Tall Chimneys: A British Family Saga Spanning 100 Years

by Allie Cresswell

  Bobby, of course, came to live in the newly converted estate house too. Awan adored him, and missed him when he started school, which he did in September that year.

  The war seemed a long way from us even though, at its outbreak, John was still in France without knowing how - or if - he would be able to get home. To be honest, the worry I had for him at the mercy of Monique’s machinations was far more than the threat I perceived from marauding Nazis. But you must remember I had little recollection of the first war. It had taken my father and oldest brother from me, and also, tangentially, my mother, but these figures were vague in my mind, mere ghosts. When I’d returned to Tall Chimneys I’d missed the Weeks, more.

  War impinged on our lives in many ways; we had our gas masks - they hung in rows on the hooks in the passageway - and Kenneth had fitted out the ice house - never used, in these days - as an air-raid shelter. Awan and Bobby liked to play in there anyway, and had gradually transported toys and old rugs into it to aid their games; I suppose it was spooky and spidery, dark and thrilling without being really menacing. We supplemented their provisions with some old garden chairs and an oil lamp or two. It was a token; we didn’t expect to be the target of bombs, so far north and so far away from any conurbations. Rationing began early in 1940 but it didn’t affect us too badly at first. Rose’s father made sure we had meat and we grew most of our own fruit and vegetables. We had eggs. Somehow or other Kenneth’s mother continued to be able to access flour and sugar and provided the children with cakes, which satisfied their longing for sweet things. The bartering system which has always flourished in the countryside became more prevalent, and, all in all, we didn’t go without.

  We got used to seeing aeroplanes in the sky; spitfires and Lancasters regularly crossed overhead, not in waves, heading for the Channel or France (we were too far north for that), but in ones and twos as their pilots were trained to fly. Throughout the long, hot summer of 1940 we could hear the engines, like angry bluebottles caught against a window, a high-pitched whine and then an eerie silence as they stalled, a coughing, stuttering re-start or, once or twice, a dull explosion as a plane fell to earth on the moorland around us. The airmen took to patronising our local public houses, very young men, many of them, hardly old enough to be able to hold their beer let alone be sent up aloft to fight the Luftwaffe. They would be there one evening, talking loudly with their fellows, flirting with the local girls, and the next night there would be an empty chair.

  At Tall Chimneys we had more mouths to feed. Kenneth drove us to the station and we came back with four evacuees from Leeds, where Lancaster bombers and munitions were being churned out by the factories, some of which were owned by Sylvester Ratton. Kenneth and Rose wanted a boy because he would have to share a room with Bobby. A school-age boy would be ideal, as Rose was, by then, expecting a baby and didn’t want an extra child who would be under her feet. They picked Malcolm. He was about Bobby’s age but whereas Bobby was chubby and dimpled, Malcolm was thin to the point of being skeletal. He was filthy, ill-turned out in torn trousers and shoes so badly scuffed we could see his toe through the leather. He was snot-nosed and whiney, standing rather apart from the other boys waiting on the platform. Kenneth chose him in preference to the more appealing alternatives because he looked so frightened and Kenneth felt sorry for him. I went in search of the girls and spotted one aged about seven in the waiting room. She was holding the hand of a toddler perhaps two and also cradling a baby who was under a year old. They were all dressed in clothes which, though well-mended, were immaculately clean. The hair of the older girls was neatly braided and in ribbons. The baby wore a home-crocheted bonnet. As I approached the little group, the oldest girl shrank away from me and pulled the toddler behind her.

  ‘We have to stay together, Mam says,’ she announced, defiantly.

  The woman who was supervising bustled over with a clip-board. She was hatchet-faced, prim and terrifying, without a shred of maternal instinct or kindness. The girls shrank even further into the grimy corner of the waiting room. ‘Which will you take?’ she asked me. ‘Madam here says they’re to stay together but I’ve told her nobody will have room for three.’

  ‘I have room for three,’ I said, quickly. ‘I’ll take them all.’ The big girl’s face remained stoical and determined, but a fat tear oozed from her eye and dribbled down her face.

