Tall Chimneys: A British Family Saga Spanning 100 Years

by Allie Cresswell

  ‘On what?’

  ‘Whether you’ll keep coming back here,’ I threw him a coquettish smile.

  The tempting entrance to the greenway passed by, but there were others I knew of.

  He smiled back, and reached out his hand to rest it over mine on the gear stick. ‘Of course, as you’re here, I will,’ he said, with a resigned smile.

  ‘So that will be always,’ I said, with a laugh which came out forced and artificial. His air of long-suffering had put a stone in my stomach.

  He said ‘You know, Evelyn, there’s a great big world out there. It might be in chaos, now, with war spread out like stain across its surface, but it’s out there and in spite of what we’re doing to it, it is beautiful. You ought to see it. You ought to take Awan and travel. You don’t want, for her - do you? - the sequestered life you’ve had? And I think after the war things will change, very quickly. She - and you - must keep up.’

  ‘This is sounding like a valedictory speech,’ I said, tearfully now, all my roguish plans forgotten.

  ‘No, no,’ he soothed.

  ‘Or that you’re bored of Tall Chimneys, and of me.’

  The world sounded like a frightening place to me. I knew I was parochial and naïve. The idea of sending Awan out into the bewildering unknown was terrifying to me and yet I knew John was right. She must have wider experiences than I, meet more people, see more, do more. This day - her first school day - was in every sense the first of the rest of her life. The question was - and I knew it was the question John was really asking me - would I go with her, or send her out alone?

  We travelled for a while in silence. Then he said, ‘The Royal Academy is staging its summer exhibition as usual, despite everything. I’ve been asked to submit something.’

  ‘Really?’ I turned to look at him. This was a wonderful piece of news. John’s work was known and respected amongst a limited number of connoisseurs but was considered too outré by many. Sir Edwin Lutyens, however, the current President of the Royal Academy, was just the kind of forward-thinking person to appreciate John’s modern style. ‘Which piece will you submit?’

  I considered John’s recent works - the harrowing canvasses he had done on his return from Dunkirk, his desolate renditions of the moor above Tall Chimneys. The comparison with the exuberant botanical studies he had been working on before Awan was born, and the enormous experimental works he had been doing for George and Rita couldn’t be more marked. It occurred to me for the first time that they reflected much more than what John saw, they reflected what he felt - the inner man; John was tortured, depressed and unhappy and it was my fault. How narrow and provincial my world must seem to him, after living in Paris and London. What a dearth of interesting artistic conversation there was at Tall Chimneys, where the year’s carrot crop and some new recipe for pickle brine were sometimes our most fervently discussed topics.

  ‘You’ll be tremendously busy all spring,’ I said, brightly, cranking down the window to let out an imaginary fly so he wouldn’t see the tears in my eyes. ‘I doubt you’ll be able to get home, much.’

  ‘So much of this war is being fought in secret,’ John replied, cryptically. ‘The battle fields are only the half of it. Intelligence will win the war for us, or lose it. And we’re getting to a critical point.’

  ‘Oh! With work, yes, but really I meant with painting. The exhibition might give you the impetus to do something entirely new. It will open up a whole new world of opportunities for you.’

  ‘That’s what I’ve been trying to say,’ John sighed. ‘The world out there offers opportunities for both of us. If only you’d come out.’

  We pulled into the station yard. ‘How can I?’ I almost wailed, ‘how can we?’

  ‘What do you think will happen?’ John asked, witheringly. ‘Do you expect to be put in the stocks? To have your nose cut off? Or a bolt of lightning to come down and strike you dead? The world isn’t so medieval, now, Evelyn.’

  I looked at him. The slaughter taking place across the globe felt to me exactly that - as crude and bloody as the Crusades of old. I felt the guilt of my unconventional life like a heavy weight around my neck - like Hester Prynne’s letter A. And yet, I told myself, I had made a world for myself where I was safe and even accepted. I had brought the folks in the village round to tolerate me - that was something, wasn’t it? I had even brazened things out in the local market town. That had taken courage. But surely, out in the real world, I’d be spurned, wouldn’t I? I imagined being turned away from decent accommodation, having respectable doors shut in my face, refused service in restaurants and cafes.

