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),