Tall Chimneys: A British Family Saga Spanning 100 Years

by Allie Cresswell

  Sometimes, after Awan had gone to bed, they would bring the gramophone downstairs and play their music; black women with voices like treacle keening for lost loves, black men lamenting their lot, jazz music which jangled and confused and set the teeth on edge like a cupboard full of demented pans and crazed cooking utensils, dance music which energised tired legs and set them moving to its irresistible beat. They taught me to jitterbug, taking it in turn to whirl and twirl me on the kitchen flagstones, pulling me this way and that while my feet, of their own volition, skipped and swivelled beneath me. On these evenings it struck me once again that Tall Chimneys had provided me with a sort of family, a surrogate for the one I had never known, and these members of it, as temporary and passing as they might be, were gaining as much from our brief association as Awan and I were.

  For some reason that I could not fathom, Kenneth took against the Americans. As men they were as unlike him as it was possible to conceive; whereas he was taciturn and self-effacing, they were garrulous and brash. Kenneth was loyal to his core, while the US troops had a reputation of being flighty and unreliable. They were known to be womanisers, something Kenneth would never be. But this divergence in character did not go far enough to explain his antipathy. I wondered if it was simply their military nature which had riled him, recalling a vague idea I had entertained that he did not approve of war. But then Rose let it slip that he had agreed to help in the rehabilitation of some wounded soldiers, teaching them car engine maintenance, so I knew his resentment of the GIs must stem from something else. In the end I told myself he was just jealous, too used to being the only man about the place. He and Rose declined my invitations to join in the fun in the kitchen during the evenings. He debarred Rose from any duties in the men’s rooms, which was unhelpful, as it meant I had to shoulder the extra work myself.

  ‘They’re just men away from home,’ I told him one afternoon, when a sudden shower had drenched the sheets on the line and I knew Rose would not help me put them all through the mangle again.

  ‘They’re men who’ll take advantage,’ he replied, ‘mark my words. Rose will keep them at arm’s length, and so should you.’

  ‘You’re jealous,’ I laughed.

  But he returned my humour with a hard look. ‘Of course I am,’ he said. ‘I guard my own.’

  Captain Bentley - Cameron, or Cam, as he liked to be called - remained grounded and on light duties for some weeks. His burned arm didn’t heal well and at one point the scabbed skin got infected. When not at the base he made himself useful around the house. I found him one day repairing the drawers of the unco-operative chest from his room. It was an awkward operation, with one arm incapacitated, but he had managed to secure the drawer to a table using clamps. ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ he said with an apologetic smile, looking up from his work, ‘it’ll work good as new when I’m done.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ I said. ‘Where did you get those clamps from? Kenneth’s workshop?’ I knew Kenneth would not happily have lent Cam any of his precious tools.

  ‘No ma’am,’ he grinned. ‘From camp.’

  Cleaning his room a few days later I tried the refurbished drawers - they slid smoothly in and out as they had never done in my entire recollection. His clothes were folded up neatly inside. Seeing them there - tidy and in some way vulnerable, like a tucked-in child sleeping - made me feel as though I were spying, and I closed the drawer quickly. But the next day I asked him if he’d take a look at the flap-doored wardrobe. ‘Only too happy to, ma’am,’ he grinned.

  That summer was balmy and kind, as though the weather had decided to give us a holiday between the horrors that had gone before and those that were to come. Oh, I know that abroad the war continued unabated. In the Western Desert Campaign Rommel was outwitting and defeating our troops at every turn, culminating in the defeat at Tobruk. At the beginning of July Sevastopol fell to the Germans, a bitter blow to the war on the Eastern front. We all knew the allies were gathering themselves for something big; plans were in train, preparations being made. No-one said what, or when, but we knew it, and relentlessly, day after day, the aeroplanes took off over the moor and dropped their cargo to earth, like sycamore seeds in autumn. In the meantime, we basked in days of warm sunshine, reaped the harvest of fruit and vegetables we had sown and took pleasure in little things.

  John did not come home; his letters indicated great industry in the Intelligence Corps and some success at the exhibition. I wrote back and described our crop of peas and runner beans and the arduous watering regime needed to keep everything alive in this period of drought.

