Louise Carpenter - An Unlikely Countess - Lily Budge and the 13th Earl of Galloway

Rose had long since left for Edinburgh, where she was busy making her own mistakes with men. Etta, on the other hand, heading for confirmed spinsterhood and growing ever more homely and cosy, was deeply shocked by Lily’s news. Paradoxically she did the most to spread it around, reasoning that scandal was best heard from source. It was a choppy time and somewhere in its midst Jock decided to do the decent thing. Lily was thrilled but we can be less sure of Jock’s true feelings.

Meanwhile Lily had lost her looks, almost overnight. By the time her wedding day arrived, she was gaunt and skeletal. The cause was lipodystrophy, a little-known syndrome that can cause fat deposits or strip areas of body fat and redistribute them elsewhere. In the worst cases, the sufferer is left with ‘a buffalo hump’, a Quasimodo-like pad of fat on the back of the neck. At first, Lily thought only that she was losing weight. But the muscle tone in her face continued to fall away and the wastage travelled down to the top half of her torso. Her face changed shape and her cheeks caved in. Her eyes now appeared even bigger. She had lost her youthful bloom. She had always been tiny – at dances boys had called her Pocket Venus on account of her eighteen-inch waist – but now she looked ill. ‘[I] tried everything I could to put on weight … I didn’t have much success.’ It was a devastating and cruel illness, all the crueller for the time it chose to arrive. It was identified at the local hospital but the doctor was at a loss. He had no idea of its cause and even less idea of a treatment. He sent her away with an apologetic shrug. She stopped looking in the mirror and began padding out her bra. Marriage and a child could only boost her dented confidence.

On 1 June 1936, at eight in the morning, in a ceremony at Christ Church conducted by the Reverend Richard Ford, Lily’s name changed from Miller to Millar. All her early hope and ambition was now transferred to her future family. Her wedding dress was fitted at the waist with a simple A-line skirt to the floor. She wore a matching bolero jacket and a headband, and carried a large bunch of wild flowers. Etta wore a loose, sack-like bridesmaid’s dress. Sis wore black and a grimace while Papa spent the day pensive and unsmiling. Photographs were taken in Major Dees’s garden. There was no honeymoon and no big party. Lily went straight into married life, eleven grim years of it, beginning in Galashiels where Jock had a new job as a travelling grocer. His van was his freedom, a getaway car.

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.