LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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