  Throughout July and into August Cam laboured alongside me in the gardens and vegetable patch. He said it reminded him of home and I was doing him a favour by allowing it. He wore shirt-sleeves or even just a white vest, his trousers held up by braces. I remarked on them and he said ‘Do you mean my suspenders?’ making me burst out laughing. Kenneth, working at a distance, threw me a scowling look.

  Cam’s skin turned a beautiful peachy brown apart from on his arm, where the new skin stayed pink and wrinkled. The sickle-shaped mole became less obvious. He took it upon himself to fix things that were broken, proving himself skilful with wood in particular. He silenced floorboards which had squeaked for as long as I could remember, eased stubborn cupboard doors and oiled creaking hinges. He polished out scratches and steadied wonky legs; he glued and screwed and sanded. The more he did around the house, the more Kenneth seemed to resent him; I supposed he felt his toes were being trodden upon but these things needed doing and Kenneth had enough on his hands with his family, the general upkeep of Tall Chimneys, his business and his work with the wounded. Cam repaired an antiquated and long-defunct irrigation system in one of the greenhouses to ease the burden of watering the tomatoes, melons and cucumbers, and then rigged a shower pipe from some spare bits of it so the children could play in the cooling water. One day he came home from the base with a huge waxed tarpaulin, and made them a shallow bathing pool. The children frolicked and shrieked with delight, so glad to be able to cool off. Kenneth stood with his arms folded and his brow furrowed, wishing, I suppose, he had dreamt up the scheme himself. Once, when the children were in bed and Kenneth was visiting his mother, and we had sampled perhaps a glass too many of the GI’s Scotch, Rose and I used it too, stripping to our under-slips under cover of darkness and taking it in turns to shampoo each other’s hair. When I thought about it later, I realised our antics would have been in full view of those north facing rooms I had allocated the officers, and it seemed impossible they would not have witnessed the whole debauched, tipsy episode.

  In the evenings I would cook food and we ate round the kitchen table unless we had what the men called a ‘cook-out’ which involved lighting coals in an old oil drum sliced in half and placed on trestles in the yard, and cooking food over the glowing embers. There would be laughter and fun, and I would ignore Kenneth’s hunched shoulders and palpable disapproval as he tinkered in his workshop, waving away our invitations to join in. Usually, Captain Brook went off to the village (where, I suspected, he had at least one girl in thrall, which proved Kenneth’s suspicions were grounded) but Cam stayed at home and made things for the children while I read, or mended, by the light of the lamp. Despite Kenneth’s coolness towards the Americans, Cam included the boys in his industry, making little animals out of scrap wood for Brian’s ark and a catapult for Bobby. He presented these to Kenneth, who received them with poor grace. Whether the boys ever got to use them, I don’t know.

  Some nights it was too hot to sleep, even with all the windows open. I was restless and wandered the house, as was my wont. I would find Cam sitting on the terrace in the moonlight, as still as one of the mossy old statues, the darkness of his form hardly distinguishable from the black mass of the house. When I sat down next to him his skin was warm and cool at the same time, the manly smell of him had a back note of wood-polish and beeswax, and it coalesced with the scent of roses from the arbour, the lavender along the pat
hways of the parterre, the sap-rich smell of the woods beyond. Sometimes we did not speak at all but more often he would begin to speak about his brother, the things they had got up to as children, the layout of their farm, his grandmother’s baking. It was like being privy to the train of his thoughts; memories and impressions emerged like skeins of silk from his mind and wove themselves into a web of words. I felt privileged to witness the rare tapestry they formed. In response I found myself telling him something of my girlhood - my years with my sister Isobel and her daughters, my time at school - and earlier still, the Weeks at the gatehouse, as much as I could recall of the diaphanous form of my mother, the smell of the stuff my father used to put on his hair. Cam listened, occasionally nodding or putting in a ‘Uh huh,’ to encourage me along. I could hardly make out his face; he kept it turned slightly away from me. It had the effect of drawing my memories out, and my words poured into some dark pool of benign night rather than into the ear of a virtual stranger.