  ‘No,’ John said, reading my thoughts. ‘People have moved on. Nowadays, when life is so precious, and often so short, nobody cares about who sleeps with whom. But you won’t believe that, will you? Why would you, when you’re so comfortable here? But do you ever wonder what it’s like for me?’

  The question haunted me as I waved John off on his train. He disappeared back into the world of secret communications, confidential intelligence and dark mystery he inhabited and left me feeling very far behind.

  I drove home and, not able to face the house empty of both John and Awan, let myself into the gatehouse. It was dusty and cold. I lit a fire and drew some water to heat over it. The tea in the caddy was stale and I had no milk, but I drank it anyway, wallowing in my misery. I cried for a while, at first just an outlet for the tears I had not shed at the school or in the car, or on the station platform, but then in genuine anguish at my predicament, all of my own making, I realised.

  Was I ‘so comfortable’ at Tall Chimneys? I had been in charge there, to all intents and purposes, my own mistress, independent, with the huge house and the encircling grounds to roam in as I had willed. But the truth was I had closeted myself at Tall Chimneys, too afraid to venture even to Leeds or York, let alone to London or abroad. My ‘independence’ had been a sham! Was it any wonder I was green and gauche? Why hadn’t I braved the world? It was a self-fulfilling prophecy, I realised. I was green because I had not kept up with the times, and I had not kept up with the times because I was simply too old fashioned to fit in. How could I ever have thought that, small, mousey, unworldly as I was, I could hold a man like John? And yet I had tied myself to him, knowing it to be an alliance which the world would always frown upon, knowing I would be a guilty shackle around his ankle. I might have told myself I did not care but, really, I cared very much.

  Then, to make matters worse, I had recklessly slept with another man and got myself with child, adding to the burden John must carry and making my perpetual incarceration at Tall Chimneys even more certain. If I did not have the gall as a mistress to face the world, how much less could I do it with a fatherless child? My action had tied me even more securely to Tall Chimneys. I had walled up my guilty secrets there in the same way that I might have nurtured a monster, believing I would be free from prying eyes and wagging fingers, but as much a prisoner as the pig in the sty, and equally doomed.

  John’s final comment rankled most of all. Did I ever wonder what it was like for him, to be alone? What solitary hours he must pass, I thought, but then, another thought assailed me: what temptations might apparent singleness bring his way? How might he console himself for my absence?

  I roused myself and took up a cloth and broom. I cleaned out the gatehouse, ravelling the cobwebs from the rafters and sweeping away the bloom of grey dust which coated the furniture. I shook out the covers from the ottoman and hung them out to air in the chill wind. I collected branches from the woods and stacked them under the eaves. I hid John’s easel and canvasses behind a screen and tidied his paints and brushes away, throwing a lace cloth over the table where they had habitually been scattered. I worked automatically, without any thought, until the tolling of the school bell alerted me to the time, and I rushed out to the car to collect Awan.

  Later, I settled her in to her own bed, and went upstairs to escape her cries of protest, wandering the state rooms until they had subside
d. Not until she had quietened did I go back down to the echoing kitchen and at last into my own chamber. I felt the vast press of Tall Chimneys all around me like a suffocating weight, and the choking encirclement of the woods around the house, and the squeeze of the moor tightening in, and I realised the significance of my day’s activity. Rather than reaching out into the world John was so keen for me to step into, I had been running further away from it, burrowing deeper in to Tall Chimneys. I had been preparing the gatehouse as my last bastion, an inner sanctum, a cell, a coffin.

  I tossed and turned all night, all my old feelings of uncertainty clamouring to be heard. In the morning, early, I heard a footstep in the passageway. Kenneth greeted me with a grin. ‘You’re to come to breakfast, Rose says.’ He nodded at the chair at the head of the kitchen table, the one John habitually used. ‘You won’t want to be staring at an empty chair,’ he explained.

  ‘Kenneth,’ I cried, ‘you’re an absolute god-send. What would I do without you? I could kiss you.’

  He blushed to the roots of his hair and his eyes slid to a point just above my knees. ‘Come quick or the muffins will be cold,’ he muttered.

