Tall Chimneys: A British Family Saga Spanning 100 Years

by Allie Cresswell

  I gasped, and took a step backwards, momentarily alarmed - I didn’t recognise him at first and took him for an itinerant. But then I saw his eyes - unchanged - and my apprehension turned immediately to relief. I don’t think I had realised how deep the well of my loneliness had been during his absence, but it surged up, now, and threatened to overwhelm me. I must have made some sort of gesture - perhaps I held my arms out, I’m not sure - I know my eyes filled with tears. My face must have revealed the full story. Kenneth got to his feet with his face firmly averted and left the kitchen, leaving his tools scattered over the hearth. Rose likewise made herself scarce. John stepped across the flagstone floor of the kitchen and took me in his arms.

  Much later, in bed, I nestled into the crook of his arm. Between us the swell of my stomach was perfectly accommodated in the curve of his side, as if someone had designed it to be so; we were a fit, as we always had been, as we always would be. He had looked at my body with a raised eyebrow, and made no comment, speaking, instead of friends he had made in Germany which included, coincidentally, Diana Mitford, Oswald Mosley’s long-term mistress.

  ‘Everyone has a secret life,’ he had said, pointedly.

  ‘And some not so secret,’ I’d agreed. ‘Did I tell you the King and Mrs Simpson came here?’ I went on to talk about Colin’s visit at Easter, the men who had come, my talk with Mrs Simpson, about Rose and Kenneth, and my new-found skill of bicycle-riding.

  Afterwards we made love again, and in the aftermath I put my hand to his beard and cupped his emaciated face.

  ‘You look like an old testament prophet,’ I told him.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I was ill for a while - ‘flu, and then a chest infection. It’s what delayed my return.’ He turned slightly and tilted my face up to his. ‘But I prophecy this: a baby, at Christmas.’

  ‘Well that’s a novel idea,’ I joked. ‘I wonder if it will catch on.’

  ‘Evelyn,’ he cautioned.

  I looked up at him, chastened and beset by quandary. There was no possible way the baby could be his, and he must have known it. The last thing I wanted him to do was to imagine he had a rival. On the other hand, to confess the truth would have been mortifying. ‘Yes,’ I said, at last. ‘At Christmas, or just afterwards.’

  ‘Very good,’ was all he said. And then, in the morning, ‘We will drive to town today, and see a doctor. And I think there will be no more bicycle-riding for you.’

  The autumn and winter of 1936 were momentous, both in the sequestered hollow of Tall Chimneys and out in the wider world. In October John heard through an acquaintance he had made in Berlin that Oswald Mosley had married Diana Mitford at a ceremony in Germany attended by the German Chancellor Adolf Hitler.[9] The regularisation of this socially non-conformist liaison gave me pause for thought; that they had felt it necessary, these two who had both made careers out of challenging the status quo. My general understanding of the outside world was that it was increasingly anarchic and chaotic; old norms clung on by their finger-nails and hardly anyone paid them more than lip-service. As far as my personal circumstances were concerned, I had stopped hoping to be able to marry John; as much as I might feel like he belonged to me, the fact was I was the marriage-wrecker, the interloper, and the law would never be on my side. And I was carrying another man’s child. I had put myself beyond any shade of pale - social, religious, moral - which might still exist. The certainty of it - and the brazen swell of my stomach - made me oddly reckless, careless of social opinion even amongst the villagers and people of the little market town where I was now frequently to be seen in the shops and the library.

  Some of the WI women had been less than kind about my pregnancy until a coalition of Rose, her mother, the redoubtable Mrs Greene and Patricia Coombes had silenced them all. Kenneth said nothing, either in congratulation or in condemnation, but I sensed disapproval, or, perhaps something even more - disappointment. From comparative loquaciousness - five or six sentences - he regressed to monosyllabic responses and eyes which refused to meet mine. I found I rather minded about his disapproval, but, regardless, I held my head up high and carried on as though nothing had changed, choosing not to see the disenchantment in his eyes. When out and about, I refused to hear the whispered comments of the townsfolk as I passed. John, as often as not, was with me. He took my arm and pointed out amusing or interesting things as we walked along the pavements, and tipped his hat to the women who stood to one side as we went by as though they might catch something noxious from our proximity.

