly whip, ‘more out of excitement than understanding’.
Word quickly spread about Lily and Randolph’s circumstances. While the Scottish peers and peeresses might return weekly to imposing seats scattered throughout the lowlands and highlands, they were not inclined towards the high life. But even by their standards of frugality, they saw that the new recruit was unusually strapped. Lady Saltoun, chief of the Fraser clan, a cross-bencher and another addition to the upper chamber that year, recognised Randolph’s limitations immediately. She remembered him as a teenager, when he was Lord Garlies, and it made her shudder. As an eighteen-year-old girl, she had been forced by her parents to dance with him at a masonic ball in Glasgow. It had been an awkward experience and one she was keen to forget. But despite faint memories of whispered talk of the boy’s disappearance from Scottish society, his sudden and unexpected reappearance in the House of Lords thirty years later met no interrogation or indiscretion.
During those early exhilarating days, Lily experienced a feeling of true belonging. It was a feeling of power and privilege by proxy. But it was to become apparent that Randolph could not fulfil his role. Some time before they left, Lily had an encounter that reminded her of how far she had come from her world, one to which she could not now return and to which she felt she had never spiritually belonged.
The reminder came in the stately if unlikely figure of Lord Home of the Hersel, who had succeeded Harold Macmillan as Prime Minister in 1963, but who had now returned to the upper chamber as a life peer. Lily did not hesitate when she saw him walking towards her in a corridor. She stopped him in his tracks. Speaking without pause in her thick Borders accent, as was her way, she reminded him of that time when they had met quite by chance more than forty years ago. The encounter had been at the Caledonian Hotel, Edinburgh, at the wedding reception of one Bunty Johnston, the daughter of R. J. Johnston, a lawyer and the County Clerk of Berwickshire. Lily would not normally have attended such a function but her older sister, Etta, was the Johnstons’ servant girl and Lily had been invited too, as she helped Etta with the Johnstons’ spring cleaning. ‘Oh Etta, I must come, I must!’ she had said. ‘It’s the only time I will ever have the chance of seeing the inside of the Caledonian Hotel.’
‘How nice to see you again,’ the former Prime Minister replied, either out of impeccable memory or, more likely, impeccable manners. ‘It has been a very, very long time.’
2 The Beginnings (#ulink_f97dc105-577a-510a-8af3-cffad862f2a5)
Soon after Lily May Miller entered the world on 28 October 1916, she began to understand that the single benefit of being born into small-town life was that it could eventually be left behind. Her mother, nicknamed Sis and known for being fierce and cross, had spent her life bringing up her siblings and then her children, weaving blankets at Cumledge Mill, hunched, scowling, over two looms at once. Her father, a local groom, had run away from a tenement in Glasgow, desperate for country air, and when not at home and being subjected to his wife’s wrath, could usually be found in the stables, content among the horses.
The Borders town of Duns, which sits close to the Berwickshire coastline, was until 1975, the county town of Berwickshire, the administrative commercial and agricultural hub of neighbouring border towns such as Selkirk and Galashiels. As well as the cattle market every other week, set up for the buying and selling of farm equipment, once a year there were the Hirings in the Town Square, where employers traded farm hands and children skipped and played in the accompanying fair.
Duns had none of the excitements or department stores of Edinburgh and Glasgow, but it was well served. Everything of significance was conducted in or close to the town square, dominated by the town hall, where ladies in hats and gloves stopped to exchange gossip. Sometimes the news was of the latest young girl who had got herself pregnant out of wedlock, reliable information put about by two of the three Miss Smalls, large spinster sisters in brown fur coats who ran the baby linen shop and sold sanitary towels in brown paper parcels tied up with string. (It is a measure of how little there was to do that the Miss Smalls had the time and inclination to track the menstrual cycles of their customers.) The women in the town square, or those propped on brooms on their doorsteps, would nod and tut and predict the girl’s demise. These women preferred their husbands to travel to outlying areas to buy their birth control, the thick, ghastly condoms that were washed after use and dried with a sprinkling of talcum powder. Sex: pity the person who muttered the mere word, let alone the woman who admitted enjoying it.
As Lily grew up, there was none of the gossip that had followed the birth of her sister, Agnes, two years before. Plump and blonde, Agnes, affectionately called Etta, was as physically different from her father as a child could possibly be. Lily, by contrast, had been declared Andrew Miller’s from the start. She possessed his wiry frame, the same long nose, strong jaw, and cloudy, bulbous blue eyes. When her mother scraped her black hair back from her wide pale face, knotting it in two coiled snakes by her ears, the resemblance was indeed remarkable.
John Andrew Miller liked to say he had blue blood in his veins, or bluish at least. His mother had been a Scottish servant girl called Mary Jane Bryden and she had conceived him while in service. His father, she had told him vaguely, was a man connected with the household. Once her condition had begun to show, she had been dismissed. She kept her son for eight years, but when she met a new lover she promptly gave him away to the Miller family in Glasgow, from whom he took his name.
Andrew Miller was a clever boy, the brightest in the school, he claimed, but at fourteen his education came to an abrupt halt when he discovered he now had to earn his keep. He arrived in Duns some time before 1910, probably around 1905, an unusual step, for one brother was a coal miner, the other a baker, and it would have been more natural, expected even, for him, too, to have stayed in Glasgow at the centre of the pre-war Scottish economic boom. But he wanted to work in open fields, and there were not many of those in Glasgow. The Borders made sense. After agricultural labour, domestic service provided the chief source of employment. There were many grand houses and estates dotted along the River Tweed, such as Manderston, famous for its intricate silver staircase, which required many servants.
Andrew Miller quickly found a job. He was taken on as a trainee groom in a large house called Anton Hills, eight miles from Duns town, where he slept on a narrow bed in a cramped grooms’ dormitory with panelled walls and a basin in the corner. From Anton Hills, he moved on to the much bigger and grander estate of Duns Castle, owned by the Hay family, local gentry, patrons of the poor, and dispensers of pennies at Christmas time. By now, Andrew Miller possessed all the characteristics of an adolescent boy – a scrawny overgrown body, gangling limbs, and a ghostly teenage pallor highlighted by his black hair and light, serious eyes. To relax he boxed in matches against other grooms using his bare fists. He liked to drink, too, although rarely to excess. Add in the smell of the stables and a girl might have had reason to look beyond him for a husband. Sis, however, knew a good thing when she saw it.
Her real name was Annie Colvin, after her mother, but her brothers called her Sis and, because one was notorious in the town (for drinking and poaching), she became Sis to everybody else. Sis came from a family of drunks. Her father had dementia, her mother drank, and then there were those brothers of hers, who possessed barely a social skill between them. To begin with the Colvins were a family of nine – death would claim the sickliest, one by one – crammed into a shack-like house with an earthen floor and two windows. When Sis left school at nine to look after her mother’s new baby, it was by unspoken agreement that she took over the housework too. Thereafter she cooked, cleaned, and looked after all her siblings. This upbringing was to have consequences for her own daughters. She had no notion of what it meant to be a child; her thoughts ran solely on making ends meet. She bore a hatred of alcohol; she deeply distrusted education (which she considered something to be tolerated and on no account to be pursued further than necessary); and she had a contradictory attitude towards children. She viewed them both as good – a woman’s role in life – and bad – an economic drain, especially when born into poverty, which in itself she considered an act of supreme irresponsibility.
When Andrew Miller met Sis she was a well-established presence at the mill. Day after day, in the early morning darkness, she joined the gang of women who made the long walk along the road that led out from Duns. Sis was pleasant looking in the way that the plain often are: petite with wavy, mousy hair, a reasonable figure and small, round unsmiling brown eyes. (Her younger sister was the real beauty, but she was to die giving birth to her illegitimate child.) Heaven knows exactly how her path crossed with Andrew, since Sis rarely indulged in dancing and never in drinking, but in 1910, when she was twenty, she gave birth to the girl who became known as Etta. Papa, as Sis began to call Andrew, always explained his initial hesitance in marrying her as a result of his ‘bachelor’ job at the castle. This cannot have angered Sis too much, despite having to spend another three years under her mother’s roof, for on 25 September 1913, she married him at 1 Duke Street, Glasgow, by common declaration, with Papa’s brothers, William the coal miner and James the baker, as witnesses.
Papa recognised in his new wife the courage and spirit he lacked himself. She had a fighting, steely nature and offered him the prospect of a secure family environment (he had been old enough to remember his mother abandoning him). Sis saw that Papa was free of all the vices of her own family. In his knee-high boots, riding hat, and voluminous breeches, as he proudly drove his horses through town, with their polished saddles on glossy black flanks, he was considered a splendid sight and quite a gentleman. But while each filled the other’s needs, they were ill-suited at heart. Aside from a skill for mimicry, Papa was quiet and self-contained, dour even, certainly not prone to the great surges of emotions that erupted from his wife. He had always regretted his thwarted education and as an adult, became a determined autodidact, spending hours poring over Scottish literature. At one stage he even attempted to compile a history of the Scots language, which Sis would throw on the bonfire after his death. Sis hated books and frippery, and found it hard to control her feelings, particularly if she suspected he had been drinking at the bar of the Swan Hotel.
They had been married one year when the First World War broke out. Papa did not have the resolve to become a conscientious objector, but the idea of war horrified him nevertheless. He could not hide in the stables for long. In January 1915, for example, Country Life ran an editorial posing five questions:
1. Have you a Butler, Groom, Chauffeur, Gardener, or Gamekeeper serving you who, at this moment should be serving your King and Country?
2. Have you a man serving at your table who should be serving a gun?
3. Have you a man digging your garden who should be digging trenches?
4. Have you a man driving your car who should be driving a transport wagon?
5. Have you a man preserving your game who should be helping to preserve your Country?
As Pamela Horn points out in Life Below Stairs in the 20th Century, in all the great houses in Scotland and England, building projects and improvements stopped, freeing up the men to fight. Gardens once lovingly tended were given over to potato growing, and much of the work on the estates, both indoors and outdoors, was carried out by women – those who did not go into munitions factories – be they former housekeepers and maids, or members of the Women’s Land Army. In the various gentlemen’s clubs, such as the Athenaeum in London, waitresses replaced the all-male staff. Mrs Cornwallis-West, the former Lady Randolph Churchill, readily embraced the change, and one hostess replaced her footmen with a set of ‘foot girls’, handsome, strapping young women in blue livery jackets, stripped waistcoats, stiff shirts, short blue skirts, black silk stockings, and patent leather shoes with three-inch heels. Most employers were less brazen. In the big hotels in Edinburgh, such as the Caledonian, staff quickly became depleted. In January 1916, conscription was introduced and Papa had no choice. He joined the Scots Greys, was wounded in the battle of the Somme in 1916, and returned home immediately. From that day on, he refused to talk of his war experiences, so his family never really knew what had happened to him – only that he came back pensioned off.
By the time Lily was born, Papa was working in the stables of the Swan Hotel in the town square, and the family was living in a cramped house in North Street, which stood directly opposite Sis’s parents’ house in South Street. The first few years of Lily’s life were spent in the shadow of a series of Colvin crises, which taxed Sis until she was red in the face with exhaustion and despair. Sis’s father was becoming increasingly demented (he would report Papa for abusing his horses but the inspectors always found them healthy and grazing happily, as round as barrels). Sis’s youngest brother, Arthur, her mother’s favourite, had not survived the war. (12 per cent of those who fought on the western front were killed, rising to 27 per cent of officers; Duns alone lost seventy-five men to the war.) Her mother, engulfed by grief, had taken to guzzling pitchers of whisky to numb the pain. She had also contracted dropsy and swollen to gargantuan proportions. She rarely rose from her bed. Those brothers still living at home, Jock and Jim, were indolent and disinclined to help. And then, in March 1918, Sis’s younger sister died in childbirth. Her daughter was also named Lily, but when it became apparent that nobody could or would care for her but Sis, the child was deposited at North Street and renamed Rose to avoid confusion.
If these burdens took their toll on Sis, she took them out on her own family. As a result Papa spent more time at the bar of the Swan, which angered Sis further, and the children learned never to approach their mother when she was in a rage or to contradict her even when they knew her to be wrong. Later Lily would write in the patchy beginnings of her memoirs, which she called No Silver Spoon, ‘Mother had a strong character … life had been hard for her as a child. Her environment hadn’t broken her as it might have done but had given her determination and a strong will, so it was she who set the rules, we were taught the difference between right and wrong, and if we broke the rules we were punished.’
