Tall Chimneys: A British Family Saga Spanning 100 Years

by Allie Cresswell

  Perhaps John felt it too. He stood up, abruptly. ‘We never pretended it would be otherwise,’ he said, coldly. ‘But in spite of that, I have asked you repeatedly to come away with me. We could have lived discreetly in London.’

  ‘Discreetly? Discreetly!’ I yelled. ‘Is that to be the story of my life? Kept quiet, hidden away where I won’t enrage the public sensibility? Am I always to be the Talbot’s disreputable daughter?’

  John laughed; a cold, cynical sound. ‘Only in your own eyes, Evelyn. And even the most august families have their skeletons. Look at the Mitfords!’

  ‘I don’t care to look at the Mitfords, much less be numbered amongst them,’ I said. ‘Hasn’t the one who married Oswald Mosley been interned?’ Another of the daughters had tried to take her own life, I recalled. The way I was feeling at that moment, I sympathised with her. She must have felt torn in two by the declaration of war as I did, now.[13]

  ‘You make my point for me. Indeed she has, and yet she is by no means shunned by the rest of her family or by society in general,’ John fumed. ‘Victoria is long-dead, and with her the harsh moral values she enshrined. People are liberated, now. They are deciding for themselves what is right and proper.’

  ‘Then why is the Mitford woman in prison?’

  ‘Politics. Not morality.’ He gave me a cold, withering glare before turning away and lighting a cigarette. ‘With or without the society of people like them,’ he muttered, through the smoke, ‘we could have been happy’.

  ‘Happy?’ I snatched at his word. ‘Have you not been happy then? And if not, why have you kept on coming back?’

  We faced each other across the room. I had never seen John so angry, even with Ratton. ‘Because you wouldn’t come with me!’ he thundered. ‘If you had only come then I wouldn’t… I wouldn’t have had to…’ Suddenly he brought his hand up to his mouth and pressed his lips closed, sealing whatever confession he had been about to make securely inside. What had he been about to admit? I imagined the worst; numerous concubines, several bastard children.

  John took a few deep breaths and gathered himself. Then he moved round the table to stand behind me. ‘You know why I keep coming back,’ he said, hoarsely, all trace of his former angst evaporated as though it had never been. ‘Surely you do. Don’t you?’ My soup had gone cold and my tears spilled into it. He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed. ‘But look, don’t torture yourself,’ he said. ‘Things will become clear. Just remember, Evelyn, whatever happens, whatever you decide, I love you, and I understand.’

  I heard his footsteps down the long, stone-flagged passageway to the back door. I waited for the creak of the door hinge, the rasp of the catch where it always stuck, but there was nothing, only the echo of our angry words.

  ‘As if that helps,’ I said, bitterly. I waited for his reply, but none came. Presently I turned, expecting to see him hovering in the shadow in the corridor, but the place was empty. Then I recalled Cam had oiled the hinge and repaired the catch.

  Later, in the evening, I picked up the newspaper John had been reading and scanned it listlessly. A small paragraph caught my eye.

  Soon after dark on 7 November, the 503rd PIR battalion took off from Land’s End. The thirty-nine C-47s headed for La Senia, Algeria, constituting the first wave attack of the North Africa Campaign. The widely-scattered battalion suffered casualties, both KIAs and WIAs. After reorganizing, the battalion re-grouped at Maison Blanche.

  John and I did not discuss the matter again. He was kind towards me, but kept his distance, showing his care in small ways; bringing tea in the morning and cycling up to the village to collect the all-important newspaper, which I read voraciously, looking for news, suspecting even as I did so that he had already read it, and was in possession of the information which I dreaded.

  Day followed tormented day; the radio was silent on the subject of the situation in Algeria, the newspapers a blank page. The more stretched out my uncertainty, the greater my sense of panic, the surer I became that, should he survive, I would go with Cam to America and marry him. It was almost as though I hoped my resolving so might keep him alive. I burned, I yearned to know that he lived. I would leave Tall Chimneys; it would be worth the sacrifice, I told myself, if Cam would only live. I would embrace the church, even the shrivel-lipped women who looked at me askance in the village street. I would ask God to wash my sins away. I would wear white, and make my vows, and look them all in the eye.