  Whatever the apparent orthodoxies of his private life, Mosley’s political manoeuvrings continued unabated. He orchestrated a number of violent marches and protests, policed by his increasingly aggressive black-shirts, including the infamous battle of Cable Street, placing himself further and further beyond mainstream politics. I think it was from this time Colin and his cronies gradually separated themselves from the Fascists. The next time he visited us, which was in mid-November, there was no sign of the quasi-military uniforms and indeed these were outlawed by act of parliament the following January. He came, on that occasion, with Mr Baldwin, a number of governmental flunkies and a surprising flotilla of clerical gents including the Archbishop of Canterbury. There was much sotto voce conference and frequent use of the telephone, and a greater consumption of whisky than I would have expected for a gathering with such a marked ecclesiastical contingent. Giles Percy was one of the number. He had changed, in the months since I had seen him. His hair was brutally short but he was cultivating the sproutings of a nascent beard on his cheeks and chin. His eyes were hollowed with tiredness, his face almost cadaverous and a poor colour. He smoked voraciously; his fingers were yellow with nicotine. When he saw me and my obvious pregnancy his pallor blenched to an even paler hue, his bruised eyes widened but he managed to pull himself together sufficiently to hold out his hand and greet me.

  ‘Mrs Johns,’ he said, in an oddly strangled voice before, after a coughing fit, going on more levelly, ‘Many congratulations. Your husband has returned to you safely?’ He asked it as a question but I had the strong impression that it was more a statement of fact. He knew John was home; knew, I suspected, a good deal about our lives, John’s work and professional connections, about my own daily comings and goings, than I would perhaps like.

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ I replied. ‘He is working hard on a new installation, at present.’

  The installation was actually a nursery, which we had converted from one of the old Butler’s rooms across the corridor from mine. John was painting the walls with a frieze of outsized plants and fantastical flowers so that it looked like a prehistoric bower. Kenneth had drained and flushed out the ancient radiator in there and installed a wash-hand basin with dogged diligence, and said nothing about the room’s intended purpose; I hoped he would get over his disapproval in time. My friend Ann was knitting a layette. Rose’s father was making a crib. I was planning a trip to the attics where the old nursery equipment was stored, so see if anything could be brought back into service.

  ‘Excellent,’ Giles said. ‘I heard his exhibition in Berlin was well-received.’

  Mr Ratton did not accompany Colin on that visit. I was relieved. Even with John in residence, I feared Ratton’s malign influence. I had no intention of asking after him but towards the end of the week Colin called me to one side.

  ‘Our friend Sylvester is pursuing some business interests in this neck of the woods,’ he said. ‘He may need to use the house. He’s to have full access, of course.’

  ‘He’s no friend of mine,’ I declared stoutly. ‘I hope he’ll give me notice of his arrival?’

  ‘Probably. Negotiations are on-going… An invitation here might swing it.’

  I nodded. ‘So there’ll be guests? He brought…’ I hesitated to say ‘lady’ in reference to the coarse, painted woman he had brought with him on his last visit, but alternative description evaded me for the moment.

  Colin watched me struggle. ‘Brought? Brought whom?’ he as
ked, tersely, after a few moments.

  ‘A companion. A female companion,’ I got out, at last. ‘When he came in the summer.’

  ‘Did he, now?’ Clearly, Colin hadn’t known. ‘The old dog,’ he muttered to himself. He pressed his already thin lips together to make a hard, white line. His eyes glittered like frost shards. ‘Well, no,’ he said at last. ‘No women, I shouldn’t think, unless they’re the wives of the people he’s dealing with. He’s buying up business properties in the area, mills and factories and so on. It’s a thing we’re speculating on together. As always, in this house,’ his eyes flickered down to my stomach with a cold, speaking implication, ‘discretion is the watch-word. None of us wants what goes on here generally known, do we?’

  ‘What goes on at Tall Chimneys is nobody’s business but ours,’ I countered, boldly, more boldly than I felt. Somehow, Colin always managed to reduce me to a child, the unwanted, too-late baby, the supernumerary sibling. Of the seven of us Talbot children I was the only one to have produced a child who would carry our name into the future. Could Colin not be happy? Could he not offer congratulations? Could it not be a catalyst to some kind of family feeling and cohesiveness? I found myself engulfed by a wave of loneliness for something I had never really known, a sense of belonging which had evaded me almost all of my life. Only with Isobel and my niece Joan had I ever caught a glimpse of it, and with the Weeks, those kindly guardians at the gatehouse.