The Miller girls, always impeccably dressed and groomed, with laundered smocks and over-combed hair, were as temperamentally different as their parents. In personality Lily was closer to Rose, a fiery, hot-headed girl quick to lose her temper. Rose would be the first to challenge Sis and the first to escape Duns, running off to Edinburgh at the age of sixteen. It was Rose with whom Lily clashed. Each night Etta would look on, dismayed, as her sisters tugged crossly at the oil lamp Sis had placed between them. Etta was far more bovine, round and plump and compliant, the prettiest of the three; a simple and uncomplicated child with no inclination to gaze to the horizon. Lily, with her odd, bony little face, bulging eyes, and pale knobbly legs protruding from her skirt like matchsticks, was the bridge between Rose and Etta. She possessed Etta’s gentleness and Rose’s bravado and courage. She was quixotic in attitude and agile in her movements – quite the opposite of the stolid Etta – and liked to dance and spin around, tossing her head so that her bunches twirled and bobbed about her ears. It was a show put on for anybody who would look, but the best audience was always Papa. Really, though, despite her love of dancing – ‘what rubbish,’ Sis would mutter – Lily learned early on that the most effective way of winning affection and love was by saying what people wanted to hear, and in this her acting skills came in useful.
Just before Lily’s fifth birthday, Papa was offered a position on a private estate in Ayrshire looking after hunters and racehorses, accommodation included. If ever there was a chance for Sis to slip the Colvin leash, it was now. The family packed up their possessions, piled them onto Papa’s horse and cart and set off for a new, independent life. Lily was devastated. It meant leaving behind her best friend, a wiry haired old woman called Hannah who lived in the bottom half of their council house. Hannah was an Irish immigrant, an agricultural labourer of the sort known in the lowlands as a bondager, and every night she was to be found in her bonnet and flounce sleeves, drunk in the town square, lashing out with her wizened legs at the local constable. She was, Lily later recalled, ‘very special. I have never met anyone like her since.’ It was life without Hannah, rather than leaving Duns, that Lily found intolerable. The old woman had fed her stories of taking to the road in a gypsy caravan, ‘with a horse to drive like a pedlarrman [sic], just the two of us,’ and one day went a step further, rasping hotly in the child’s ear ‘take care of those hands – one day you will become a great lady’.
Hannah might have been filling Lily’s head with bunkum, but it was to have one effect: it confirmed what Lily had already begun to feel, that she was different and wanted to escape. But climbing on Papa’s cart, squashed in next to Sis and her sisters, did not have the same appeal as bumping along in Hannah’s imaginary caravan.
Lily need not have worried. Within eighteen months the Millers were back. Annie Colvin’s health had taken a turn for the worst and, when duty called, Sis could not help but come running. Annie Colvin died on 19 December 1922, when Lily was eight years old. When the undertakers arrived, they found the corpse so heavy and large that it could not be carried down the staircase. Eventually the body was placed in a secure box and lowered to the pavement using a rope pulley. Given the location of the two houses and the fact that the horrible business must have attracted a crowd, it is likely that Lily witnessed her grandmother’s final indignity, lying on the pavement in her makeshift coffin.
The first time Lily felt what life might be like free of the Millers en masse, was at Duns Primary School, an unprepossessing low stone building close to North Street. The school was hardly a hotbed of self-expression. Once a week, for instance, the older girls were herded into line and marched over to Berwickshire High School so they could learn to cook for their future husbands and employers. There were also lessons in laundry and needlework, washing and ironing, hemming and patching, all practised on squares of white cotton and flannel. (At the end of the nineteenth century a series of codes was passed – by a government of men – that made it clear to schools that their grants would be adversely affected if such subjects were not included. Too many men had been rejected from fighting in the Boer War on medical grounds, and if the British male was puny and unhealthy, it seemed his wife’s cooking was to blame.) But compared to the atmosphere of chaos control and pleasure policing at North Street, school promised much. Lily did not warm to many of the spinster teachers – they were starchy and sharp-tongued and made her cry by thwacking maps with pointers and asking her questions she could not answer – but Mr Thomson, the headmaster, was heaven itself.
Danny Thomson was a strict, sprightly man who wore orange tweed plus-fours and liked to show the children clippings of the hybrid plants he grew in his garden. He taught academic subjects, but was especially keen on encouraging the dramatic arts. Although tone deaf, he was keen to involve his charges in the Borders Festival, a competition of performing arts in which many of the region’s schools took part. By 1928, after a string of victories that saw him banging on the school piano more fiercely than ever, in the interests of fairness, Duns Primary was asked not to enter. It was under Mr Thomson’s nurturing eye that Lily learned to tap dance. ‘I had been blessed with a good singing voice,’ she declared in later life, ‘a pair of light dancing feet and a certain ability to act.’ She became so good that Mr Thomson soon suggested she dance in shoes made for the job. Perhaps her mother would buy her some? Sis would no more pay for such frippery than she would prop up the bar at the Swan. Lily could go straight back to Mr Thomson and tell him what to do with such a ridiculous suggestion. Mr Thomson, keener than ever to ensure his star continued to sparkle, was not easily dissuaded. Shortly afterwards, he presented Lily with a pair of shoes he had found himself, cast-offs but tap shoes nonetheless. Lily ran home to North Street suffused with joy. The tap shoes entered through the front door and left through the window.
Lily was a bright child, but she had no encouragement at home, not even from Papa. Sis only valued instruction of the domestic kind. Her dream for her daughters extended to them gaining good positions in domestic service, which would, in turn, bring adequate and fair reward. ‘Mother thought it right and proper that training for anything should come from the landed gentry,’ Lily later lamented. Any attempts at studying at home were met with out-and-out resistance, which meant that Lily often left North Street in her immaculate pinafore with red eyes and half-finished homework. Given Papa’s regrets about his own undeveloped intellect, his inertia when it came to the minds of his daughters is less easy to explain. But he was a weak man and his position – or lack of it – is probably more a sign of how much he feared to contradict his wife than a belief that girls did not deserve the benefits of book work.
Aside from the wonderful Hannah, who, Lily later wrote, ‘From the day I crawled into her house as an infant … had taken me to her heart’, Lily (by now on the verge of adolescence) had one best friend. She was a bold, straight-talking girl called Alice Brockie, who arrived at Duns Primary tinged with the smell of the barnyard on account of living on a smallholding in the outlying reaches of Duns. Alice came from a good home. The family had once been successful farmers from Selkirk and her mother had employed a maid, but the post-war depression had forced her grandfather into bankruptcy and he had eventually sold the family business. Moving to Duns as a qualified specialist in Border Leicester sheep was a step down, to be sure, and it was said that Mrs Brockie was having trouble adapting. She was known as the Duchess, for her airs and graces, and it had also been noted that Alice’s sister, Bunty, walked about with a pet piglet under her armpit.
When Alice first arrived at the school, aged eleven, it was Lily who had offered friendship. It was typical of her, even then, to be drawn to someone down on her luck and apparently in need of help. Alice Brockie would never forget this first act of kindness. Lily’s friendship with her, which was to last a lifetime, was cemented by a shared dream of the future. The two girls, in their blue pinafores and bunches, would sit in the girls’ playground and plot their escape. ‘I am not going to end up a poor servant girl skivvying after other people! I will not! I will not!’ Alice would cry passionately.
They fantasised endlessly about leaving Duns. Mr Brockie might have been suffering the legacy of his father’s financial ruin, but he knew the work of Dickens, and every morning he would test Alice’s arithmetic as she sat on the side of the bath watching him shave his whiskers. He had stimulated Alice’s ambition and Lily found it to be contagious. Alice wanted to leave Duns, to leave Scotland, travel the world, and perhaps even become a doctor. Lily could not be so precise – it was thrilling to even think of a life beyond the town square, let alone decide what to do with it. All she knew for certain was that she wanted more than what Sis had in mind.
In 1928, when Lily was twelve, she began part-time work in a baker’s shop. Lily’s days now began at 7 a.m. with the collection of morning rolls to be delivered in a large wicker basket before school. The weekends were the busiest. Orders doubled and the Saturday bread run started at 6.30 a.m. The bakery paid Lily three shillings and sixpence a week, as well as a large bag of cakes and a bag of sweets, all of which she handed over to Sis, who then handed back nine pence, three of which she called ‘pocket money’. Lily, schooled in her mother’s impressive housekeeping, saved the sixpence ‘pay’. After returning home to North Street for breakfast, on Saturdays Sis would put Lily and Rose to work. The bedroom was turned out and the stairs and lobby scrubbed. When ‘the chores in the house were done to my Mother’s satisfaction’, the girls were given a wheelbarrow and sent to the sawmill over a mile away to collect wood. They made the journey twice, first for thin logs, and then for the fat ones Sis used for cooking mutton stew in her cauldron.
All chores, including cooking Sunday lunch (always stew, usually mutton but sometimes rabbit if Sis was feeling generous) had to be finished by Saturday evening. Sis refused to work on the Sabbath. She was, in Lily’s words, ‘a keen church goer and she set the pattern’. Setting the pattern included herding her girls to Bible class and then afternoon Sunday school, where Lily became a teacher, and badgering Papa to convert from the Church of Scotland to the Church of England. He complied, for a quiet life, but even the children noticed their father was not quite as ardent in his beliefs as one might expect of a church warden. ‘He went along with it all the same,’ Lily later wrote, a succinct epitaph for Papa’s general attitude to life.
The Millers worshipped at Christ Church, an Episcopalian church dating back to 1857. It is still there today, sitting high on Teindhill Green, which snakes across the top of Duns. It is surrounded on all sides by its graveyard and inside are the usual memorials to those singled out for special attention. Lily, in her best dress, became familiar with these as she sat in the third pew from the back where she was squashed in next to Papa, Sis, Etta, and Rose. The front pews were filled by the Berwickshire gentry, the descendants of those remembered on the walls: Mr and Mrs Hay of Duns Castle, Papa’s old employers; Captain Tippins; Lady Miller from Manderston and the incumbents of Charterhall. The congregation encompassed the very rich and the very poor, so Sunday service gave Lily her first taste of the class divide. ‘They have such loud voices,’ she would whisper to Papa. ‘Why do they shout at each other like that?’
For the other six days of the week, the gentry, apart from the Hays, remained hidden on their estates or in London. Their children were educated either at boarding school or at home. Errands were run by staff. Occasionally a car would purr through the town and the men would tip their hats if a lady were inside, but these sightings were akin to spotting a rare bird. No sooner had they come into view than they were gone. Their homes ran along banks of the River Tweed, known locally as ‘Millionaire’s Row’. Lily, like all the other ordinary girls in Duns, was not destined to breathe such air. The closest she would come to this life of privilege was waiting at the tables, clearing the hearths, and making the guest beds, and that, according to Sis, would do quite nicely.
If Lily had dodged thinking about the grim reality of her destiny, preferring instead to dream with Alice, in 1930 she was given no choice. Turning fourteen marked the official end of her education. Sis’s project was to send her into service as soon as possible and she enlisted Etta to keep an ear to the ground for a suitable position – nothing too grand, but enough to put Lily on the first rung of the domestic service ladder (the last rung being a position with a titled family). When the day came for her to leave school, her sadness at waving goodbye to Alice and Mr Thomson was made bearable only by the fact that Sis had not yet found her a position and that she would not be leaving North Street. It was never Sis’s plan to have Lily moping about at home, so when the baker for whom Lily worked offered her a job minding his children, three-year-old Olive and five-month-old Moira, Sis was happy to let her do it. This was a temporary measure until something ‘proper’ came up.
Caring for the baker’s small children brought Lily much pleasure. She took them for long walks around town, Olive toddling along by her side and Moira peering inquisitively from the pram. Lily loved tidying and rearranging the nursery. This routine continued for a few months and Lily was ‘thrilled’ at the way things had turned out. ‘However,’ she was to recall years later, ‘mother had different ideas.’
Sis spoke endlessly about the benefits of learning from the aristocracy. In a good family Lily would be looked after and would learn to distinguish what was good taste and what was bad. Being surrounded by pictures, silverware, and fine china would cultivate her. It would be impossible to live among such beauty, Sis argued, without some of it rubbing off. On a more profound level, Sis believed the upper classes were morally ‘better’: it was as simple as that.