  But then, as time went on, Cam began to feel less and less like a stranger to me.

  It transpired as part of these nocturnal exchanges that I had never seen the sea, and, one morning, quite early, Cam arrived back from the airbase in a jeep with a hamper of food to take Awan, Bobby, Brian and me to Scarborough. I hesitated at first - I had never been so far since the days of my girlhood; John had never offered to take me to the sea but oughtn’t it be him who initiated me? But the children were wild with excitement - Bobby gathering cricket bats and balls and buckets in a frenzy (Kenneth was working on a farm that day, so wasn’t there to object) - and Rose was eager for them to have a holiday, hastily packing extra food supplies and changes of clothes. Before I had thought through the adventure it seemed we were off; I scarcely had time to find a sun hat for Awan or grab a bale of towels before we were motoring across the moor, the canvas top of the jeep pushed down, the children in the back singing songs at the tops of their voices.

  It couldn’t have been a more perfect day; the sky wide and blue, the sun unhidden, the countryside a gathered haberdashery of velvet and brocade, silken petals, iridescent feathers and lace-topped trees. It was rich, soft and inviting, and as exciting as a fantasy landscape in a children’s storybook. Cam drove easily, with one hand on the wheel, the other resting along the sill of the open window, and that stifled smile played the flesh of his cheek so it quivered. We arrived in Scarborough and parked up, the children rushing ahead to the sands, casting aside their shoes and socks and outer clothes only just in time before plunging into the shallow waves in their underwear. Cam followed them while I set out the blankets and the picnic, and looked about me at the other day-trippers and at the beach, scarred by groynes to deter enemy aircraft, and at the blue, endless ocean. The children ran in and out of the sea, shrieking, and collected shells in their buckets. Cam helped Bobby fly a kite, and built a sand castle for Brian, and ran after Awan with a rag of seaweed. In between times they came back to me for drinks of warm lemonade or bites of sandwich. Then Cam organised a game - baseball, he called it, but it looked a lot like rounders - and had a dozen children flocking around him, clamouring to join in.

  At last he flung himself down on the blanket in front of me, and flashed me a smile. ‘Having fun?’

  I nodded. Speech was almost beyond me. He had removed his shirt. His body was as perfectly sculpted as Michelangelo’s David.

  ‘In a while we’ll go and find some tea and buns. Isn’t that what you English people like? Tea and buns?’

  I laughed. ‘Tea and cake is a British staple,’ I agreed.

  ‘Like our coffee and doughnuts. You see? We’re not so different after all.’

  ‘I never said we were,’ I commented, lying back on the rug and closing my eyes.

  ‘We were given a little talk, you know, before we came over,’ Cam said. I sensed he had lain down beside me. I could feel the warmth of his shoulder next to mine.

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘About you folks being reserved. You don’t strike up conversations the way we do because you think that’s rude.’

  ‘We like to mind our own business,’ I agreed.

  ‘That you like to talk about neutral topics like the weather and sports...’

  I nodded. The sun on my body felt like honey.

  ‘…rather than your feelings.’

  An alarm bell sounded somewhere. It felt like a line had been crossed.

  ‘We were told the women would be buttoned up, severe, very stiff, and up-tight…’

  Is that how I seemed, to him?

  ‘But you’re not at all like that, are you?’ Cam’s voice sounded closer. He must have rolled over onto his side. If I’d opened my eyes, I would have seen him looking down at me, his hand supporting his head, lying next to me, like a husband next to his wife in bed. Something touched my arm - a sand creature? A flap of the blanket? A feather? I wanted to flinch, but didn’t. ‘At night, when we’re talking, just the two of us. You’re not buttoned-up at all.’

  I opened my eyes. As I had expected, his face was inches from mine, his eyes soft and honest, the sickle birth-mark so close I could see the downy hairs which covered it. We were in a glass bubble, suspended in a moment in time; the laughing children, the crashing waves, the whirling sea birds above us were far away and almost unreal, simply a backdrop for this intensely amplified reality which encased the two of us. I felt I ought to speak, to say something either very flippant and witty which would shatter the spell like a hammer through glass, or something honest and instinctive, which would seal us in for ever. But before I could summon up a reply Cam went on, without a falter in the intensity of his tone or the directness of his gaze, ‘and so, Mrs Johns, I hope you do not think you’re going to leave Scarborough without a dip in the sea.’