  Colin had wandered away from me to poke at the embers in the fireplace. I could hear Mr Baldwin in the adjacent room, speaking into the telephone. Beyond the crazed, heavily leaded window, on the long terrace, Giles Percy passed by, smoking.

  ‘Do you ever hear from our sister?’ I burst out. ‘Our sister Amelia?’

  ‘She’s in Germany with Diana Mitford - that is, I should say, Diana Mosley.’ He replied, matter-of-factly. ‘She’s a celebrated beauty, much in vogue with the Chancellor’s inner circle. She has her own room at The Berghof, I believe.’

  He could not have described someone more alien to my humdrum, domesticated little existence. I felt small and contemptible in comparison. ‘The Berghof?’ I mumbled.

  ‘Hitler’s private country retreat. Much like here. A place where discretion is assured.’ The idea made me shudder. Colin looked up from the fire. In spite of his proximity to it, his skin remained pale and waxy. ‘She’ll never come here,’ he sneered. Could he read my thoughts? The tiny flicker of family connection which had suggested itself to me was snuffed. ‘Unless… but no. It won’t come to that.’

  ‘To war?’ I whispered.

  He seemed not to have heard me. Next door I could hear Mr Baldwin concluding his conversation. Colin must have heard it too. He made for the inter-connecting door. ‘But if it does,’ he went on in a voice suddenly light, as though considering the likelihood of rain later, ‘if it does, well, it’s an ill wind which blows nobody any good, isn’t it? I think we’ll have tea, now, if you please.’

  I went downstairs to ask Rose to prepare tea, and sat down heavily on the chair by the range while she assembled the crockery and cut the sandwiches and arranged scones on a plate. My only two relations in the world seemed so distant to me, utterly uncaring. I stroked my belly with a distracted hand. What kind of world, what kind of family, was I bringing my baby into?

  But then John strode into the kitchen from the nursery, his hair unkempt and daubed with paint. He was still thin, the effects of his illness lingered, and occasionally he was overwhelmed by tiredness. But now his face was eager and at the same time satisfied, the expression he had when his work was going well, (and also, incidentally, during and in the immediate aftermath of sex), both energised and also gratified, the two feeding off each other in a creative, self-propelling engine of vision and experience. He snaffled a sandwich from one of Rose’s meticulously arranged plates and plonked himself on the old rug at my feet. Rose uttered a cry of sham remonstrance and reached for the loaf to cut more bread. Kenneth announced himself at the door with an exaggerated scraping of boots on the mat and much snuffling and blowing into his handkerchief. Bobby, Rose’s brother-child, who was with us for the day and had been helping Kenneth in the greenhouse, enacted a perfect facsimile of his actions, diligently wiping his little boots on the mat and rubbing his nose with his shirt-tail. And it suddenly dawned on me, like an illumination, here was the family who would greet my baby. Even Kenneth, who, I knew, frowned on me, would swallow his reproaches if push came to shove, and would never desert me in my hour of need. We gathered round the table and ate our tea, and it seemed to me to be enough.

  Three weeks later, the outcome of Colin, the Archbishop and Mr Baldwin’s labour came to fruition, and King Edward VIII abdicated.[10] We heard about it on the wireless. The King himself explained his action. ‘You must believe me,’ he said, ‘when I tell you that I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as King as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love.’ I did believe him. The idea of carrying on without John, in whatever context, was insupportable. I felt sorry for the King, that he had been made to choose; sorry that some accommodation could not have been reached that would have allowed him to have both. I was happy for Mrs Simpson, though, that poor, starved woman, hustled in and out of cars, driven miles through the night, stowed away in discreet sitting rooms until they could snatch five minutes together, always at hand but never by his side. Now she would take her place, I thought, and look the world in the eye. On the other hand the sacrifice had been all his. Would resentment, I speculated, regret, recrimination, make a bitter third in their relationship?

  ‘And I want you to know that the decision I have made has been mine and mine alone,’ the King went on. ‘This was a thing I had to judge entirely for myself. The other person most nearly concerned has tried up to the last to persuade me to take a different course.’