  But then I would catch sight of Kenneth working in the gardens or scaling the old stone walls to repair a window or re-point the masonry. His dedication to Tall Chimneys was absolute, selfless and enduring. He was Tall Chimneys, as much as I was. The house encompassed his past and his destiny as surely as it encompassed mine. What would he be, without it? What would happen to him, and Rose and their family if I left, and where on earth in the world did I belong but here, with them? And all the while John waited diffidently for some word or gesture from me, as unsure as to his fate as I was. His dignity and faithfulness further overbalanced my resolve. How could I leave him? It would break his heart, and I would rather break my own. How could the love we had shared be called sinful? And what did I care about frowning looks from people whose opinion I did not respect, or the judgement of a God in whom I did not believe?

  Was it possible to love two men at the same time?

  Yes, indeed, it was.

  I vacillated between my options, and day followed day, and no news came.

  John took Awan to school and brought her home again. Together they went into the woods and selected our Christmas tree. The temperature plummeted. We had snow. It was very cold but we had to ration our use of fuel to run the generator. More officers came. Automatically I prepared rooms in the east wing for them, and cooked, and smiled as they discussed their training. The aeroplanes flew lower and lower over the moor and the woods, sometimes seeming so close their under-carriages might brush the tops of the trees. The men jumped from lower and lower altitudes, surviving plummets of only 143 feet, the lowest ever attempted. I watched them with distracted eyes, their tiny black forms against the steely winter sky, imagining other airmen falling through air which was searingly bright onto parched, unforgiving earth.

  Then, on Christmas Eve, a parcel arrived from the new quartermaster at the camp. I decanted the contents without much interest; chocolate, coffee, a bottle of Scotch. At the bottom of the box, there was a letter. I tore it open. It was from Captain Brook.

  ‘Cameron and I survived the attack on 8th November, In spite of our losses, spirits were high. Cam’s were especially high; he talked a good deal of home, improvements he meant to make on the farm, fixing up the house. You will know better than I the significance of this. On 15 November approximately 300 paratroopers jumped into an open area near Youks les Bains on the Tunisia - Algeria border. The ensuing thrust east to cut off the German lines of communications required a third airborne drop of 30 paratroopers and heavy equipment to destroy an enemy railroad bridge. Cameron and I volunteered to lead the attack. I am sorry to have to tell you that of the 30 paratroopers to descend on the objective only six returned to friendly lines. Cameron was not amongst them.’[14]

  1943 was a terrible year in Britain but nowhere was it darker or more dreadful than in my heart. I wallowed in my sadness, drinking the loss of Cameron Bentley like hemlock.

  The year passed - as I had predicted it would - but my complacency about the permanence of things at Tall Chimneys was utterly shattered. The seasons turned without purpose, like a mad dog chasing its own tail; the futility of it gaped like a yawning chasm at my feet. My heart felt so heavy within me, like a boulder, and I edged closer and closer to the lip of the abyss willing it to topple me over. I moved through the days like an automaton, mechanically washing and dressing, preparing food, washing sheets. I was barely conscious of other people; their conversation was like the drone of a fly in an empty room. Occasionally I felt John’s arms around me, or Awan’s little hand in mine. On several oc
casions, I think, Kenneth found me wandering in the gardens without coat or shoes, and brought me home. I have blurred recollections of Rose steering me to a chair from where she had found me staring glassily out of a window in one of the far rooms of the house. She would chafe my hands, and place a cup to my lips. At night John would put me to bed and draw the curtains, and I would sink into the oblivion of sleep, and hope never to wake.

  That year is all shadow in my memory; parched of colour, flavour and sensation. What remembrances I have are fragmentary; a rabbit thrashing helplessly in a snare, the percussive thud of axes at the base of a sycamore on the edge of the woods. One night in April John hurried Awan and me to the ice house while a gale tore limbs off trees and threatened to topple the swaying chimney pots and bring them down on our heads. It was like a dream to me, his sense of urgency a distant and unsubstantiated imperative.

