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.
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