These ideas were backed up by a series of contemporary manuals. One, for example, A Few Rules for the Manners of Servants in Good Families, published by the Ladies’ Sanitary Association in 1895, had been in wide use during Sis’s childhood. The book makes the self-will and discipline required for a future of servitude all too clear. It is a bible of dos and don’ts, and could easily have engulfed an independent-minded young woman like Lily in a fog of inferiority. Don’t walk on the grass unless permitted or unless the family is out, and walk quietly; never sing or whistle; when you meet the mistress or master on the stairs, stand back or move aside for them to pass; when carrying letters or parcels, use a small salver or hand tray; never hand over a letter directly, risking skin contact, but place it instead on a nearby table. Another, A Servant’s Practical Guide: A Handbook of Duties and Rules for the Use of Masters and Mistresses, carries the same message. Its advice for coffee time leaves a mistress in no doubt of the kind of climate to cultivate:
The women servants stand behind the buffet, and pour out the tea and coffee. The only remark offered by servants in attendance is: ‘Tea or coffee, ma’am?’ Not ‘Will you take tea or coffee, ma’am?’ or ‘Shall I give you some tea ma’am?’ A well-mannered servant merely says in a respectful tone of voice ‘Tea or coffee, ma’am?’
Following the war, many former male and female servants had been reluctant to return to their old positions; war work had given them the taste for a more independent life. But in spite of this, post-war industrial depression and high unemployment led to a steady rise in domestic staff during the inter-war years. In the Borders, where there were large estates still operating on comparatively large incomes, domestic service never stopped being regarded as the principal source of employment for young girls.
Sis quite rightly viewed Lily’s Borders upbringing as an advantage. The Fairbairn Agency on the Edgware Road in London, for example, specialised in supplying simple Scottish maids to good English families, ‘mostly titled’. Glasgow girls were always rejected ‘as they are too rough’, as were ‘stockingless or made-up girls’. Country girls were ideal because they were so sensible, unsophisticated, and lacked the wisdom of the world, the three virtues Lily desired to be rid of. But she was given no choice. ‘So my days with the children were short-lived, and I was sent to “proper service”.’
3 Virescit vulnere virtus: Valour grows strong from a wound (#ulink_be3d10f2-d106-57ae-b9da-296978f0d1a5)
On 14 October 1928 at 2.45 a.m., in a large, elegant bedroom on an upper floor of 34 Bryanston Square, London W1, the 12th Countess of Galloway, gave birth to a son and heir. The boy was christened Randolph Keith Reginald Stewart, names chosen in honour of his father, grandfather, and uncle. There was also the courtesy title of Lord Garlies, which the child would keep until his father’s death, whereupon he would succeed to the title of 13th Earl of Galloway. When Randolph arrived into the world that morning there was no indication of the troubles that lay ahead. Physically, he was perfect. Lord Galloway, the 12th Earl, could rest easy. Three years before Lady Galloway had delivered a daughter, Lady Antonia Marian Amy Isabel Stewart. Now that there was a boy the line would live on, for another generation at least.
Lord Galloway was an accomplished historian, particularly when it came to how the Earls of Galloway, one of Scotland’s oldest noble families, fitted into Britain’s history. They remain one of the main lowland branches of the Stewarts, and, in the absence of a chief, are considered by the Stewart Society, founded in Edinburgh in 1899 to collect and preserve the history and tradition of the name, to be senior representatives of the clan. If a lineage dating back to the twelfth century seemed irrelevant to a small boy born after the First World War, then it was not considered to be so by that boy’s father. Documents and articles held in the Stewart Society library bear many of Lord Galloway’s annotations and corrections. His heritage brought him great pride. He did not care for family members who chose to forget it.
The Galloway earldom has its roots in the Lord High Stewards of Scotland, whose line also produced the Stuart monarchs. When David I gave the 1st High Steward, Walter, his position, he effectively made him Scotland’s equivalent of Chancellor of the Exchequer and occasional army general. It was the third High Steward – also called Walter – who turned the title into his family name, which continues to this day. An unbroken male line descends from Sir John Stewart of Bonkyl, who died at the battle of Falkirk in 1298. Two of his sons fought alongside Robert the Bruce and were rewarded with lands. Their cousin, Sir Walter, later the 6th High Steward, also distinguished himself as a commander at Bannockburn in 1314. He was knighted on the battle field by Robert the Bruce and later married his daughter. Fifty years on, their son became King Robert II. In 1607 James I made Sir Alexander Stewart Lord Garlies. Sixteen years later he created for him the Galloway earldom. Queen Elizabeth II is a direct descendant of the royal Stewarts through the female line.
The early bravery and military inclinations of the Stewart relatives – some destined to become the Earls of Galloway – continued through the centuries, right up until Randolph’s birth. Some stood out. Lieutenant General Sir William Stewart, fourth son of the 7th Earl and Countess of Galloway, for example, co-founded the Rifle Brigade and fought in the Napoleonic Wars. His journals and papers, known as the Cumloden Papers and dating from 1794 to 1809, preserved at the family seat of Cumloden, contain a record of his achievements and include revealing correspondence from the Duke of Wellington and Lord Nelson.
Everything Lord Galloway knew and felt to be true about life derived from his family legacy. He was born on 21 November 1892, to Amy Mary Pauline, the only daughter of Anthony John Cliffe of Bellevue, County Wexford, and christened Randolph Algernon Ronald Stewart. His father, Randolph Henry Stewart, son of Randolph, 9th Earl of Galloway, had joined the 42nd Highlanders in 1855 straight from Harrow School. In his military career he survived some of the empire’s most significant conflicts. He served in the Crimea and was present at the siege and fall of Sebastopol (for which he received a medal with clasp and the Turkish war medal) and also at the Indian Mutiny, during which he was present at the fall of Lucknow (another medal with clasp). He retired, as a captain, in 1876. He was fifty-five by the time he married, fifty-six when his first son was born, and succeeded as 11th Earl of Galloway, following the death of his elder brother, the 10th Earl in 1901.
Two harrowing events in early adulthood had shaped Lord Galloway’s life. The first was the death of his younger brother, the Hon. Keith Stewart, killed during the First World War, and the second was his own experience serving in the Scots Guards during the first battle of Ypres. Wounded and close to death, he had been captured by the Germans and kept prisoner before finally being returned home.
Even before the Lieutenant Hon. Keith Stewart’s death on 9 May 1915, when he was head of the leading platoon of his regiment, the Black Watch, in the charge on Aubers Ridge, near Festhubert in Flanders, he was regarded by all – family, friends, schoolmasters – as extraordinarily brilliant, a rather special boy who, had it not been for his brother’s status as first son and heir, might well have eclipsed him in every way. At Harrow he was head of school, captain of the football First XI, had won the public schools’ fencing competition in 1911, the Macnamara Prize for English three years running, and had passed second into Sandhurst in 1913, then fifth out a year later. He was gazetted to the Black Watch in August 1914, and went to the front in the December. (Lord Galloway – then ‘Garlies’ – had been at Harrow School only a year when his brother arrived and his own time there would prove to be not nearly so distinguished.)
It was inevitable that the tragic, early death of such a young man would shock the family. Keith Stewart epitomised all they stood for: brains, honour, courage, strength, and patriotism. It was some while before his body was recovered, but his popularity was so great that both commissioned and non-commissioned officers went looking for it at considerable risk to their lives. His corpse was eventually found lying within a few yards of the German trenches. It was brought back and buried by the British chaplain in the cemetery of Vieille Chapelle. In the months that followed the news his father received many tributes. Tommy Graham, who fought with him, sent back to Britain wounded, wrote to him:
He was young as far as his years are concerned, but he was old in wisdom … He never asked one of us to do something which he would not do himself: he shared our hardships and our joys; he was, in fact, one of ourselves as far as comradeship and brotherly love was concerned … We never knew who he was till we saw his death in the Press; but this we did know, that he was Lieut. Stewart, a soldier and a gentleman every inch … it’s not every day one like Stewart joins the army. There was not a man in his platoon, or the regiment for that part, but would have willingly went through hell for him, and mind you we faced hell out there on more than one occasion.’
Graham had heard of the death from another officer, Lance-Corporal Alexander ‘Sandy’ Easson, who broke the news thus:
We have lost little Lieut. Stewart … the best man that ever toed the line … None of the rest of them ever mixed themselves with us the same as he done. He was a credit to the regiment and to the father and mother who reared him; and Tommy, the boys that are left of the platoon hope that you will write to his father and mother and let them know how his men loved him … He died at the head of his platoon like the toff he was, and Tommy, I never was very religious: but I think little Stewart is in heaven. We knew it was a forlorn hope before we were half way – but he never flinched.
The Galloway family motto is Virescit vulnere virtus – valour grows strong from a wound – and so it proved for Lord Galloway, who adhered to it throughout his life. As soon as he had recovered, both from injury and from the loss of his brother, he became honorary attaché to the British legation in Berne in 1918, and then, after the war, in 1919, ADC to the military governor of Cologne. A year later his father died and he succeeded to the title. That he would incorporate his brother’s name into that of his son and heir shows how the legacy of Keith lived on. The military tradition into which the two brothers had been born sets in context the assumptions and expectations Lord Galloway would come to make of his own son, just as, one imagines, they had been made of him. It also explains the enormous sense of disappointment, bewilderment, and shame he would come to feel when he found that his heir could not live up to them. For now, though, Lord Galloway had no reason to suspect that when he married his beautiful young bride, their genes would mix so badly.
Lord Galloway’s marriage to Philippa Wendell in 1924 was seen by society as a second splendid match for the Wendell family, descendants of the victorious American Civil War general, Robert E. Lee. The Wendell sisters were not just beauties – Catherine, the eldest, was blonde and graceful, and Philippa, ‘a vivacious brunette’ – they were American beauties, bringing with them the wealth that the British aristocracy so badly needed. In the fifth volume of The Stewarts: A Historical and General Magazine for the Stewart Society, the tribute to their union reads: ‘To none of all the alliances formed in recent years between fair Americaines and members of the British aristocracy does so much interest attach – historically and genealogically at least – as to that just celebrated by Miss Philippa Wendell and the Earl of Galloway.’ Two years earlier, in 1922, Catherine had married the Earl of Carnarvon. That Philippa had followed her into the aristocracy by marrying a Scottish earl, one whose ancestry placed him at the head of the Stewart clan, was considered another piece of good fortune. ‘She comes on both sides of the house from some of the very oldest New England families,’ the report in The Stewarts gushed, ‘and, it may be added, of pronounced Royalist sympathies.’
The new Lady Galloway was perfect in every way. She was a beauty with fine, noble features. She had pale skin and dark, thick hair (Randolph was to inherit her colouring), cut into a bob and worn pulled back from her face, showing off to good effect the sharp angles of her cheekbones and jawline. She enjoyed listening to and playing classical music, which particularly delighted the musical dowager countess, who in the past had held her own festivals at Cumloden, and she wrote plays and poetry (the latter published in Punch). Added to this her uncle by marriage, Mr Percival Griffiths, possessed a fine and extensive private collection of Stewart relics. There were wonderfully wrought royal layette baskets, miniatures of Charles I hand-worked in silk; a lock of the ‘Royal Martyr’s hair’; the hawking outfit – pouch, lure, and gloves – of James VI and I; the Bible of Charles II in its bag of Royal Stewart tartan velvet – ‘probably the oldest example of that tartan in existence’ – along with rings, medallions, and trinkets.
Shortly after their marriage Lord and Lady Galloway took a house in London which led the Daily Telegraph to speculate that ‘Lady Galloway would blossom out as a leading London hostess’. She did not. Lord Galloway found that he preferred being on his estate, for which he now felt a great responsibility. Although Lady Galloway had chosen to have her baby in London, soon after Randolph’s birth they travelled back to Scotland.
Cumloden is situated in the county of Kirkcudbrightshire in the south-west, close to the towns of Newton Stewart and Minnigaff. It was not a stately home, but a converted hunting lodge, orginally built in 1821 by Sir William Stewart. The family’s main seat had been the grand and imposing Galloway House, also in the south west, but that had been sold off in 1908 due to the family’s dwindling funds. Cumloden was a low white house with black timbers, not remotely grand or imposing. At the front, there was a porch with a verandah, framed by trees, rhododendrons, laurels, box hedges and azaleas. Inside, to the right of the entrance hall, a couple of steps led off to the billiards room and the main telephone room.