  He implored me to follow him. ‘The chimneys are swaying, Evelyn!’ he cried into the teeth of the wind, but I watched him disappear into the lashing rain with Awan in his arms and remained behind with the wind. I looked on with distracted curiosity as it rampaged round the yard overturning planters and scattering logs from the log pile and sending slates cascading off the roof to shatter like porcelain all around me. Then other voices joined the cacophony as Kenneth and Rose hurried from their accommodations, and I let them hurry me to safety without acknowledging there had been any danger at all.

  I remember voices always muttering just out of earshot; people whispering, a low drone of secrets a perpetual soundscape at the back of consciousness. Periodically I might wonder what they were saying, and instantly realise that I didn’t care.

  That spring was wet, but I don’t recall the runnels of water which would have spouted down the by-ways of the crater between the mossy stones and gnarly tree roots. I have no recollection of the sun which, I am told, was so generous for the rest of the year. My world seemed rendered in the grainy monochrome of newspaper photographs; grimy and unpleasant to the touch - I shrank from engagement with it in any form. Its details at the time and in hindsight are indistinct and in some way unimportant, as though not connected to me at all; third or fourth hand, obsolete, scenes from an insignificant archive.

  Food tasted like wet newspaper in my mouth; as often as not I left whatever had been put before me untasted.

  Of course I recovered. Bereavement does not kill us even when we lose the companion of a lifetime, how much less when our connection with the lost is only of a few weeks’ duration. Life goes on, as they say, and indeed it does, however hard we might will it to end. Sonnet writers might have it otherwise, but nobody ever died of a broken heart and no more did I. Looking back on it now, so many years later, I can see my reaction to Cam’s death went much further than mourning simply the cruel and pointless death of a beautiful young man. In taking him, life, fate, God (call it what you will) had snatched from my grasp a chance - oh so briefly dangled - of freedom, a freedom I had not even known that I wanted until that moment. I had spent my life telling myself I was free, within the safe parameters of Tall Chimneys, free to be loved by John, to bring up my child, free enough even to make a contribution to our sequestered rural society. By showing me an alternative Cam had pulled back the veil to reveal my freedom had been a specious facsimile; Tall Chimneys had in fact been a gilded prison and I its complicit captive. I do not know to this day whether I would have taken the opportunity he offered, gone to America, become his wife. I only know that it presented a choice, something I had never had before. I mourned his death, I missed the man. I lamented the opportunity I would never now have. But most of all I found I grieved for the illusion of liberty and security which had been stripped away. I would never feel entirely free at Tall Chimneys, or completely safe within its boundaries, ever again. My sense of it as an impenetrable domain had been shattered; life could and would impinge. But far from making me abandon its crumbling masonry I clung all the more desperately to it; if life here could be compromised, I reasoned, how much more vulnerable would I be beyond it?

  With the Allies now firmly on the offensive, the airbase on the moor ceased operations and the stream of billeted officers stopped. A skeleton crew maintained the buildings but very few flights came or went. John went away on some occasions but he was never away long; I did not know what arrangements he made with the Intelligence Corps and assumed (wrongly, as it turned out) his period of usefulness had come to an end. He painted and his work was in demand. Our financial situation commensurately eased but ironically there was nothing to spend any money on; no luxury goods or nice clothes.

  We had seen virtually nothing of Colin for almost eighteen months and I had, perhaps, become a little lax in keeping things in readiness for his visits. Then, one afternoon in the early autumn of 1943, there he was, rolling down the drive in a swanky black motorcar with two companions in tow: Sylvester Ratton and Giles Percy. John was with me in the rose garden when they arrived and to my surprise Colin announced it was John they had come to see. So he helped carry the men’s few bags into the house and then waited, a thing he would never under ordinary circumstances have done. I thought Colin looked thin and rather ill, very pale. His nose was sharp and beak-like, his suit hung off him. He disappeared to make a telephone call almost immediately, leaving John, Ratton and Giles, a triumvirate of awkward associations and rattling skeletons as far as I was concerned, in the hall. John greeted Ratton with a curt nod of greeting but, to my surprise, shook hands warmly with Giles. That the two of them were acquainted separately from me seemed incongruous, like two worlds colliding.