  ‘Ah,’ I sighed. ‘Where there are Rose’s muffins, there is hope.’

  1941 - 1944

  The entry of the US and Canada into the war was another thing which provided hope although, from my point of view, they also brought the wider world uncomfortably close to my doorstep. Our morale improved because it evened up the balance of power - with such militarily superior troops and weaponry on our side, how could we lose? The talk in the village shop and along the assiduously tended rows of vegetables was up-beat. At first the talk was all fuelled by information from newsreels and the radio. We heard that they came equipped with fast, light jeeps, bigger planes, better guns and a business-like, ‘can-do’ attitude which made the slow machine of the British military seem woefully sluggish and old-hat. They were reputed to be a-brim with confidence; bigger and broader than our Tommies, and more attractively arrayed - their uniforms made the olive drab of the British regalia seem very homespun. With their pronounced swagger and characteristic drawl, they behaved like film stars, every one of them. They were gallant, we were told, their ‘ma’am’ so much more chivalrous than the ‘missus’ of the average Yorkshireman. They had seemingly endless supplies of money - the average GI earned five times what a British soldier earned and he was not shy of spending it, apparently; in areas where a US or Canadian encampment was established, business flourished.

  Then, they were amongst us. In March a small Corps of US engineers came to occupy the RAF training camp which had existed for the past two years on the other side of the moor. They tore down the shabby wooden huts which had housed the trainee pilots and put up pre-fabricated buildings. These arrived in sections and only needed bolting together, providing roomy billets, a kitchen, mess-hall, classrooms and a shower block. They bulldozed the rough airstrip, making it wider, longer and covering it with cinder transported from various steel-works in the south of the county. They constructed an air-control tower with a modern radar installation. When off-duty the men converged on the local towns and villages, spending money in the shops and cafes, instigating dances and film-screenings in the long-deserted village halls and getting used to the local ale.

  I didn’t like it. Their modernity made me feel like a throw-back of history; I was out of step, out of place, out of time.

  John did not, as I had predicted, come home at Easter time. He wrote to us fairly regularly. Of his work he said nothing, other than that it was more demanding than ever, and involving ‘some travel’, but he said he was painting in his spare time. I was glad of it, and wondered, with a bitter, jealous twist in my gut, what his work looked like, now he was back in his natural environment, and free of our constraint.

  After a cold and wet start to the year, April and May were warm and sunny; the gardens looked splendid and we were hopeful of good crops of soft fruits and legumes. I kept myself very busy, adding occasional visits to my friends and the local market town to my schedule of activities, to keep my spirits buoyant.

  Rose had her third baby - another boy, Anthony - in May. Kenneth brought him across to the house to show off, proud as a peacock but also endearingly shy when I teased him about his fecundity - perhaps he would rather I’d believed he’d found the baby in the gooseberry patch. This baby had his father’s red hair and wary eyes. I took him gently into my arms. I ached for another baby of my own, for John’s baby, but it was clear to me by that time such a thing was not to be. As I held the baby I was conscious of a sudden stab of envy that Rose’s early fall from grace should have been forgiven and made good by the love of a decent man and the blessing of more children, while I seemed destined to remain forever cursed by mine. I wonder if Kenneth read my thoughts. He put a hand on my shoulder and gave me a look so filled to the brim with understanding and sympathy that for once it was me who blushed.

  It might have been all of a piece with my sense that John was slipping away from me, but I had an abrupt sensation of vulnerability. It was abetted by my feeling that the world, in the guise of the Americans, was encroaching further and further onto what I thought of as my own territory. ‘You won’t move away?’ I stammered, assaulted all at once with the idea they might abandon me and Tall Chimneys. The accommodation I had given them above the old estate offices and gun rooms would be too cramped for a family of five, as homely as Rose had made it. Bobby and Brian had to share a room and I knew this annoyed Bobby. Kenneth really needed more space for his repair and maintenance work which had flourished into a thriving business. I feared they had already outgrown Tall Chimneys in a way which I knew I never could.

  Kenneth shook his head. ‘Never,’ he said.

  While Rose was recovering from the birth she didn’t help me in the house and so I didn’t get the opportunity to gauge what she was thinking on the matter; I feared, though, that her desire for more space would outweigh Kenneth’s promise to stay.