Along the south-west front of the house were Lady Galloway’s sitting room; Lord Galloway’s study; a bedroom called the Orange Room for important family guests; a little store room; and the drawing room, off of which was an ante-room leading to a conservatory always filled with flowers. Double doors led from the drawing room into the dining room, outside which was a hall leading to the bedroom of the head housemaid, and underneath was the wine cellar. A flight of stairs led off to the north wing where Lord and Lady Galloway had adjoining bedrooms (Lady Galloway’s room had a spectacular view). The dowager countess also slept in a pretty room in the north wing, despite it being considered the coldest room in the house. Across the passage was a bathroom and a set of box rooms where Lord and Lady Galloway stored their much-used travel bags. From here another flight of stairs led up to the bedrooms used by the gaggle of old Stewart aunts and American relatives whenever they visited. These rooms also ran along the south-west front of the house and were called South Room (with appropriately facing dressing room), Balcony Room, Blue Room, and Roof Room. The layout continued in this manner – a series of rambling wings connected by a rabbit warren of corridors and narrow staircases. The focal point of it all, close to the entrance hall, was the grand and central spiral staircase.
The beauty of the estate, however, lay not in the house, however comfortable the interior, but in the lands, which stretched beyond the eye could see and included a deer park that Randolph would grow to love. To the west was Kirkland, the nearest farm, and further beyond, up the Wood O’Cree Road, looking over the River Cree, sat All Saints’, Challoch, the family’s church and burial yard.
On inheriting all this Lord Galloway grew further into his new role and began applying himself to a myriad of public duties. He became justice of the peace for Kirkcudbrightshire and in 1932, four years after Randolph’s birth, he was appointed Lord Lieutenant of the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright. This role lasted until 1975 and involved lunches with Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, from whom – in terms of old-school austerity and iron backbone – he was not dissimilar. The same year as Lord Galloway began representing the Queen, he also embraced masonic life. He was initiated into Lodge St Ninian, No. 499, and became Right Worshipful Master when he took office in Grand Lodge as Junior Grand Deacon. (In 1945, he would become Grand Master Mason.)
Unsurprisingly Lord Galloway’s responsibilities and his extensive travelling dictated the rhythm of the household. Randolph’s early years were typical of a post-war childhood in a big house, at one turn privileged, at another, by today’s standards, emotionally lacking. It would have been quite unthinkable by the standards of his class for Lord Galloway to make his many trips abroad without his wife. As a result Randolph spent much of his time with a succession of nannies, nurses, and governesses. The year was divided into time spent at Cumloden; a large house in Sandridgebury, near St Albans, where Lady Galloway had grown up following her father’s death – a fine residence with butlers and footmen, chauffeurs for the two Rolls-Royces, cooks, general maids, and scullery maids; and London. The London trip occurred in late January, usually when Lord and Lady Galloway were abroad, and the children would travel up with the nannies to stay at 39 Lowndes Street, where they would remain until just before Easter. The children adored these trips. In the cold London air the nannies would walk them round Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, where they would stand, eyes wide with delight, before Peter Pan’s statue. Occasionally they would go to Bryanston Square, where Randolph had been born, and curl up with Nana, their mother’s old nurse.
Just before Easter the children would be brought back to Cumloden where they would remain until July. The nursery toy box overflowed. There were puppets, clockwork cows, and the ‘bunny express’, an engine in lapine form that sounded a bell as it chuffed around the track. There was a toy cinema, countless picture books, and annuals – a favourite being the series of adventures of the Peek-A-Boos. Lady Antonia had a large and intricate doll’s house, which in fine weather was moved into the play hut in the grounds of the house, and Randolph had three sets of trains with tracks, two containing green engines with chocolate and cream coloured coaches with multi-coloured roofs. The puppet theatre was a favourite. If Lord and Lady Galloway were in residence, the countess would make sure all adults attended performances, including the sombre dowager. Often Lady Galloway would go behind the puppet stand herself. There were picnics in the surrounding beauty spots, which brought the children much joy, but not always the adults, particularly the dowager. The sun annoyed her, any wind drove her frantic, and in the rain she would sit alone in the Rolls complaining of her misery and wishing she was by the drawing room fire.
Come July the children would transfer to Sandridgebury where they would stay until October. During these months Cumloden would be let out to rich holidaymakers and Lord and Lady Galloway would travel to Europe or beyond, announcing their departure in the broadsheets. The trip south was a complicated operation involving much luggage. At 8.30 a.m. on the dot Mr McGowan would arrive in the Rolls ready to drive the nannies and their charges to Dumfries station, the starting point of their long journey south. The nannies would then shepherd the children into the car while Mr McGowan struggled with the numerous trunks, hat boxes, Gladstone bags, books tied with string, attaché cases, and luncheon boxes, as well as the portable wireless and gramophone. At Sandridgebury they would be met by another Rolls, driven by Hubert French, and in the back seat sat a delighted Mrs Percival Griffiths. Mr Griffiths was equally pleased by their presence in his large house, and often liked to take them to Whipsnade Zoo in the Rolls, although he would get cross if they made a noise during his afternoon nap.
All things considered, with old great aunts pressing upon him as many Fuller’s peppermints as they could manage, Randolph thought himself happy at Sandridgebury. It was one long blissful summer of hide and seek, sardines, netball, rounders, tennis, croquet, and golf. And in October, on his birthday, there would always be a party during which his great aunt would stamp about the hall, much to the children’s delight, shouting ‘Do you know the Muffin Man, the Muffin Man, the Muffin Man? Do you know the Muffin Man who lives in Drury Lane?’
And so this was the cycle of Randolph’s early life, spent largely in the bosom of extended family and in the care of familiar, loyal servants who were always on hand to ensure the smooth running of the houses. Cumloden had a large staff, most of whom lived on the estate with their families, so that as Randolph’s anxieties began to take hold, and he became prone to wandering the grounds alone, these familiar, weather-beaten faces seemed part of his world even though they came from a quite different one. Mr Curry, for instance, who tended the grounds, tidied the woodland paths, cut the wood, and ensured the house remained heated, lived with his wife in a cottage in the deer park. Mr Malcolm Scott, the head gamekeeper, lived with his wife and daughter, Monica, at Cumloden Lodge, which sat at the south entrance (Monica was responsible for opening the gatehouse gate and waving in the Rolls). It was often the case that the house employed several members of the same family. The succession of cooks – Mrs Robertson, Mrs Cockie, Mrs Partridge, Mrs Bain, Mrs Clark, and Mrs McNabb – and the roll call of butlers – Mr Leashman, Mr Campbell, Mr Hopkins, Mr Sparks, and Mr Wright – tended to arrive alone, but the coachman’s daughter, for example, was head housemaid and parlourmaid. Randolph’s favourite servant beyond all others, the one he continues to talk of in adulthood, was Nan Dalrymple, the laundry maid and wife of the station hand at Newton Stewart railway station. Often he would seek her out in the laundry room and she would embrace him with vigour – an unfamiliar but very pleasant sensation.
Randolph and Lady Antonia were initially educated at home. They were woken at 7 a.m. by the school-room maid with a glass of hot water ‘that tasted awful’, as Randolph remembered later, and in the afternoon, after lessons, they rested for an hour before being taken for a walk around the grounds by their governess. There was rarely a shortage of company though. Children of family friends were always being invited over for parties and on Tuesdays in spring, after their return to Cumloden, the portable gramophone and a box full of records, including selections of Irish and Scottish country dances, would be carried down from the school-room and set up in the billiard room where Miss Border, the dancing instructress, would hold classes for them and their friends. But Randolph’s fear of his father slowly began to overshadow all. His ‘personality problems’ began early, long before he left Cumloden for Belhaven Hill, one of the most fashionable Scottish preparatory schools at that time. He cried when he left Cumloden for Sandridgebury and he cried when he left Sandridgebury for Cumloden. He was often making a scene, ‘either public or private or both’, he recalls. This irritated and angered Lord Galloway, who expected his son to behave with dignity, composure, and formality. It did not help that Randolph was a slight, sickly child. Whenever he contracted a cold or the flu, the school-room was turned into a sick bay.
Years later, when he was an adult, Randolph wrote of a puppet show that his mother had performed for him during his childhood. She named it ‘The Child in the Bath’, and in tone it chimes rather tragically with the feelings Lord and Lady Galloway would come to have regarding their own son. In the show the mother puppet placed her infant child in the bath and left the stage. While she was gone, ‘the Black Witch, an evil woman’ entered and snatched the baby. ‘No happy endings,’ wrote Randolph, ‘for both parents were so upset, they had no idea of the visitation of such a demonic and odious prowling spirit.’
For all the joyful innocence of the nursery, the picnics and the toys and the parties, Cumloden remained a formal household. Lord Galloway believed in the same values as his own father and his approach to child rearing was rigid and unbending. It was not an atmosphere suited to an increasingly odd and eccentric little boy. In 1935, for example, Randolph threw a tantrum at the news that a newly appointed governess would shortly be arriving in the schoolroom. Poor Miss Daisy Cook, who appeared armed with milk of magnesia and syrup of figs. ‘Tears of wretched despair … and dejected despondency adorned my face in the schoolroom, when writing Christmas letters of thanks,’ Randolph recorded. ‘Miss Daisy Cook was not amused by my attitude.’
Randolph was not a good student and when he did badly, he would sob or scream, which would have Miss Cook shouting back at him to bring himself under control. Other staff began to notice his oddities. On one occasion, following a telling off by the dowager countess, he displayed more peculiarity, fussing about and breaking wind (a habit that he never thought to control). ‘I was swiftly removed by Mother to the schoolroom,’ he wrote, ‘wherein I became aggressive and threatened Winnifred [school-room servant] on her approach.’ Mr Leashman, the butler, witnessed the incident and was ‘deeply shocked’. But Randolph did not apologise for his behaviour. He broke wind again, which had the effect of ‘bringing a dark frown to the butler’s face’.
Randolph’s eccentric behaviour was not confined to Cumloden. Reports would often drift back from outings with other children, and events would often occur at house parties that confirmed he was unlike the other boys. During one house party in June 1934, the housekeeper took the children to the coast of North Berwick (not far from where Lily lived). Randolph ran away and everybody got soaked in the rain while they looked for him. During one stay at Sandridgebury, the children were taken to a private tea party by their aunt. Randolph had promised to behave, but once there he found it impossible to rise to the challenge. He muddled up the names of all the guests – understandable in an eight-year-old child – but then went on to insult the host, Mr Parr, by telling him that his study smelt of rats and tobacco. ‘It may smell of tobacco, Garlies,’ said the surprised Mr Parr, ‘but it does not smell of rats!’ To which Randolph had rudely retorted, ‘Yes, it smells of tobacco and rats, and is the smelliest house I have ever been in!’ Throughout the rest of the tea, Randolph continued to break wind, which had his aunt slowly dying of shame. Back at Sandridgebury she told him that never in her life had she been so mortified. ‘Signorita’, who helped with the children when they stayed, told him wisely, ‘If you do this at school, teacher will come and put you in the lavatory!’
These minor acts of bad behaviour only make sense in retrospect. At the time the puzzled Lord and Lady Galloway consoled themselves that their son would change with age. What he needed was to grow and toughen up. What he needed was the discipline of prep school. There he was sure to metamorphosise from cry-baby into a proper boy possessed of a dignity befitting his title, and a spirit strong enough for the future challenges of Harrow School. In the summer of 1937, before Randolph was due to start at Belhaven Hill School in Dunbar, the headmaster, Mr Brian Simms, came to Cumloden for lunch. Randolph was petrified and thought him horrid. He did not like the way he ‘fixed [him] with a cold and hard eye across the dining table’.
That September Randolph left Sandridgebury with his mother and father. They were met at St Pancras station by the dowager countess and together they travelled to King’s Cross in order to catch the train back to Scotland. Randolph’s behaviour during the journey was not encouraging. When a locomotive blew its steam, he began screaming. Lady Galloway became angry and told him to stop being so babyish. Once on board the train his behaviour changed completely and he became jolly, babbling a list of nonsensical words that his mother sweetly wrote down on some notepaper for him. They spent the night of the twenty-eighth in the North British Hotel in Edinburgh (to become the Balmoral). Randolph was ‘as potty as ever, making the craziest of noises’, and smelling and blowing his sweet wrappers. The following day they travelled to Dunbar where Lord and Lady Galloway delivered Randolph to Belhaven for the beginning of Michaelmas Term. As they disappeared down the drive, he stood watching them from the front porch. For the first time in his life, he was alone, about to begin a new phase of his life under ‘the iron rule of Mr Brian Sims [sic]’.