  Giles was a grotesque iteration of the young man he had once been. He had put on weight, his body thickened and ponderous; he had the corpulence of good living. His youthful skin had coarsened and there were broken veins on his cheeks. His teeth were yellowed from smoking. But his hair, previously very closely cropped, had grown out, restoring the characteristic - and now rather anachronistic - halo of blond curls around his head and his eyes were as intensely blue as I remembered them. These positives failed to outweigh the negatives in his appearance and in comparison, I thought John by far the handsomer of the two even though he was some years older.

  Ratton bore comparison with neither; very stout and entirely bald, he had done away with the mean little moustache so his head looked more than ever like an unbaked loaf. He had swapped his rimless spectacles for ones with a heavier, tortoiseshell frame. They didn’t fit properly and were constantly slipping down his tiny nose. Nevertheless he was still clearly very successful; his suit was hand-made and his shoes hand-tooled. The diamond in the ring he wore on his little finger was larger and more sparkly, set off by another in the pin on his silk tie. He seemed to take delight in the encounter between Giles and John, watching them both with a bright, anticipatory light in his eyes. Rather than strolling at ease round the hall or through the rooms, or going upstairs to unpack his bag, he remained stubbornly in front of the unlit fire and looked from one to the other of us, his rosebud mouth wet with anticipation.

  Giles, John and I made desultory conversation about the war and the weather while Colin could be heard speaking in a low tone on the telephone.

  Presently, Ratton asked, ‘Is the child at school?’ John bristled visibly, recalling, I suppose, Ratton’s mean trick on Awan at their last encounter. But I could see at once what was fuelling his devious excitement.

  I looked at my watch. Rose had agreed to collect the children that day and they would be home at any moment. I thought to rush downstairs and head them off, to prevent a face-to-face encounter between her and Giles. Giles might be bloated and blighted, as far removed from Awan’s fresh-faced litheness as it was possible to imagine, but no-one, not Giles, not John, perhaps even not Awan herself, could possibly ignore the unmistakable likenesses of eye and hair between father and daughter once they were in the same room. But fate was unkind and, at that moment, I heard Awan’s light tread on the servants’ stairs and her voice calling our names. She burst throug
h the baize door and stepped into the hall, her uniform all askew from a day’s work and play at school, her blonde curls rampaging free of the neat plaits I had made for them that morning, a slab of pie in her hand.

  ‘Mummy, can I eat this…’ she began, holding the pie out in front of her. Then she saw the company and fell silent. ‘Ooops,’ she whispered, looking from John to me and back again, and casting a shy glance across the hall at ‘Uncle’ Ratton.

  Giles gasped - it must have been like looking backwards in time at a younger version of himself. He paled, visibly, and then flushed. His eyes widened. He took a step back and almost stumbled on the lip of the hearth. John threw out a hand to catch his elbow, lest he fall entirely, and guided him into a chair. Then John too looked across the hall to see what had so utterly spooked the visitor. Of course he saw it immediately - how could he not, with such an eye that he had for both the outward appearances of things and for their underlying structures? The blue of their eyes, the curl of their hair, the hue of its tresses - these were the least of it. How much more the matters of proportion, limb-length, the quality of flesh and bone? They were exact facsimiles of each other and you didn’t have to be a painter to know it. It was as though threads of genetic connection looped across the space between them like skeins of cobweb. John gave a sort of grunt of surprise, and turned to me with a raised, questioning eyebrow. I gave a slight nod.

  ‘Well,’ Ratton burst out, rubbing his fat little hands together, ‘this is interesting, isn’t it?’

  ‘What is?’ Colin asked, stepping back into the hall.

  ‘Three gentlemen visitors, and only one slice of pie,’ I said, quickly. ‘You’d better eat it, darling,’ I turned to Awan, ‘before they start to squabble.’