One of the most exciting aspects of any Port Eliot Festival line-up for the dovegreyreader tent is the book that has completely passed me by...and I hope Louise Carpenter won't mind me saying that about hers.
Published in 2004, An Unlikely Countess Lily Budge and the 13th Earl of Galloway...my sort of book exactly and yet somehow I had missed it. In fact this 'missing the good books' was one of the reasons I started writing dovegreyreader scribbles in the first place. I was struggling to find them and this was a chance to start exploring and sharing it all, because how exactly was a person to know what was out there.
Catherine St Germans suggested I might like to talk to Louise, so I scurried off to buy the book and see what I thought.
Over two lovely long and relaxing reading days in the garden I met Lily May Miller, born to a working-class family in 1916 in the Borders town of Duns. Life was tough and uncompromising and a life in service beckoned for Lily until she met and married Jock Millar in 1936. Jock a wayward philanderer, and it was never going to end well; two babies later and he was off leaving Lily penniless and eventually homeless.
Meanwhile on October 14th 1928, to the Count and Countess of Galloway, a first-born son Randolph Keith Reginald Stewart. Important enough to receive a mention in The Times Court Circular the next day...
The Court Circular interesting in itself for its relentless tracking of the whereabouts of the aristocracy, and when Randolph is taken back to the family seat at Cumloden (I kept reading that as Culloden, with good reason in the end...battles will follow) in Kircudbrightshire (ker-koo-bree-shire for anyone not from these shores) in Scotland, hopes were high for the future of this son and heir. Imagine his parents horror when Randolph emerges as an eccentric and wayward child ill-suited to the conformities of aristocratic life. I suspect we would now place him somewhere on the autistic spectrum, but with no knowledge of how best to help him, and eventually at their wit's end and fearful of their difficult son, his family pursue some drastic and brutal treatments for him culminating in a lobotomy.
It is hard to countenance now but Louise Carpenter explores this very evenly, placing it in the context of the times... Randolph a tragedy to be managed not spoken of, but I wanted to weep for him all the same.
As the chapters in the book alternate between the lives of Lily, now Mrs Budge and married to Jimmy, a man who 'looked like Fred Astaire only after too much dancing,' and Randolph's prolonged incarceration with the monks in the Monastrey of the Transfiguration in Roslin... I kept turning the pages on these lives that would eventually converge.
Lily along the way to that first meeting with Randolph on a Church pilgrimage in 1976 will have been variously the owner of a children's nursery and animal sanctuary, a relief bar manager, an antique dealer, she will have adopted a child with learning difficulties, turned her house into a hotel and proved herself to be indomitable, fearless, feisty, kind-hearted, caring, good to a fault perhaps, surprisingly sensible and pragmatic, and always capable of brushing herself off and starting over, but Lily is emotionally needy too and her need to be needed will be forever apparent.
When Lily meets Randolph and sees him as a 'bird with a broken wing,'...well can you see what will happen next...
And can you see why I was riveted to the garden chair.
I really don't want to tell you any more because to do so would be to recount some of the best bits of the book, about Lily and Randolph's life together...
And Lord Galloway, Randolph's father's reaction to the union...
And the complex and tortuous paths that all these intertwined lives will take...
And will Randolph ever take his seat in the House of Lords with Lily in the wings...
Suffice to say Lily, twelve years older than Randolph, died in 1999 as perhaps the most unlikely Countess of Galloway there could ever have been, Randolph lives on in sheltered accommodation and Louise plans to visit him again before the event at Port Eliot so will be able to update us. But what a superb story this is and with what skill has Louise Carpenter told it. Quite a few of Team dovegrey have now read and absolutely loved the book prior to Louise's visit to the tent (Happy Campers, Fran H-B and Knit Angel all in rave mode over this one) and we are all bursting with questions. It should be a great event (Saturday July 26th 10.30am) and of course we will report back in full...with pictures.
Footnote : Good news. Though the book had been out of print for some time there are now (or were!) a good number of copies on You Know Where. But even more exciting...my suggestion to Louise that An Unlikely Countess most certainly deserved a second outing, and could we please have a Kindle version, has not fallen on deaf ears. Kindle version in the pipeline and ready soon.
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