4 Tea or coffee, ma’am? (#ulink_e4079bbd-ddba-58e9-a744-2c68b2b10806)
‘I hated it.’ This was Lily’s verdict on her new life of subservience. The first time she stood before a mirror dressed in her afternoon uniform, a black alpaca dress with muslin apron, starched cuffs, and cap, she felt a surge of disgust. She wanted to rip the dress from her back and throw it on the fire. ‘I will not be a poor little servant girl! I will not!’ Less than four years had passed since Alice Brockie had made her passionate playground declaration. Alice was now doing well at Berwickshire High, well on her way to escape. The same could not be said for Lily.
The household Sis found for her was on the other side of Duns. It was a large square, double-fronted home with steps leading up to a porch, on either side of which stood two mock Roman pillars. The ostentation was ominous. Her new employers (Lily refused to speak of them by name, referring to them only as ‘they’) were middle-class professionals, and her mistress, Lily soon saw, liked to maintain a lavish shop front when perhaps stocks were not as high as they might have been. ‘There always seemed to be so much silver on the table, but to me very little food,’ Lily wrote. That first day she was led up the back stairs to a tiny maid’s room. The floor was bare and the bed coffin-like in its dimensions, topped with a lumpy flock mattress. Companionship presented itself in the form of a ferocious-looking old cook and a whiskery gardener. Her duties consisted of all that could not be cooked or weeded. She was to clean, tidy, clear the grates, and manage the laundry. All cleaning had to be completed by the time her mistress rose for breakfast, which meant beginning at 5 a.m., and certain rooms were forbidden her, except if she had work to do. She had to keep to the back staircase, and never use the main. She could not wear rouge or have boys loitering about, although this was not such a hardship – she was only fourteen.
Although Lily was already tall, taller than Rose and Etta, she was still a child, not yet built for the physical labour expected of her. Life was now dominated by loneliness and hunger. Had she been sent to a large estate, she would at least have experienced the hierarchical but friendly bustle of life below stairs as well as the relief of regular, sustaining meals. Instead she grew paler and thinner and her hands began to crack. When she was not working she would lie on her bed in the attic and fantasise about ways of making Sis see sense, but we have her word that Sis ‘turned a deaf ear’ to this misery. When Lily made her weekly pilgrimage to North Street, she went straight to ‘my beloved Hannah’, who sympathised but, like Papa, wisely refrained from facing Sis head on.
In time Rose and Lily would prove themselves extremely adept at bolting from Duns. For now, Lily tried to please her mother and her mistress, and wrote later, ‘Although I wasn’t happy, I did my job properly, in fact, they called me Miss Tidy, no one could find anything after I had tidied a room.’ And yet she possessed an instinctive independence that prevented her from accepting her prescribed lot, a tension that was always to complicate her life. Her compliance was short lived. ‘With help from no one,’ she wrote later, ‘I took the initiative and ran away.’ It was 4 a.m. when she climbed out of a window. ‘But’, she added, ‘I hadn’t used much imagination.’ She reached North Street by dawn and no sooner had she knocked on the door and encountered Sis’s fury than she was walking the same road back. Her mistress took her back because of her age, her insecurity, and, no doubt, because she was cheap. A week later Lily bolted again, this time with the hope of travelling to London. She left in daylight, by the same downstairs window, and took the road out of Duns, which she hoped would lead to London eventually. It was a ridiculous plan – she had no food and hardly any money – and once on the road, it occurred to Lily that her ambition was beyond her. She lost her nerve and began to cry. When a stranger passed in his horse and cart, she accepted his offer to climb aboard and be taken home, weeping, to Sis and Papa, back, as she put it, to Duns to ‘face the music’.
Presented with such abject misery, Papa displayed uncharacteristic resolve. ‘“She is NOT going back!” he told Sis. “Enough is enough! The child is desperate.” I may add he won that round,’ Lily later wrote, with obvious relish. Sis, furious in the face of being overruled and intent on exacting some kind of punishment, sent Lily to bed without supper. Victory, though, was sustenance enough.
Within two or three weeks of returning to North Street, Lily began working in Greenlees, a small independent shoe store in the town square, and it was here, among the racks of heels and Oxford brogues, that she made the physical transition from child to young adult. The once gangling limbs were now long and coltish, and her square jaw and jutting cheekbones, quite ugly in a small child, had matured to give her an arresting bone structure. Duns had little to offer a teenage girl interested in fashion. But Lily made the most of what there was. She bought her clothes off the rack from Mrs Saban, wife of the butler at Manderston (her wages of seven shillings and sixpence for a sixty-hour week could not stretch to Aggie Johnson, the dress maker). When Betty, daughter of the town’s one barber, opened a small room in her father’s shop, Lily allowed her to cut off her hair and style it in the marcel wave using her new iron tongs heated up over the fire (electricity did not arrive in Duns until 1936, so even the dentist operated his drill by foot).
Mr Thomson’s school productions began winning prizes again. One in particular – Raggle Taggle Gypsies – made it to the festival finals in Edinburgh until it was discovered that the ‘leading man’ – he with the marcel wave – was in full-time employment and the cast was disqualified. ‘Much to my disappointment,’ Lily wrote, ‘my acting days had come to a halt – much to the relief of my mother, I may add.’ Despite this, there are two periods of Lily’s life where photographs record genuine happiness. The years between sixteen and nineteen are the first and the year immediately after her marriage to Randolph is the second. ‘Life was good,’ she remembered of her adolescence. She was between roles – no longer a child completely under her mother’s rule, and yet not quite a woman with responsibilities of her own. She still gave Sis her earnings, but her pocket money was raised to half a crown. ‘I felt rich indeed.’
Sis’s disdain for pleasure had abated with age, but she permitted certain excesses of youth provided they were experienced within the confines of the church. By now Lily was a committed Sunday School teacher, and a regular on the Christ Church picnics and camping trips by the coast. She looks happy enough in the photographs, but being constantly in the presence of Him must have had a sobering effect, and only at the rare ungodly events that Sis allowed her to attend, dances at the Town Hall, the Drill Hall, and the Girls’ Club, could she relax completely. There, she was more flirt than church mouse.
Sis, Papa, and Etta, not to mention the sensible and hardworking Alice Brockie, now on the cusp of becoming a nurse, came to rue the day that John David Millar walked into Lily’s life. Another forty years would pass before Lily’s friend, Lord Lauderdale, musing on marriage, would comment that romantic matches are often dictated as much by the needs and insecurities of the choosers as the merits of those chosen. Lily met Jock, as he was called, at a dance. He arrived, as usual, revving his motorbike with a cigarette hanging from his lips.
A dance in Duns was a hot ticket. The most upmarket were held in the Girls’ Club, a hostel housing young ladies from outlying areas in weekday employment, for the sum of £1 per week. The rules by which Miss White ran her establishment serve as a succinct metaphor for the aspirations of many Duns mothers. Only certain boys were allowed inside. The son of Lady Miller’s secretary at Manderston was one; the son of the Manderston butler was another. These boys, associated by proxy with the gentry, were considered safe, ‘a cut above’. Jock Millar on his motorbike would certainly have been a cut below. (Although his grandfather had been a ship owner in Dundee, his father had been cut off after falling in love with a servant girl.) He worked as a butcher in Veitch’s, the most prestigious independent grocers in Duns Town Square, where every morning he could be seen neatly arranging Mrs Veitch’s meat on small trays in the window. He had orange hair, a large forehead, and biggish ears. All this, combined with the apron, did not make him an obvious Duns Don Juan. But he dressed in sharp three-piece suits and had a way with women.
There were three things about him that attracted Lily: other girls wanted him; he was older and therefore more sophisticated; and, most alluring of all, he represented danger. He took her virginity in the fields outlying Duns and afterwards she climbed on the back of his bike and roared home to Sis, revelling in her act of defiance. Being with Jock, confident, desired, fast Jock, provided her with attention and physical affection – always in short supply at North Street – as well as security by association. Lily’s fatal error was to mistake the euphoria this gave her for love. Did Jock love her back? There are photographs of them lounging lazily in fields, he with one arm draped casually round her shoulders, the other round the plump and beaming Etta. Lily looks to have swallowed a happy pill. Jock, too, appears to be enjoying himself, but if he did love her, he had a novel way of showing it, for many more women continued to climb aboard the back of his bike. Duns being what it was, none of this escaped comment.
In February 1936 Lily became pregnant. The Miller family had by now moved from North Street to staff quarters adjacent to a large house in Langton Gate owned by Major Dees, a local solicitor and pillar of the community. Papa was his chauffeur and would sit bolt upright behind the wheel of Major Dees’s racing green Bentley. Occasionally the Major could be glimpsed in his tweeds, sitting in the back. If the scandal of Lily’s pregnancy unsettled her parents’ new-found respectability, her mother did not buckle in the crisis. Intuiting that her daughter was about to saddle herself with a bad bet – Sis was naturally distrustful of men, but she particularly loathed J.B., as she called him – she made herself clear. Lily must keep the child, but not the man. She would help bring it up. Lily was horror-struck. Nursing a child under her mother’s instruction while Jock went off with other women, leaving her behind, had limited appeal. She wanted to escape from her mother, and besides, she felt herself to be desperately in love.
Rose had long since left for Edinburgh, where she was busy making her own mistakes with men. Etta, on the other hand, heading for confirmed spinsterhood and growing ever more homely and cosy, was deeply shocked by Lily’s news. Paradoxically she did the most to spread it around, reasoning that scandal was best heard from source. It was a choppy time and somewhere in its midst Jock decided to do the decent thing. Lily was thrilled but we can be less sure of Jock’s true feelings.
Meanwhile Lily had lost her looks, almost overnight. By the time her wedding day arrived, she was gaunt and skeletal. The cause was lipodystrophy, a little-known syndrome that can cause fat deposits or strip areas of body fat and redistribute them elsewhere. In the worst cases, the sufferer is left with ‘a buffalo hump’, a Quasimodo-like pad of fat on the back of the neck. At first, Lily thought only that she was losing weight. But the muscle tone in her face continued to fall away and the wastage travelled down to the top half of her torso. Her face changed shape and her cheeks caved in. Her eyes now appeared even bigger. She had lost her youthful bloom. She had always been tiny – at dances boys had called her Pocket Venus on account of her eighteen-inch waist – but now she looked ill. ‘[I] tried everything I could to put on weight … I didn’t have much success.’ It was a devastating and cruel illness, all the crueller for the time it chose to arrive. It was identified at the local hospital but the doctor was at a loss. He had no idea of its cause and even less idea of a treatment. He sent her away with an apologetic shrug. She stopped looking in the mirror and began padding out her bra. Marriage and a child could only boost her dented confidence.
On 1 June 1936, at eight in the morning, in a ceremony at Christ Church conducted by the Reverend Richard Ford, Lily’s name changed from Miller to Millar. All her early hope and ambition was now transferred to her future family. Her wedding dress was fitted at the waist with a simple A-line skirt to the floor. She wore a matching bolero jacket and a headband, and carried a large bunch of wild flowers. Etta wore a loose, sack-like bridesmaid’s dress. Sis wore black and a grimace while Papa spent the day pensive and unsmiling. Photographs were taken in Major Dees’s garden. There was no honeymoon and no big party. Lily went straight into married life, eleven grim years of it, beginning in Galashiels where Jock had a new job as a travelling grocer. His van was his freedom, a getaway car.
John Brebner Millar Junior arrived on 9 November 1936, shortly after Lily’s twentieth birthday. His birth was the most important event in her life so far and it marked the beginning of the end of her marriage. Jock felt trapped. He began returning home long after dark and sometimes not at all. In that first year Lily spent miserable hours pacing the streets of Galashiels looking for his van. Her plan had backfired. The apparent lack of love she had from her husband only intensified the love she gave to her baby. Brebner (they dropped the John) filled her every thought, and as soon as he began to walk she paraded him about in a miniature kilt and knee-high socks. A year into the marriage, Jock secured a job with a grocer’s store back in Duns. They found a small upstairs flat in a pokey house in Gourlays Wynd and moved back, where Sis was on hand to help and harm. Lily’s marriage difficulties quickly became family business. Now Jock and Lily quarrelled, Lily and Sis quarrelled, Sis and Jock quarrelled, and sometimes even Papa joined in. Jock felt as if everybody was against him and he was right. Very quickly the marriage descended into acts of spite and bitterness, each one outdoing the last. Lily would complain endlessly about his drinking – an echo of her mother’s preoccupation – and once even marched to the store where he worked and insisted to the manager that her husband was fiddling the books to fund his drink habit (a falsehood). In return Jock would tell her she was ugly and impossible to live with. Just when it looked as if things could get no worse, on 3 September 1939 Neville Chamberlain announced that Britain was at war with Germany.