  ‘Oh!’ The woman took a step backwards and looked me up and down. ‘Mrs…?’

  ‘Johns, from Tall Chimneys,’ I said, picking up the small leather suitcase which was propped against a nearby chair leg.

  The woman sniffed; she knew me, clearly, by repute. ‘Regulations state…’ she began, but I cut her off.

  ‘This is no time to be hidebound by regulations,’ I declared, stoutly. ‘There’s a war on. We all have to do our bit.’ I reached out my hand to the toddler, who let go of her sister’s and took mine. It was hot and sticky, as Awan’s often was.

  ‘I’m not sure I can…’ the woman tried another tack.

  ‘Have a heart,’ I hissed, glancing at her chest as though I doubted she had such a thing - it was as flat as a board - and then at the pathetic sight of the three children. ‘If you doubt me, Mrs Greene can vouch for me.’ Kenneth’s mother was a redoubtable figure in and of herself and a big mover in the WI world. Her name seemed to do the trick.

  ‘Very well,’ the woman leafed through her file of papers. ‘You’ll take Marion, Audrey and Kitty Blakney. Marion is the big one. It says here she wets the bed.’

  The seven year old gave a little cry of outrage and shame. Her brave demeanour collapsed and she sank onto the bench behind her in a torrent of tears. The child whose hand I held - Audrey - began to cry also and the baby, naturally, followed suit. The harridan with the clipboard gave a satisfied smile. ‘Good luck,’ she said, nastily, stalking off to exert her authority elsewhere.

  The three girls settled quickly into Tall Chimneys, after getting over their awe at its size and isolation. Kitty went into Awan’s cot and I unearthed two truckle beds from the attics which had been used in the nurseries years before. These were for the two toddlers who were, to all intents and purposes, of an age. All three of them slept in Awan’s nursery but I brought a proper bedstead and mattress down for Marion and set it up in the room next door, a mere anteroom, very narrow, with the smallest of windows which looked out onto nothing, but private and quiet - I hoped it would make her feel grown up and safe. She wet the bed every night for the first couple of weeks, but I made no fuss about it. She became my shadow, always at my elbow to help with the smaller girls, pass a trowel or grasp the corners of the sheets for folding. I told her a little about my own childhood, about the Weeks, exploring the grounds, about being sent to Isobel’s, about the kindness and understanding I had met from everybody. I taught her to crochet and a little embroidery and in the evenings, when the little ones were in bed, she and I would sit by the fire and work, and listen to the radio. She wrote regularly to her parents and occasionally got letters back which were full of admonitions to behave, be polite and look after her sisters. On the advice of Rose’s mother I gave Marion a spoonful of cider vinegar diluted with water every night at bedtime. I don’t know if it was this remedy or just a gradually encroaching sense of security, but Marion stopped wetting the bed.

  Marion, Bobby and Malcolm attended the village school. Goodness knows how Miss Eccles, the school mistress, coped, with a sudden doubling of her roll, an influx of children from the town with widely differing abilities and issues.

  Like Marion, Malcolm settled after a while. He was an awkward, damaged little boy, socially inept and inarticulate. Rose fed him up, cleaned him up, eradicated the hair lice and provided him with clean clothes and an endless supply of clean handkerchiefs to deal with his perpetually snotty nose. Kenneth took him into the workshop to show him the basics of woodworking and mechanics. His quiet ways and easy temper and, most of all, his verbal reticence seemed to reassure the little lad. In time his closed, suspicious d
emeanour eased. He and Bobby never got on very well and I think, for a while, Bobby’s nose was pushed out of joint because, with two new playmates, Awan suddenly had no time for him and then, to make matters worse, Rose produced a new baby brother who was no fun at all.

  In spite of the dark shadows across the channel, things at Tall Chimneys were relatively bright; the children were happy and healthy, we had plenty to eat, the weather was fairly good. We didn’t expect the war to last long - news reports were up-beat but often days or even weeks out of date. Later, the period became known at ‘the phoney war’, but at the time we believed the propaganda we were fed - that everything was going swimmingly well.