  I exhaled. I had not even known I had been holding my breath, but I breathed out in a long, relieving sigh, and sat up.

  I indicated my stockings, ‘Alas, I am all buttoned up,’ I smiled.

  Cam got to his feet. ‘Take them off,’ he said, and walked away to where the children were running on the sand.

  After that day, I found myself often looking upwards at the impossible bulk of an aircraft as it passed overhead. It went over so slowly it sometimes seemed it was stationary in the high blue sky, defying all physics, even gravity itself. And I thought of Cam at the - helm? Wheel? - I didn’t know how the thing was controlled, only that he was controlling it, his broad, strong hands coaxing that behemoth of metal into the sky, the faith of the hundred or so men in its belly placed in him alone.

  In the late afternoons, or at the dawn hour if he had been on a night training session, I would realise I was listening for the spray of gravel under the wheels of his jeep, the careful tread of his feet across the hall floor.

  After that day he started calling me Evelyn instead of ma’am. After that day we became friends. There was something about his company; he was like a favourite jacket - comfortable, the one you automatically reach for, but also warm and dry and reliable. Perhaps that isn’t a very flattering analogy; he was also a deeply thoughtful young man, eager to please, kind, gentle; an exceptional soul. The current of mirth I had detected that first day, which twitched at his cheek and the corner of his mouth, and which had played on his face the whole day at Scarborough, was never far from the surface. He found life amusing, and me especially, I think; anyway, I often caused him to smile.

  In September many of the Americans stationed up at the camp turned out to help local farms with the harvest and I recruited as many as I could to support my friend Ann Widderington at Clough Farm. The fair weather was due to break at the end of the week; a front of low pressure was expected, rain, perhaps even thunder storms. We laboured while the weather held fair, every ancient tractor pressed in to service, Kenneth and the camp engineers busy with repairs and maintenance. Awan, Bobby and Brian disappeared into the posse of farm and village children, who took advantage of the adults’ distraction to paddle in streams and climb trees, romp in the mo
wn fields and clamber on the haystacks. For me, who had spent a friendless childhood with only myself for company, it was a heart-warming sight. Baby Anthony was made much of, passed from arm to arm by the other women while Rose made sandwiches or dished out elderflower cordial; new babies were a rarity, most of the men being absent. We worked as a community, everyone bringing something; food, drink, a strong back, a song. I gloried in it. I belonged, this was my home and these were my neighbours.

  The Land Army girls worked the hardest of all, but their labours were made more bearable by the flattery and flirting of the GIs. Of these, Captain Brook was the worst; he schmoozed the women right and left, called them ‘baby’ and ‘doll’ and handed out chocolate and nylon stockings and cigarettes. Within his orbit, Cam, too, took the fancy of many of the girls, but he evaded their blandishments with shy courtesy.

  ‘Has he got a wife? A girl at home?’ they wanted to know.

  I had to confess I didn’t know. ‘He never mentions one,’ was all I could truthfully say.

  Cam was clearly in his element on the farm, driving tractors and working machinery, hefting haystacks, hauling the grain to the silos. Apart from his crew cut and his US Army issue trousers, you might have taken him for a local.

  On the Friday the sky was overcast. Bruised clouds closed in the sky, swallowing up the aircraft which took off from the airfield almost before they had cleared the tree tops. We redoubled our efforts, hardly stopping for food until the last bale was under cover, the final trailer-load of grain safely stored. Cam had been on duty that day and we had missed him. In the late afternoon we gathered for tea and cakes in the farm’s cobbled yard. One of the GIs announced a ‘harvest home’ dance that evening, up at the camp. A thrill of giggling excitement shimmied through the girls; their talk immediately turning to hair-washing and clothing. I picked up baby Anthony, who had begun to grizzle in his pram, and walked him into the kitchen to find Rose.