Picking over the remains of a failed marriage is a near impossible task. All the atrocious acts, the resentments, and recriminations pile up, one on top of the other, so that in the end there is nothing left but a tangled and indiscernible mess. One thing is clear though. If the end of Lily’s marriage to Jock began in peacetime, war finished it for good. Had Jock gone away to war and returned alive, perhaps the trauma of separation and threat of fatality might have reignited their brief passion. There were conscientious objectors in the town who chewed tobacco before their medical to produce the symptoms of heart trouble or wore dark glasses to create the impression of poor, infected eyes, but Jock was declared medically unfit because of an earlier bout of rheumatic fever. He was sent to work in the boiler rooms of nearby Charterhall, one of two airfields in Berwickshire used by the RAF (the other was Whinfield, near Norham). His boilers served the quarters of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, so he had increased opportunities to stray.
The town began to fill up with evacuees from the Scottish cities, two of whom were housed in the back of Lily’s house in Gourlays Wynd. Army camps changed the Borders landscape. The largest was stationed at Stobbs in the countryside south of Hawick, holding more than 100,000 men. The camps in Duns were much smaller but they swelled the population overnight.
Now that Britain was at war, the rules that had governed Duns for so long relaxed a little. With so many of the men away fighting, some of the women began to seek alternative stimulation. This sudden sexual liberation started with the arrival of the men from the British Honduras, brought in by the Government to cut wood. They were forward in their ways – or forward by Duns standards – and soon women began to visit them in their camp at Affleck Plantation, on the Duns Castle Estate. There is an extensive file still in existence which details how many of the local women visited the camp in secret. This led to clashes between local men and the woodcutters and raids, during which women were found in the bunks. Their names and ages are listed in the file. Eventually, the camp was closed to prevent civil unrest.
On 1 April 1940, Lily gave birth to her second son, Andrew. Unlike with some of the other wives, there was no suggestion of impropriety (Duns today has a small percentage of mixed race adults, conceived during the period with the woodcutters). She was twenty-four, although photographs of her at the christening give the impression of a woman almost twice that age. Life had become rather a strain. The second baby did not bind Jock and her together but instead drove them further apart. Jock had taken a mistress, a WAAF he had met at work with whom he felt himself to be truly in love. This heady conviction only made him even more resentful of his wife. Lily leant constantly on Papa and Sis for support, regularly involving them in her battles with Jock so that he felt cornered, persecuted, and doubly justified in erring from course.
There was an unfortunate incident when Papa, who also worked at the boiler rooms, became directly involved in his son-in-law’s dalliances. Jock’s mistress misread Miller for Millar on the nightshift rota and dressed only in a raincoat, disrobed, and thrust herself onto the old man’s lap in naked glory. The next day Papa threw a punch at Jock, and they ended up struggling on the kitchen floor in a pool of water, having upended the kettle and knocked over pans, a grisly spectacle played out in front of Sis, Lily, and the children. The fight was probably the most unpleasant incident in the course of Lily’s marital breakdown, but the scraps over the tiniest matters were more exhausting and destructive. They argued violently about everything – even about how best to peel an orange.
In 1942 the town changed shape again. Two thousand soldiers from the First Polish Armoured Division arrived and were placed in another camp on the edge of the town. The Poles were every bit as alluring as the woodcutters. As they drove their tanks through the town, the officers played to the crowd. The dances continued at the town hall, but with blacked-out windows, and when the women passed them in the streets, all giggles and sly looks, the troops bowed and clicked their heels and made to kiss their hands. Some of the officers wore hairnets after washing their hair, and their cologne was considered very avant-garde. The women, particularly those who were single, gasped and swooned. While all this was unfolding, the older Duns men such as Papa, who were protective and even a mite jealous of the soldiers’ hold over the town’s women, sat around grumbling about how the tanks were smashing up their pavements.
At some stage during the war, certainly after Andrew’s birth, Lily fell ill. Doctors suspected that she had contracted tuberculosis. She was isolated immediately (no doubt to Jock’s infinite relief) in Gordon hospital, where she remained for five months, beset by self-pity. Brebner and Andrew went to live with Sis. It is perfectly true that for a young woman Lily had experienced a good deal of bad luck when it came to her health, but it must be stated that she applied a degree of drama to her suffering that would not have gone amiss in one of Mr Thomson’s school productions. In fact as an adult woman she had lost none of her childhood propensity for dramatising and displays of heightened emotion. So far as her health was concerned, her exaggerated sense of pain had started around the time of menstruation and developed to such a pitch that even Brebner, a four-year-old boy, dreaded her monthly cycle and the attendant crushing headaches of which she complained.
This latest health setback provided Sis with ample opportunity to get back into battle position and resume her recently challenged rule over her daughter’s life. When matron eventually returned Lily home, Lily was ill-equipped to fight Sis’s declaration that she was not physically fit enough to cope with her children and the stress of Jock. There was an element of truth in this. Lily would not allow Brebner to be taken from her – her bond with him was as intense as ever – but she acquiesced on the matter of Andrew. She told herself it was temporary. But the moment Andrew stepped out of her door and into Sis’s house, temporary became permanent. He never went back.
5 Happy Days Are Coming (#ulink_84c5c7da-2e8e-5995-81b7-c4677dc24dbd)
Randolph, about to turn eleven, had been a pupil at Belhaven for two years when war was declared. At first the school made only a few adjustments. Lights were lowered and the classroom windows were blacked out with heavy curtains. But there was another change, less perceptible to the human eye. The ethos of the school, with its severe and unbending determination to turn privileged young boys, soft and fresh from the nursery, into hard young men ready for such military schools as Harrow, strengthened further still. Mr Simms, the headmaster, made use of the icy winter weather by throwing open classroom windows during lessons. Often, the temperature dropped so severely that the boys could not help but plead for reprieve, to which Mr Simms would shout back, ‘Fusspots! If you enter the army or navy, you’ll have oodles of fresh air to contend with, no matter how cold you are!’
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 that Randolph ‘went to a private school for special coaching’). In a final flourish of despair, Mr Simms wrote in Randolph’s leaving report that he had driven him to the end of his tether. Another teacher added that Randolph would have to make more of an effort and keep his wits about him, and still another concluded that Randolph was extremely backward for his years and would have to learn to grow up. Randolph might well have been young for his years – he was thirteen – but that Christmas, the schoolmasters’ counsel did not prevent Lord Galloway from pressing ahead with his own programme of development. He presented Randolph with a gun, and soon after Randolph began to go shooting with Mr Malcolm Scott, the gamekeeper. By the end of the holiday, he was accompanying Lord Galloway on organised shoots at Larg. Much to everybody’s surprise, he showed signs of becoming a rather good shot.
Randolph’s enrolment at Chartridge Hill House marked an important change in his family’s approach to him. ‘Through psychological and psychiatric causes that term I had injections inflicted on me by Dr Johnson, the school’s Buckinghamshire doctor man,’ Randolph recorded.
Given Randolph’s perceived instability, it is most likely that Lord and Lady Galloway had decided that it was appropriate for him to be sedated, in order to curb his wild bouts of behaviour. Paraldehyde was the most used sedative in the first half of the twentieth century and could be easily administered by injection. It calmed patients down without impairing their intellectual capacity. But despite being under sedation, Randolph was to receive no soft handling. Lord Galloway instructed Mr Stafford Webber, Randolph’s new headmaster, to forbid him from spending too much time with his southern relatives. Lord Galloway explained that Randolph had become ‘spoiled, pampered and petted’ and that he was still in need of toughening up.
It had already been settled that Randolph would attend Harrow School, just as three generations of his family had done. His passage to the school that had produced Sir Winston Churchill, Lord Byron, and Lord Palmerston was predestined. The full weight of family history had been pointing him in that direction since birth. Virescit vulnere virtus was the family motto and he would simply have to rise to it. That he could not frustrated Randolph deeply, and it made him even more terrified of his father. As is so often the case when the weak are terrified of the strong, the very fear itself feeds the problem, causing paralysis in the former and even greater fury in the latter.
In June 1942 the dowager countess died. She was buried in the graveyard of All Saints’, Challoch, with the other Stewarts. A month later Randolph returned home from school and further irked his father. ‘I gorged and guzzled at my food to grossest excesses, and ate far too much for the parents’ conveniance [sic] and expense,’ he wrote, ‘The father man was truly disgusted at me, I was rude, discourteous, uncivil and impolite, not to mention greed [sic]’. Randolph’s healthy appetite for buttered rolls, chocolate biscuits, and cakes had always infuriated the late dowager, who had called it ‘vulgar and ungentlemanly’. Lord Galloway did not want to see a display of it either.
Three weeks after Randolph’s fourteenth birthday in October 1942, he sat the Common Entrance exam for Harrow. It was a formality since the school would never have turned him down (his results were predictably ‘abysmally low’, even though he was a little old compared to other candidates). Randolph’s inability to please his father was having a profound effect on his social development. ‘My personality was slowly going to pot,’ he wrote, ‘becoming ever entombed in guilt, with the ever encroaching festoons of gloom entwined about complexes and phobias which had me a spectre’s shadow before that term was up. The guilt was deep and intense, becoming ever more so. I gave up laughing, I dared not even smile, thinking both were wrong.’
If Randolph’s propensity for overeating bothered his father, it was about to flip the other way and develop into a much greater problem, one that would threaten Randolph’s physical wellbeing. Randolph’s self-imposed starvation diet – a sign if ever there was one of just how deep-rooted his unhappiness had become – began towards the end of his time at prep school. The masters and subsequently Lady Galloway were once more at a loss as to what to do with him. And yet it was in the midst of the starving and the not smiling or laughing, the growing inferiority complex and the terror of the war, that the plans were finalised for Randolph to begin at Harrow School in the Easter term of 1943.
The memory of the First World War hung over Harrow School like a spectre, but now the school buildings themselves were in danger. That Harrow, merged with Malvern School since the year before, had chosen to stay on the hill placed it at great risk, not of direct attack, but of German pilots losing their way or dropping excess loads after bombing London. Parents, sensing the immediate danger, had begun to withdraw their sons, so that between the summer of 1940 and January 1941 the numbers in the school fell by almost a quarter. During the Blitz in the autumn of 1940, for example, all the boys were transferred to overnight shelters, with separate daytime shelters, and on the night of 2 October, thirty-three school buildings were hit. The first incendiary bomb fell at the feet of the headmaster as he entered the ARP control station in the war memorial.
In his definitive account, A History of Harrow School 1324–1991, Christopher Tyerman writes of how the school had been devastated and consequently shaped by the losses it had sustained during the First World War. Of the 2,917 Harrovians who served, 690 were wounded and 644, including Keith Stewart, were killed. In 1939 at least the school itself had been better prepared. The headmaster, Paul Vellacott DSO, had fought in the First World War and been gassed and taken prisoner. Air-raid precaution planning and classes on air-raid protection had started two years before the Second World War was declared, and detailed plans for dispersing the school during the anticipated aerial bombardment were in place by September 1938 when gas masks were issued.
If Lord and Lady Galloway had any qualms about sending Randolph to a place of such high risk, they did not change course. When Randolph unpacked his bags in the Grove, the same boarding house in which the 10th Earl of Galloway had been placed in April 1848, his parents had effectively placed his safety in the hands of the Senior ARP warden, H. L. Harris. Harris, greatly skilled at his job, would prove deserving of Lord and Lady Galloway’s confidence, but there was no escaping the fact that bombing remained a serious threat to the school until the end of the war.
Randolph’s housemaster was Mr Leonard Henry, a Scot and a first-rate historian who had been at the school for twenty-five years and housemaster of the Grove since 1935. During the First World War he had served in the Inns of Court Officer’s Training Corps, from which he was invalided out. He was a classically educated intellectual of whom a former pupil wrote in the Harrovian, ‘Joined to [his] power of breathing life into the facts of history was a genius for asking questions of them; this impelled one to think.’
Would the spirit of Harrow and the influence of such a man inspire Randolph? Would he learn to think clearly? Discuss and debate ideas? Would he acquire high standards and methods of scholarship? He would not, but Lord Galloway was not prepared to give up hope. Before Randolph left Cumloden for Harrow, John Edgar, Lord Galloway’s head gardener, had taken him for a walk around the grounds and delivered a pep talk about how best to cope with boys tormenting and niggling him. It was a prophetic act of kindness. ‘On account of my phobias and complexes as to what I did or did not do,’ Randolph wrote, ‘I was conspicuous beyond all proportion, and therefore a bit of a drip.’
