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,