  In June 1940 John came home. Leaving Provence and Monique - under what circumstances, I do not know and did not ask. He got away with the allied troops off the beaches of Dunkirk, one of the few civilians to do so. The trauma of the experience stayed with him - the desperation, the shoreline and dunes black with the press of men, men floating dead in the sea as he had waded out to the boats, the cold of the sea as he waited, up to his neck, the continuous bombardment of shells falling all around them, day and night.

  As always with John, his anguish poured out on the sketch pad and onto canvas; he produced some harrowingly dark works on which whorls of greyish green and arcs of white spume were overlaid with dangling, awkwardly broken figures. They were painted thickly, almost violently, with ugly strokes. Fine webs of magenta spread like burst capillaries from a central slash.

  The eye-witness view of the war he brought back with him was startling and sobering; France over-run, her troops in disarray, the British offensive stymied by the superior tactics and armaments of the enemy, the wholesale decimation of our troops. By the time he got his story out, France had surrendered to the Nazis and Mr Churchill, our new Prime Minister, was warning us not to consider the successful evacuation as any kind of victory.

  I was careful with the amount of news I allowed John to see or hear; I feared for his mental, as well as his physical health, but, on that front at least, he did seem better. He was tanned, his hair very short and his beard gone altogether, lean, his eyes darkly shadowed and in some way hooded, as though hiding truths he did not want me to see.

  He did not stay with us long. Precluded from active service because of his chest - thank goodness - he was co-opted into a unit which operated out of London, a secretive intelligence outfit whose work he could never explain to me but where his excellent French and German were apparently invaluable. He was away for long stretches of time and I missed him. When he did come home he seemed very tired and in some way distant and disorientated, as though he had been much further away than just London both physically and mentally. He didn’t sleep well, tossing and turning in the night, as though troubled, but I could not get him to unburden himself to me.

  I saw Colin’s hand in John’s appointment. Colin now played an important and influential role in support of the Coalition Government and seemed to be up to his self-important neck in officialdom. Ratton, of course, was always in his shadow, a hanger-on, basking in the borrowed glow of Colin’s success and benefitting whenever possible from snippets of information carelessly dropped by loose lips or deliberately passed on by my double-dealing brother. London was a dangerous place; there were air-raids nightly and sometimes in the day as well; the damp, sooty, smoke-laden air was anathema for John’s chest, the black-out encouraged ne’er-do-wells to rob anyone they encountered in the street. But London was safer than France or the further outposts of the conflict, and, for that, I was grateful, both for John, who seemed on the whole to enjoy his work and feel he was making a valuable contribution, and in terms of Tall Chimneys.

  We had several visits from officers reconnoitring likely houses for use by the military. Already many of the county’s biggest houses had been requisitioned; Wentworth, for example, was already housing a battalion, and rumour had it its gardens and park were to be torn up and mined for coal. Some houses were being used as schools, others as hospitals. Others still were being prepared for use as prisoner of war camps. Tall Chimneys was scarcely big enough for any of these purposes, our grounds too restricted for military training, and, crucially, we didn’t have mains electricity, a must-have for most people in those days. I would often find a military vehicle on the gravelled drive, a Captain weighing the place up, but mention of Colin’s name usually sent them away again. When they were more recalcitrant I would telephone Colin and put him on the line. I didn’t know then what arrangements Colin had made for the maintenance of the house, or for the payment of death duties for George, to enable him to keep it. Perhaps he had made some deal with the government - we certainly had a number of governmental and diplomatic guests throughout the duration of the war, often at short notice - perhaps it was considered a sort of outpost for national use, like Blenheim, which became the HQ of MI5, Bletchley and Wilton. Whatever it was, for a long time, our peace and tranquillity at Tall Chimneys were not broached. Of course, it could not last.