It defies belief that Lord Galloway could ever have imagined that Harrow in wartime could have done Randolph anything but harm. Beginning life at the school unsettled and disorientated even the healthiest and most stable of boys. One such fellow wrote about it in the Harrovian, under the headline ‘Random Impressions Of A New-Comer’. ‘It was pretty alarming coming here in September, and the latter part of the summer holidays was somewhat clouded by the prospect. My first impression was that all the boys were very big and all the buildings very ugly … I shan’t be sorry when I cease to be a new boy.’
Randolph was assigned a room with another boy, and they had had a view of the school chapel. The following day he joined the newcomers in the fourth form room where Mr Moore, the headmaster who replaced Paul Vellacott, lectured them on the school rules, including the tipping of hats to him or any females connected with the school. There were countless others, which amounted to making Randolph’s first week ‘utterly wretched’. The Harrow in which he found himself was a long way from its halcyon pre-war days. This was not a place of exaggerated happiness and sunshine, where boys lazed about in their boaters at gloriously sunny speech days with strawberries and cream for tea in the house garden, or raucous bathing in ‘Ducker’, buying chocolate on the way. Now the boys – sixth formers and new boys alike – spent much of their time underground in the air raid shelters fashioned out of the school’s cellars, where they would stay until dawn surrounded by a tangle of bedding. The school was blacked out, and its expenditure had been cut so that only essential purchases were made. The cars that had clogged the high street before 1939 were now barely a trickle. Sirens sounded constantly throughout the night and fire bombs scorched the roofs of the school buildings. ‘I seemed to live in a hypnotized world of fright, terror and extreme infidelity,’ Randolph wrote.
War and the threat of death and injury was everywhere. Each new issue of the Harrovian contained the roll of honour – as had been the case throughout the First World War – so the boys could read of the latest dead, the old boys missing, the prisoners of war, and the wounded. Most of the fresh intake of masters under Mr Moore had fought in the First World War, and were governed by the principles of bravery, patriotism, and honour.
The Corps continued with vigour. Randolph began Junior Training Corps two months after he arrived. On Wednesdays and Fridays he and the other younger boys changed out of their grey flannels and ‘bluers’ (the Harrovian word for blazers, which replaced tails for normal dress after the First World War) into a khaki army uniform. The boys marched off, guns on their right shoulders, to the parade ground where they continued marching under the orders of Harrow’s sergeant majors. As an antidote to this compulsory activity Randolph joined the chamber concert club. Those evenings, when he would sit among the audience gathered in the music school listening to Mozart and Beethoven, provided solace, albeit brief. He was much happier there.
In all other ways he was profoundly unhappy. As he wrote himself, he was deeply frightened by his environment, and to exist in a state of such high anxiety was extremely exhausting. He grew even weaker for his determination not to take food: ‘I never touched my share of butter and sugar and utterly disregarded and ignored my sweet coupons.’ Whenever English relatives arrived, bringing with them a lemon Madeira or a canary cake, a small pleasure amid the gloom that surrounded him, Randolph would give it away: ‘I was getting progressively thinner, weaker and paler, so the boys called me a rat and a worm, a drip and a twit, even a weed as my shoulders and cheeks hollowed with my immoderate fasting.’ While the school marched onwards in its own way, clearing unexploded bombs and keeping watch for enemy planes flying over the buildings, Randolph’s weight dropped to five stone. It was hardly the spirit of strength the masters were looking for. On Friday, 5 November 1943, the epitome of that spirit arrived in bodily form.
The Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, one of Harrow’s most famous old boys, descended on the school for what was the fourth of his by then annual visits. Mr and Mrs Moore held a reception for him in the Old Harrovians’ Room, after which he was entertained with a programme of Harrow songs in Speech Room. He then delivered his rousing speech to the school, intended to inspire future generations of soldiers. The path of the war was hard and long, he told them, with no fixed end. ‘However long, however hard, we shall go forward, and no one can tell at what moment the resistance of the enemy may break, but that is not our affair; that is theirs; that is for them.’ He talked of the great responsibility that awaited Britain when the moment of victory came, of the duty and the ‘burden of shaping the future’. Towards the end of his speech, Churchill delivered a message Randolph had heard countless times before, only spoken from different lips:
You young men here, some of you may be in the battlefields or in the high air, others will inherit, will be heirs of the victory which your elders and your parents have gained, and it will be for you to make sure that what has been achieved is not cast away either by the violence of passion or by apathy or by sheer stupidity. But let keen vision, courage, and humanity guide our steps so that it can be said of us that not only did our country do its duty in the war in a way which gained lasting honours, but that afterwards in the years of peace it showed wisdom, a poise and sincerity which contributed in no small degree to binding up the frightful wounds inflicted by the struggle.
In Randolph’s corner the rally cry fell on stony ground. It was not ‘the violence of passion’ or ‘apathy’ or ‘sheer stupidity’ that made him so incapable of stepping into the boots of his predecessors. It was more that the boots did not fit and were becoming more and more uncomfortable. Randolph’s fear of war intensified, with good reason. In the early hours of Ash Wednesday, 22 February 1944, the school suffered a disastrous raid. A bomb hit the Old Harrovians’ Room, where Churchill had been received three months earlier, and there were four fires in the east wing of the Old Schools. The chapel was hit, setting the canopy alight. The science schools, the Butler Museum and the school stores were all ablaze. The wooden ventilator on the roof of Headmaster’s (a boarding house) was set alight, too, and the flames were so strong that only firemen could put them out. The Grove was hit, as was Moreton’s and Malvern School House. While the boys remained below ground in their shelters, parties of masters tried to bring each blaze under control, while others combed the buildings looking for more bombs. A bomb on the chapel stalls burnt itself out and two bombs were found in the gymnasium. Bombs covered the five courts and one had blown a hole near the squash court.
Randolph was in a state of high agitation. The school itself, however, remained strong under threat. Typically, by 9 a.m. the next morning, the holes in the terrace lawn had been neatly turfed over so that there was no sign of the events of the night before. Unexploded bombs were being loaded into wheelbarrows, tarpaulin had been laid over part of the roof of the school stores, and the chancel cleared up. The boys were given an extra hour in bed and then lessons went on as usual.
The following month Lord Galloway arrived at Harrow and took Randolph out to tea. The school stores were not yet restored so they went to the King’s Head instead. Lord Galloway had been told of Randolph’s unpopularity – often at breakfast the boys in the Grove sniggered at him and said, ‘Give the weed some milk and sugar’ – and once again he wanted to try and make his son see sense. He lectured Randolph on the importance of being social and cheerful. ‘Does it matter?’ Randolph responded. ‘Yes, it does matter!’ replied Lord Galloway.
One advantage of Harrow was that after the first year every boy was given a room of his own, with a coal fire and a wooden bed which let down from the wall. The boys were allowed to furnish the rooms as they wished. It was a domestic improvement, but in Randolph there was no improvement at all. Towards the end of June, escorted by the Grove’s matron, Randolph boarded a train to London for a consultation with one of the many psychologists to feature in his life.
Cumloden continued to receive southern relatives. Lady Galloway’s sister arrived (she had been thrown to the ground by the fallout of a doodlebug) as did Mrs Francis Jolliffe Raitt and her sister, Aunt Agatha, an ancient lady who repulsed Randolph and had ‘the silver stubble of a greying beard beneath her ancient mouth’. After the war-torn landscape of suburban London, with its plumes of smoke and buildings with blown-out, charred windows, Cumloden during the holidays was an even greater relief. Randolph loathed the city – this never changed – and being able to walk through the deer park restored his spirits in a way his masters never could. Towards the end of the summer of 1944 Lord Galloway made an announcement. If he saw no improvement in Randolph’s attitude, he would be leaving the school at Christmas. Nothing could have pleased Randolph more. As the new chauffeur drove him out of the gates in the family Rolls, headed for the station, the gamekeeper appeared from the front lodge and cried after him ‘Good luck Lord Garlies!’
‘I was ill at ease, upset and unhappy,’ Randolph wrote of his return. That term he began seeing a psychologist in south Harrow. He was getting used to being asked questions by strange doctors, and he made his way to his first appointment in the slashing rain on his own. He returned dazed (in his memoirs there is no explanation of why this was; perhaps he had been medicated). He then began to wander about in a disorientated fashion, alarming matron. The sirens continued to sound. Randolph sheared off his eyebrows with a pair of scissors, creating for himself a most curious expression: ‘Harrow boys noticed that I had discarded my eyebrows, how silly I looked …’ He also became obsessed with having his hair cut at the local barber’s; he deliberately sat on the lavatory – ‘the throne’ – back to front; and when faced with normal chairs, he perched on their edges with a poker-straight back, a peculiarity that made it into his school report and which Lord Galloway observed ‘must be awfully uncomfortable’. Two days after Randolph’s sixteenth birthday, he went back to the psychologist: ‘I told him exactly how I felt, that I was being spied upon and watched, followed and criticized by members of the school, especially boys.’
One of Harrow’s master’s, Sergeant Major Robert Banks, who clearly had a poor grasp of Randolph’s emotional state, told him that if he wished to join the army, he would have to tighten his shoe straps and behave the way any normal recruit would behave. Then on 1 December, Sir Winston Churchill arrived at the school again to deliver his fifth wartime speech, reminding Randolph once more of all his failings:
Now that we are marching into a period of great stress, of difficulty, now that you will go forward into a world where the problems will be made greater by the victories which have been and will be won, where duty will become more compulsive because of the need to live up to what has happened in the past, now at this time, I say, you give to me, by your voices and by your aspect, that feeling that there will never lack a youth of Britain capable of facing, enduring, conquering everything in the name of freedom and for the sake of their dear, loved native land.
Confirmation that he was leaving Harrow came at the beginning of December in a letter from his father. In the New Year Randolph would go to live at The Rough, the Surrey residence of Lord Galloway’s relative, Shane Randolph Chichester. There, it had been decided, as Randolph recorded later, he would ‘do navvying manual jobs … to overcome this sensation of inferiority complex’. His health had become the concern of the whole family. Even Randolph’s kind Aunt Catherine, who came to visit, gave him a talk about how he should focus on being an asset in life.
‘On Tuesday 12th December before dark, I had my last appointment with Dr Wilson on psychological matters,’ Randolph writes of his last week at Harrow. These last days were ‘all eaten up in the misery of unpopularity and mocking, humiliating ridicule’, but tinged with not an ounce of regret. Randolph tried to keep his departure a secret, but it somehow got out and the boys began taunting him that it was because he was stupid. At Christmas, he left, weighing 5st 11lb and three-quarters, bound for home.
Back at Cumloden his failings became increasingly domestic. The day after he arrived Lady Galloway gave him a talk, but it was to no avail. He showed himself up in the dining room and was considered ‘rude, discourteous and impolite’. On another occasion, he attempted to sweep some crumbs off the table using the floor broom. ‘In a gentleman’s house,’ Lord Galloway said, ‘one does not use the dirty brushes of servants on one’s dinner table.’
Randolph says today that everything his family did, every decision they made regarding his future, was always in the hope that it would bring about some kind of change in his personality. It is impossible to know whether that frightened, weak little boy at Harrow forgave them for this or indeed whether, at this stage, there was anything to forgive. How many parents of their generation and class would not have wanted to mould their heir for future responsibilities? Was their treatment of him simply a display of disciplined, responsible, illiberal parenting? That Lord and Lady Galloway came to rely on a string of expensive London psychiatrists shows how desperate they were becoming. There can be no doubt that Randolph’s difficulties were as hard for them to bear as for Randolph. But their desperation would eventually lead them to make a decision with far more destructive consequences than a pair of lost eyebrows.
For now, fresh hope was invested in the influence of Shane and Madelaine Chichester. As planned, on 9 February 1945, Randolph left Scotland for Farnham Station and life at The Rough. Ten days later, Shane Chichester delivered his first homily: ‘[we] discussed my psychological situation, concerning the unnecessary phobias and complexes which had bugged me. I then had a low opinion of myself yet I was too proud and conceited to accept any criticism. Concentration, that of mine was another thing which worried Shane Randolph Chichester, and when people asked me questions I too often remained silent.’
