For all the joyful innocence of the nursery, the picnics and the toys and the parties, Cumloden remained a formal household. Lord Galloway believed in the same values as his own father and his approach to child rearing was rigid and unbending. It was not an atmosphere suited to an increasingly odd and eccentric little boy. In 1935, for example, Randolph threw a tantrum at the news that a newly appointed governess would shortly be arriving in the schoolroom. Poor Miss Daisy Cook, who appeared armed with milk of magnesia and syrup of figs. ‘Tears of wretched despair … and dejected despondency adorned my face in the schoolroom, when writing Christmas letters of thanks,’ Randolph recorded. ‘Miss Daisy Cook was not amused by my attitude.’
Randolph was not a good student and when he did badly, he would sob or scream, which would have Miss Cook shouting back at him to bring himself under control. Other staff began to notice his oddities. On one occasion, following a telling off by the dowager countess, he displayed more peculiarity, fussing about and breaking wind (a habit that he never thought to control). ‘I was swiftly removed by Mother to the schoolroom,’ he wrote, ‘wherein I became aggressive and threatened Winnifred [school-room servant] on her approach.’ Mr Leashman, the butler, witnessed the incident and was ‘deeply shocked’. But Randolph did not apologise for his behaviour. He broke wind again, which had the effect of ‘bringing a dark frown to the butler’s face’.
Randolph’s eccentric behaviour was not confined to Cumloden. Reports would often drift back from outings with other children, and events would often occur at house parties that confirmed he was unlike the other boys. During one house party in June 1934, the housekeeper took the children to the coast of North Berwick (not far from where Lily lived). Randolph ran away and everybody got soaked in the rain while they looked for him. During one stay at Sandridgebury, the children were taken to a private tea party by their aunt. Randolph had promised to behave, but once there he found it impossible to rise to the challenge. He muddled up the names of all the guests – understandable in an eight-year-old child – but then went on to insult the host, Mr Parr, by telling him that his study smelt of rats and tobacco. ‘It may smell of tobacco, Garlies,’ said the surprised Mr Parr, ‘but it does not smell of rats!’ To which Randolph had rudely retorted, ‘Yes, it smells of tobacco and rats, and is the smelliest house I have ever been in!’ Throughout the rest of the tea, Randolph continued to break wind, which had his aunt slowly dying of shame. Back at Sandridgebury she told him that never in her life had she been so mortified. ‘Signorita’, who helped with the children when they stayed, told him wisely, ‘If you do this at school, teacher will come and put you in the lavatory!’
These minor acts of bad behaviour only make sense in retrospect. At the time the puzzled Lord and Lady Galloway consoled themselves that their son would change with age. What he needed was to grow and toughen up. What he needed was the discipline of prep school. There he was sure to metamorphosise from cry-baby into a proper boy possessed of a dignity befitting his title, and a spirit strong enough for the future challenges of Harrow School. In the summer of 1937, before Randolph was due to start at Belhaven Hill School in Dunbar, the headmaster, Mr Brian Simms, came to Cumloden for lunch. Randolph was petrified and thought him horrid. He did not like the way he ‘fixed [him] with a cold and hard eye across the dining table’.
That September Randolph left Sandridgebury with his mother and father. They were met at St Pancras station by the dowager countess and together they travelled to King’s Cross in order to catch the train back to Scotland. Randolph’s behaviour during the journey was not encouraging. When a locomotive blew its steam, he began screaming. Lady Galloway became angry and told him to stop being so babyish. Once on board the train his behaviour changed completely and he became jolly, babbling a list of nonsensical words that his mother sweetly wrote down on some notepaper for him. They spent the night of the twenty-eighth in the North British Hotel in Edinburgh (to become the Balmoral). Randolph was ‘as potty as ever, making the craziest of noises’, and smelling and blowing his sweet wrappers. The following day they travelled to Dunbar where Lord and Lady Galloway delivered Randolph to Belhaven for the beginning of Michaelmas Term. As they disappeared down the drive, he stood watching them from the front porch. For the first time in his life, he was alone, about to begin a new phase of his life under ‘the iron rule of Mr Brian Sims [sic]’.
‘I hated it.’ This was Lily’s verdict on her new life of subservience. The first time she stood before a mirror dressed in her afternoon uniform, a black alpaca dress with muslin apron, starched cuffs, and cap, she felt a surge of disgust. She wanted to rip the dress from her back and throw it on the fire. ‘I will not be a poor little servant girl! I will not!’ Less than four years had passed since Alice Brockie had made her passionate playground declaration. Alice was now doing well at Berwickshire High, well on her way to escape. The same could not be said for Lily.
The household Sis found for her was on the other side of Duns. It was a large square, double-fronted home with steps leading up to a porch, on either side of which stood two mock Roman pillars. The ostentation was ominous. Her new employers (Lily refused to speak of them by name, referring to them only as ‘they’) were middle-class professionals, and her mistress, Lily soon saw, liked to maintain a lavish shop front when perhaps stocks were not as high as they might have been. ‘There always seemed to be so much silver on the table, but to me very little food,’ Lily wrote. That first day she was led up the back stairs to a tiny maid’s room. The floor was bare and the bed coffin-like in its dimensions, topped with a lumpy flock mattress. Companionship presented itself in the form of a ferocious-looking old cook and a whiskery gardener. Her duties consisted of all that could not be cooked or weeded. She was to clean, tidy, clear the grates, and manage the laundry. All cleaning had to be completed by the time her mistress rose for breakfast, which meant beginning at 5 a.m., and certain rooms were forbidden her, except if she had work to do. She had to keep to the back staircase, and never use the main. She could not wear rouge or have boys loitering about, although this was not such a hardship – she was only fourteen.
Although Lily was already tall, taller than Rose and Etta, she was still a child, not yet built for the physical labour expected of her. Life was now dominated by loneliness and hunger. Had she been sent to a large estate, she would at least have experienced the hierarchical but friendly bustle of life below stairs as well as the relief of regular, sustaining meals. Instead she grew paler and thinner and her hands began to crack. When she was not working she would lie on her bed in the attic and fantasise about ways of making Sis see sense, but we have her word that Sis ‘turned a deaf ear’ to this misery. When Lily made her weekly pilgrimage to North Street, she went straight to ‘my beloved Hannah’, who sympathised but, like Papa, wisely refrained from facing Sis head on.
In time Rose and Lily would prove themselves extremely adept at bolting from Duns. For now, Lily tried to please her mother and her mistress, and wrote later, ‘Although I wasn’t happy, I did my job properly, in fact, they called me Miss Tidy, no one could find anything after I had tidied a room.’ And yet she possessed an instinctive independence that prevented her from accepting her prescribed lot, a tension that was always to complicate her life. Her compliance was short lived. ‘With help from no one,’ she wrote later, ‘I took the initiative and ran away.’ It was 4 a.m. when she climbed out of a window. ‘But’, she added, ‘I hadn’t used much imagination.’ She reached North Street by dawn and no sooner had she knocked on the door and encountered Sis’s fury than she was walking the same road back. Her mistress took her back because of her age, her insecurity, and, no doubt, because she was cheap. A week later Lily bolted again, this time with the hope of travelling to London. She left in daylight, by the same downstairs window, and