  The evacuees went home at the end of 1940, the threat of bombing or invasion being deemed, then, to be negligible. What blindness! Leeds was bombed in 1941, the town hall, markets, museum and station were all decimated. I wept for the children, especially Marion, Audrey and little Kitty, but also for Malcolm, not knowing what had become of them. I wondered if Marion might write to me - she had promised she would - but I didn’t receive a letter. I just prayed they had escaped danger.

  Of course it was terrible, terrible, to know what was going on in Europe. After Dunkirk all pretence in the news was dropped. The newspapers had graphic pictures and, I am told, you could see newsreels in the cinema depicting the mud and carnage. This war was mechanised in a way the first had not been - in the interim we had invented ways of killing many people from a safe distance with aeroplanes, tanks and submarines. We had become sneakier about war, using intelligence, radar and sonar to second-guess our enemies’ movements. It was more effective but somehow less honest than the man-to-man combat of past conflicts.

  From the spring of 1941 the government began to register women, list their occupations and offer them a range of jobs which would contribute towards the war effort. Later that year, unmarried women under the age of thirty could expect to be conscripted to do war work in munitions factories or operating the enormous bureaucratic machine which drove the war forwards. I escaped this, having turned thirty in 1940, although in some ways it might have presented me with opportunities to branch out of the narrow existence which had thus far contained me. Once again, fate seemed determined that the openings presented to other women should pass me by. My female contemporaries grasped the openings offered by the war with both hands; some of the younger women joined the ATS, trained as auxiliary nurses or went away to be ambulance drivers. The farming women took on the work of the men and supervised the women of the Land Army who arrived to help out, proving themselves just as adept at the management and planning challenges which farming presents as the men had in years gone by. The older women, and those who were married, were left to look after the children and keep the infrastructure of civilian life going; running shops, pubs and post offices, driving buses, sometimes stepping into the still-warm shoes of their conscripted husbands. Here, again, I had reason to suspect Tall Chimneys was considered in some way a satellite resource of the government; my role as housekeeper there went unchallenged and there was no suggestion I should be sent off to do something more useful. I was busy in the village and the wider parish - I felt I was ‘doing my bit’. I was co-opted onto the committee of the WI in the village; we ploughed up the village green and the cricket pitch to grow vegetables and my long years’ experience in the kitchen gardens of Tall Chimneys came to the fore.

  On top of that, Colin brought frequent parties of gentlemen to the house for conferences and pow-wows - very secretive and business-like; there was little of the whisky-swilling of former days and the food I managed to serve up was necessarily rather Spartan. I cooked for these parties mys
elf, having assimilated a wide enough repertoire to be able to satisfy house parties of seven or eight gentlemen for three or four days. Rose helped me and I brought in women from the village to assist with the laundry and cleaning. It seemed to be accepted this was my war-service and in all honesty it was arduous enough, at times; running the house and garden almost single-handedly hadn’t got any easier, with the years.

  Giles Percy never appeared at these gatherings, and I was glad of it - the older she grew, the more Awan resembled him. I enquired, casually, after him once or twice - had he joined up? Was he abroad? I gathered he was engaged in some vital but shady war effort but no-one was prepared to enlighten me further than that.

  Ratton sometimes made one of the party. Although not connected with the government and having no official role, he seemed accepted by the military men, officious secretaries and Cabinet members who arrived by train or in their own motorcars. He wore some kind of uniform, non-determinate khaki emblazoned with stripes and other doubtful insignia, but then most of the men did in those days, even men who did no combative service seemed co-opted in some role or another, variously attached to numerous obscure branches of the military machine. Ratton looked ridiculous in his get-up, like an under-cooked pie filled with gristle and minced snout - offal trying to pass itself off as good quality meat. He was entirely bald by this time, but sported a bristly moustache which looked absurd beneath his snubby little nose. He wore spectacles, too, behind which his round, naked eyes looked even more like glass beads. He was fatter than ever, his round chin melding into the heavy column of his neck, and his breathing was laboured and stertorous; he needed to take a rest half way up the staircase while he caught his breath, although he pretended to be using the pause to survey the portraits of latter-day Talbots which lined the walls.