  Colin did not visit at all, which was a relief. With Rose preoccupied by the baby and Awan at school, I put covers over the furniture in many of the rooms to save on pointless dusting and cleaning and took myself off into the gardens and up into the village as often as possible.

  In June, I arrived home from collecting Awan from school to find a jeep parked haphazardly on the gravel sweep and two US Captains waiting for me in the library. How they had found their way there, I do now know. The idea of them wandering at will through the house, ‘casing the joint’ made me anxious and angry at the same time.

  They both stood up as I entered the room. ‘Good afternoon, ma’am,’ they said in perfect unison.

  Both men wore uniform; short jackets tapered to the waist, well-tailored trousers, black boots - stout but very clean. They kept their caps tucked under their arms. They were broad in the shoulder, their hair very short, chins clean shaven. They carried with them the smell of soap - pretty strong - and (stronger still) of spearmint.

  I replied, stiffly, ‘What can I do for you gentlemen? Perhaps I ought to inform you that, in England, it is considered polite to wait until invited, before entering a house.’

  The taller of the two men proffered a document, a warrant, I supposed. ‘Indeed, ma’am, we would have preferred not to trespass, but our orders do allow…’

  I waved his letter away with a look of disgust.

  The man summoned a palpable rush of bonhomie, calling it into himself as though from thin air. He spirited the paper away and held out his hand instead, a friendly gesture accompanied by a winning smile - very white teeth, a rather engaging dimple in one cheek. ‘Captain Aloysius Brook, ma’am,’ he gushed. I steeled myself to resist his blandishments and returned a withering look. ‘And Captain Cameron Bentley,’ he swept his spurned hand out in a seamless gesture to indicate his companion. ‘2nd Battalion, 503rd PIR,[12] at your service.’

  ‘I thank you, I am not in need of a 2nd Battalion 503rd PIR,’ I said, without a glimmer of
a smile on my face. I knew what was coming.

  Captain Brook widened his smile. ‘Of course not,’ he conceded, ‘but the 2nd Battalion 503rd PIR is in need of you.’

  ‘I thought as much,’ I nodded.

  ‘Next week our first trainees arrive,’ he explained. ‘The men will be accommodated at the camp, but the officers will be billeted on local homes.’

  ‘Will they, now?’ I raised an eyebrow. ‘Mrs Coombes, at the Plough and Harrow, has comfortable rooms and cooks a wonderful breakfast,’ I said. ‘I am sure she’d be pleased to accommodate your officers.’

  Captain Bentley took a notebook from his jacket pocket and flicked through the pages. ‘Check,’ he said, quietly. I noticed a tremor in his cheek. A nervous tic?

  ‘She certainly was a very friendly lady,’ Captain Brook agreed.

  ‘Mrs Widderington at Clough Farm took in guests, before the war,’ I suggested.

  Captain Bentley leafed through his book. ‘Land Army girls…’ he muttered.

  I ran through the other houses and farms in the village where there were rooms to spare, and where the payment of a billeting fee would be welcome. As I spoke the names, Captain Bentley gave an apologetic nod of agreement. ‘We’ve visited everywhere, ma’am,’ he said, avoiding my eye, ‘and we still have four officers to place.’ The twitch in his cheek continued to pull at the corner of his mouth. He rubbed his chin from time to time, as though to calm it.

  ‘The fact is,’ I said, ‘this house is already used for war purposes. I can’t say too much, I am sure you understand.’

  ‘Loose lips sink ships,’ Captain Bentley said, sagely, staring at a faded flower on the library carpet.

  ‘What kind of war purposes?’ Captain Brook enquired, conversationally.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I replied, and went off to telephone Colin.

  It took a while to get through. In the meantime, I served tea. The men drank from the delicate porcelain cups with great care, and hid their dislike of the beverage as best they could. I answered their questions monosyllabically. Only Awan provided any distraction from the stand-off which was, effectively, taking place across the library hearth rug. She brought an atlas down from a shelf and asked the men to show her where they came from. Captain Brook pointed to New York, Captain Bentley showed her a small town on the shores of Lake Michigan, ‘St Joseph’s,’ he said.