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.’
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