At the beginning of March Shane gave Randolph a prompt card on which he had written his pearls of wisdom:
1. There are no reasons for fear
2. Happy days are coming
3. The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth
4. Possunt quia posse videnta [sic] – They can because they think they can
5. I shall pause and think before answering questions, then answer frankly
6. I can do all the things through Christ who strengtheneth me. Get into the stride of saying I can.
While Shane continued in his subtle and kindly efforts to correct Randolph’s personality, a specialist in psychology and psychiatry began visiting the house. Poor Cousin Shane was continually tried: ‘I entered the dining-room to pull down my brows at Shane … who then told me that he did not want to see a dark frown but a nice bright smile on my ugly face. I continued both to under and to overestimate myself.’
On V-E Day, 8 May, which Randolph describes as ‘a day of magic’, he was still at The Rough. Bolstered by the news, he moved his bed so he could lie on a platform outside his bedroom window and look up at the stars. By that August, when war ended with Japan, peace was finally restored to Britain. If only Randolph’s life could have been as hopeful. Two months after Britain’s victory he left The Rough accompanied by Lord and Lady Galloway. They were headed back to Scotland via London. Randolph was to spend a few days ‘with family and psycho-annalists’, a slip of the pen that reminds us how much Randolph’s future medical treatment would reveal about the annals of psychiatry.
6 Becoming Mrs Budge (#ulink_7f6f6c19-9285-5c64-b88f-25662ec9032f)
‘By the end of the war I … had lost my husband, not in the horrors of war but to another woman in the Forces,’ wrote Lily of peacetime. Her marriage to Jock, having limped through the war years, now gave up the fight. Jock eventually left her for his mistress. Bad luck had also struck Rose. Two years after Lily gave birth to Brebner, Rose, at the age of twenty, gave birth to a baby girl called Ann, an event shortly followed by the disappearance of her husband. She married again, only to find that her new husband liked to drink. She had produced two more children (his), and the family was living in near squalor in a flat by the docks in Leith, then one of the most dangerous and run-down areas of Edinburgh. Only Etta, harbouring no ambitions to leave Duns or escape her life of domestic service, gave Sis any hope. Out of the blue she announced her intention to marry a quiet and gentle shepherd, employed on a nearby farm called Blackerston. Following the wedding, she joined him in his quarters, a wing of The Retreat, a large, round hunting lodge and, just when Sis and Lily had ruled out the possibility of Etta producing a family of her own, in 1947 she announced that, at the age of thirty-seven, she was pregnant. Nine months later she delivered a girl, also called Anne. (If there was a compensation for Etta’s comparatively uneventful existence in Duns it was that she remained married to the same man until she went to her grave.)
Lily’s single status sustained the Duns gossips, not least because another woman was involved. But Lily shrugged off the talk. Her godchild, May Millar (no relation but the daughter of Sis’s friend), then an impressionable child at Duns Primary, remembers being struck by how her godmother seemed wholly indifferent to what people were saying behind her back. She thought that this was either because Lily would not have wasted her energy on the opinions of those who did not know her, or because fresh problems had presented themselves on Jock’s departure. Money worries loomed and they consumed Lily’s waking hours. She did not expect, nor did she receive, any financial help from Jock. This left her with the sole responsibility of bringing up the boys, added to which was the worry over Andrew’s health (he had contracted scarlet fever). Sis and Papa were ‘wonderful’, Lily later recalled – ‘the only financial support I had was from them’ – but their donations could only stretch so far and it became apparent that Lily would need to find a full-time job.
Lily later wrote, ‘with a sad heart I made my way to the city’, but it must be stressed that once again her sadness was not at leaving Duns – after all, it held nothing for her any more, if it ever had – it was much more to do with Sis’s insistence that Andrew stay behind. His ear had been perforated and he was now partially deaf. He was also weak from the aftermath of his illness. As Lily observed, ‘They were still young enough to look after him and give him the extra care he needed.’ It was a decision made with his best interests at heart, but the consequences were to reverberate for years. Andrew was seven and broken-hearted. His father, as he saw it, appeared not to love him – he once shooed him away from Gourlays Wynd as if he were a stray – and now he was being left with his grandmother, who terrified him to the point of making him mute. The child adored his mother and could hardly bear the thought of her disappearing off for a new life with Brebner. But Andrew was a soft, delicate child, prone to tears, and he quietly accepted the situation. Brebner, on the other hand, created a scene. He wanted nothing more than to stay behind with his friends. As a result each looked to the other as having secured the better deal and this jealousy and resentment forced them further apart. (It was to last well into their adult years, when slowly they discovered they liked and then loved each other very much.)
Lily and Brebner arrived in Edinburgh in the spring of 1947, the inaugural year of the Edinburgh International Festival, conceived by Sir Rudolf Byng, conductor of the Glyndebourne Opera, as an optimistic and defiant response to Nazism. The plan was that she and Brebner would stay with Rose in Leith until they were on their feet. On this occasion Sis was right. A grim scene awaited them. Lily was completely unaware of the conditions in which Rose lived. As she walked up the stairwell she saw a mouse, which she thought a bad sign. She peered into the apartment with increasing dread. The walls flaked from damp and many of the floorboards were rotten or splintered. The flat had three rooms – a sitting area, a bedroom, and a kitchen, with a communal lavatory.
That night Brebner was given the sofa and Lily slept on the floor beside the cockroaches. The next morning she determined to find herself a domestic job that would get them out. She was, of course, returning to a profession she loathed, but servants were in demand after the war and needs must. By nightfall she had secured a position as a housekeeper in a large Victorian boarding house in Cluny Gardens, in the bourgeois and respectable area of Morningside, her accommodation provided. She returned to the tenement, collected Brebner and that night they slept in their new basement flat. She began her duties the next day, cleaning a house full of unappreciative students. It was an exhausting, soulless job, but it promised a modicum of stability. Brebner was enrolled in the local school, and just as their lives appeared to be acquiring a rhythm, an incident occurred that led to her tendering her notice.
It is important here to remember Lily’s propensity to over-dramatise, but then the ‘episode’ is odd enough that one wonders how she could have made it up. A student boarder had, apparently, wantonly dropped his trousers and undergarments while she was dusting. Lily’s reaction to this absurd display of masculinity (or lack of it) is telling. For all Lily’s efforts to widen her horizons, there was still a streak of the Duns prude in her. She could not possibly stay on in Cluny Gardens following such an assault on her dignity, no matter how much trouble it caused her. And so off they went again, this time to the Hotel Marina on Inverleith Row, which was managed by a one-armed man. She did not stay there long – for unknown reasons – and they then moved on to lodgings in Hillside Street, where they lived while she worked in a snack bar in the city centre, frying up eggs and bacon.
The year that followed was the most itinerant of Lily’s life. She was constantly moving in and out of jobs as she changed her mind about what was best for Brebner. She could not settle. Edinburgh then was a city of absolute contrasts – the rich and the poor, the New Town and the Old Town. The divisions and distinctions were there even in the architecture of elegant sweeping crescents and squares beside tenements black with soot. While serving up plates of food heavy with grease, she clung to her dream that Brebner would have the chance of a different kind of life. With each trying experience, the bond between them could only intensify. Andrew would later remember, poignantly, ‘She loved me, of course, I always felt that, but Brebner was number one son. She adored him. You only had to watch her face when she looked at him.’ Lily felt their connection was spiritual. Once when Brebner fell and split his head on the pavement, she recalled that ‘the pain was so intense with me, at the same moment, that I couldn’t see for a second or two’. On another occasion, when he was knocked down by a taxi, she maintained she felt a sharp pain across her chest. ‘I knew he was in trouble but could hardly breathe,’ she wrote, ‘and a few minutes later he was carried into the house, he had bruises and his ribs were broken, the doctor had to strap my ribs up too, we recovered together.’ One imagines the doctor was startled when asked to bandage Lily up, but the idea that she might have appeared comical, eccentric, absurd even, would not have occurred to her. Her feelings did not exist in half measure and for the most part she was quite unable or unwilling to keep her instincts and impulses in check.
With all the toing and froing Brebner fell behind with his schooling. When the results of his eleven plus examination were announced, Lily saw with dismay that he had failed, which brought back the memory of her own childhood disappointment. She understood immediately that if she did not take action, Brebner was in grave danger of treading her path. She had no intention of sending him to Darroch, a secondary modern, which she called the ‘the drop-out school’. Instead she enrolled him in Trinity Academy, a semi-private school. Because she could not stretch to the uniform, she joined a warehouse clothes club that offered, for a weekly hire purchase charge of five shillings, £10 worth of clothing, which covered his blazer, cap, and tie.
Lily always had an atrocious grasp of finances and her first financial embarrassment remains murky, probably because it was murky even to her. What is clear is that she overstretched herself by moving from the lodgings in Hillside Street to a flat in Leith, which, with Sis’s and Papa’s help, she hoped to buy, probably through the services of a loan shark. Sis was now as sturdy and squat as a little ox. Her face had fattened and slackened and on the end of her nose sat round, black-rimmed spectacles. Her breasts had grown to an enormous size and drooped towards her waist so that there was a balcony effect dominating the top half of her frame over which clothes strained at their fastenings. She paced about in comfortable shoes and carried her handbag tucked under her left arm, which she kept stiff at a right angle to her body. She still cooked mutton stew over the fire and gossiped in the town square. Papa, on the other hand, was as thin and wiry as ever, so that together they looked like Jack Spratt and his wife. For all Sis’s instincts to control and dominate – now regularly exercised on her grandson – and for all Papa’s inertia, they remained loyal and willing to help. Recognising Lily’s need for security, Sis and Papa gamely provided her with a deposit. Suffice it to say, the scheme went wrong. Lily could not keep up the payments, and the bailiffs arrived to carry away every piece of furniture for which she’d saved. Brebner, sleeping on balls of their clothes, contracted nephritis.
Lily had no desire to return to Duns, but Sis’s support had always come at a price. She made her feelings clear and within a few days Lily and Brebner were on a train heading towards the Berwickshire coastline. In 1949 the Millers were living in the top part of a terrace in Gourlays Wynd, bought by Sis’s brother, Jock. There were Sis, Papa, Andrew, Jock, and his brother Jim. Two years of power struggles ensued. Brebner and Andrew fought constantly, but the real battle raged between Lily and Sis.
The problem was not a new one. Sis persisted in treating Lily as though she were a child, incapable of making decisions about her life. Given the disasters that had occurred since Lily had left home, and the fact that Lily had, when it suited her, fallen back into the parental safety net, Sis had some justification in assuming Lily needed her guidance. Her failure, though, was her approach. She lacked the skills of tact or diplomacy and so her suggestions, however well-meant, were always delivered as orders. Lily felt cramped and stifled, and this fresh exposure to her mother’s domineering nature reignited all the resentments she had felt during her childhood. Had these quarrels been purely personal, a simple clash of personality, perhaps they would not have been so fierce, but what truly fanned the flames was that they often erupted over matters concerning the children. Sis had been raising infants from the age of nine and this, she believed, gave her the upper hand. There was also the indisputable fact that when it had suited Lily, she had been quite willing to leave Andrew in Duns in her mother’s care. Sis was right about this, at least. But there was no getting round the fact that Sis’s way of child rearing repulsed Lily. She was horrified by the idea of physical punishment (Sis once beat Andrew with a bunch of rhubarb), and rather than toughen her boys up, she preferred instead to demonstrate her affection. She liked to embrace them and kiss them and tell them how much they were loved. There is no doubt that Brebner was overindulged, and that Lily was endlessly overcompensating for the fact that the boys did not have a father or any semblance of family security. But beyond these unconscious motivations, Lily had discerned from her own childhood that children needed affection.
If anything could have driven Sis and Lily even further apart, it was the issue of Brebner’s education. Sis could not imagine him remaining at school beyond an age when it was compulsory. Did Lily not understand he had a duty to contribute to the household? Was she quite mad? Lily saw red on this issue – in fact she possessed no more powers of diplomacy or tact than her mother. Her boy would not face the same indignities as she had. She was going to provide him with a proper education. During the rows that followed, Jock and Jim were monosyllabic and unfriendly, and the boys continued to fight like tomcats, biting and pinching after dark and bloodying each other’s noses.
Life became intolerable. Lily decided to return to Edinburgh, this time for good. She had earnt her keep in Duns by housekeeping and by now had occupied a string of positions. These enabled her to secure a good post before she left. In 1951, she packed her bags and Brebner’s – but not Andrew’s – and boarded the train for Waverley Station. This time, the circumstances of her arrival were more ordered. She stood outside 42 Blacket Place, a large Georgian house in a sweeping crescent south of Princes Street, and pinched herself. She was to become housekeeper for the McIntosh family. Professor Angus McIntosh was Chair of English Language and General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. Lily’s service flat was once again in the basement.
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