  ‘Ahhh,’ Rose sighed, giving a worldly nod. ‘She didn’t want him to do it. She was holding out to be Queen, I bet.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I replied. ‘All she wanted was a hot bath and a whisky, when I met her.’

  We had snow at the beginning of December and then the temperatures plummeted so it stayed on the ground in frozen drifts against the house and in hard sheets amongst the shadows beneath the trees. The bowl had a sense of stillness and waiting, the trees perfectly motionless in the arctic air. Everything was petrified, even the branches of the trees were encased in sheaths of ice; it tinkled and rang like steely bells when a snow-fall set the branches waving, and, in the stillness, it creaked and squeaked as it tightened its grip. The terrace was a sheet of ice, the cobbles of the yard like polished, pearlescent goose eggs. The steeply sloping drive was treacherous, its craters and potholes as sharp as jaws; Kenneth punctured his motorcycle tyre twice in as many days. A dense fog enveloped everything, we hardly saw the sun and from the drawing room windows I could barely make out the outline of the grey fountain.

  Inside the house, in contrast, all was light and warmth, readiness and anticipation. The nursery was ready, a gloriously colourful arbour, all sunshine and vibrancy. The handmade crib, the bale of clothing and nappies sent down by Rose’s parents, the beautifully worked blankets and shawls made by Ann all stood ready. I was ready, more than ready; sick of waddling through the rooms, unable to bend to put on my own shoes, eager to meet this little person who had been brewing and baking inside of me.

  We had laid our plans. Rose would help me, boil water and assemble towels, make tea, rub my back, all of which - she assured me - would be necessary before the baby made its appearance.

  ‘Mum will come, if you like,’ Rose offered. ‘She and I, we managed it between the two of us. We didn’t need the doctor.’

  I refrained from pointing out that, in their case, the muddier the waters over Bobby’s origins, the better. Unless I could convince people I had found my baby under the gooseberry bush there would be little question about its genesis. I didn’t
have a convenient married relation I could palm it off onto. And, truth be told, I didn’t want to deny it. I was past caring what people might think.

  ‘It’s all the same to the doctor,’ I said.

  The telephone stood ready to call him; for the first time it would be of some use to me. If the doctor was out on his rounds, John or Kenneth would go and look for him in the motorcar which Kenneth had primed and serviced. He had also overhauled the generator; we kept it purring, the furnace stoked up and the range lit.

  John and Kenneth seemed to have come to a manly accommodation. John accepted Kenneth’s authority at Tall Chimneys in all matters practical and technical, never questioning the freedom I had conferred upon him to make decisions on his own cognisance or his ability to do so. John never presumed to interfere with the workings of Tall Chimneys or undertook any remedial tasks unless under Kenneth’s supervision. Like me, he did not treat Kenneth like a servant but as a colleague. In return, Kenneth seemed to swallow his resentment of John and to overcome his suspicion. Occasionally I found them having quite garrulous discussions and I was glad that John had managed to break through Kenneth’s reserve even though I wondered why I had not. It was understood that they took a joint, equal and equally jealous interest in everything pertaining to Tall Chimneys, and that included me.

  We had a lovely Christmas, John and I. We lit the candles in the dining room and dined in state to the strains of the wireless floating from the drawing room. We served ourselves; I had given Rose and Kenneth a few days’ holiday. We ate well and John raided the cellar for a good bottle of wine. I drank of it pretty sparingly - it had, after all, been the cause of my flagrancy with Giles Percy - and we laughed about those agonisingly awkward meals with Ratton sitting at the head of the table, as ugly and objectionable as a goblin. Afterwards we took a careful turn on the lawn, the crisp, frosted grass crunching beneath our feet like sugar coating. John threaded my arm through his and held my hand. We looked at the skeletal rose bushes and limp, water-weighted heads of the hellebores, and breathed in the sharp-edged air. It smelt of polar-places, distant bergs and creeping glaciers, but also of our own home woodlands, pine-laced and peaty, and of the smoke which rose in sluggish columns from the tall chimneys but then fell back to meld itself with the vaporous mix of mist and gelid air. Overlaying it all was the smell of John himself, soapy and smoky and manly and mine.