Tall Chimneys: A British Family Saga Spanning 100 Years

by Allie Cresswell

  ‘You have been a spy,’ I said, with a shudder. Even though she had been on our side, it still felt, to me, like a disreputable occupation, dishonest and double-dealing.

  Amelia laughed. ‘Poor little Evelyn,’ she said, and her remark made me wither inside.

  When she came back from town she was laden with bags - how she had bought so much with clothing coupons I did not know, but then, I realised, she probably had cash or some governmental authority which would allow her to buy whatever she wanted. ‘What a God-forsaken little town,’ she complained. ‘Hardly any Christmas decorations and no Christmas cheer whatsoever. In Germany, even with the war on, they know how to celebrate Christmas.’

  ‘Perhaps the Fuhrer’s entourage do,’ I replied. ‘I suppose the ordinary Germans have it as bad as we do. The Jews, I understand, have it a whole lot worse.’

  Amelia ignored my barbed remark. ‘Come upstairs with me,’ she said, airily, as she passed through the kitchen, ‘and see what I have bought.’

  She laid her purchases out onto the bed and I saw immediately why she had made such a good spy; she was a chameleon, able to blend seamlessly in to whatever background she found herself in. The clothes she had bought were much like mine - conservative, practical, hard-wearing. ‘Suitable for a daughter of Yorkshire, do you think?’ she asked, holding a woollen skirt up against herself, and layering it with a thick cotton blouse and long-line cardigan.

  ‘You’ll blend right in,’ I said.

  ‘That’s the idea,’ she smiled. ‘I’ve bought vests too. This place is freezing - you do know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Fuel is rationed,’ I said, ‘so we can’t use the furnace.’

  She laid down the skirt ensemble and picked up a two-piece suit. ‘This is a horrible colour,’ she observed (it was brown), ‘I’d have liked it better in dove grey, or pale blue, but there wasn’t any choice.’ She turned back to the mirror, to admire the effect.

  ‘There’s plenty of wood for the fires, though,’ I went on, ‘assuming someone gathers it and chops it up.’

  Amelia had her back to me. Perhaps she didn’t realise I could see her face in the mirror, but she gave an exasperated eye roll at my comment, and inspected her nails, ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I think I draw the line at that.’

  ‘Someone has to do it,’ I retorted.

  ‘I’ve done enough for King and Country, don’t you think?’ She looked up and our eyes met, through the silvered surface of the mirror.

  ‘This is nothing to do with King and Country,’ I said, with a bitter note to my voice which I couldn’t conceal. ‘This is family. Everything I do is to make sure that the people and the place I love survive.’

  She smiled. ‘We’re not so different, after all,’ she said.

  And looking at us both, there in the mirror, she was right. Physically, there were several similarities between us. We had the same hair colour - light brown, with golden highlights - although hers was cut shorter than mine and she wore it loose, I could see we shared the same thick tresses and curly habit. Our eyes were the same shape - mine perhaps a shade or two darker brown - and our eyebrows had the same arch. Our skin tone and texture was identical, but Amelia’s bone structure was more sculpted, her cheek bones having a greater prominence, and she had a sharper chin and nose. She was a few inches taller than me (but wore boots with heels) and was several pounds lighter; in fact she was slim to the point of thinness, not only on her waist and hips but also her arms and shoulders. But then, I considered, she had borne no children - the end of many women’s waistlines - nor had she done physical work, as I had, preserving her from developed muscles which were perhaps not very feminine.

  ‘Isobel was fair, and very slight,’ I said. ‘She is the only other sister I remember. I lived with her, you know, when I was small.’

  ‘She took after Father,’ Amelia said, ‘like Colin.’

  ‘And we look like our mother?’

  Amelia nodded. Now I thought about it, George had also had our colouring. Of our oldest brother, the one who had died in the first war, and our older sister, I had no memory of at all.

  ‘William and Josephine were unlike either mother or father,’ Amelia said, as though she had been privy to my thoughts. ‘Both thick-set, with wiry hair and an over-bite. No beauties. They took after Grandmother Harris’ side of the family. Thankfully Mother - and therefore we - escaped it.’

  We both smiled. Perhaps there could be, I speculated, briefly, some sisterly accord between us? Did I mind so much if Amelia didn’t pull her weight around the house? What was one more mouth to feed, when I had catered for the airmen with relative ease? It would be good for Awan to have a woman around who had travelled, a worldlier woman than I would ever be. Maybe, in time, Amelia would take Awan to London or even further afield.

  ‘John has had to pretend to be in love with you,’ I said, raising a subject which we had hitherto not broached. I said it with an amused tone, as if the thing was absurd in itself but also very clever, since it had fooled the enemy so successfully.

  ‘Pretend?’ Amelia almost shouted, and turned from the mirror to rummage in her handbag for a cigarette. The confidential moment was broken. ‘Well, it wasn’t so difficult. After a few years we both got quite used to the subterfuge. At times, I almost believed it was true.’ She threw herself onto a chaise longue and looked at me narrowly through the haze of smoke from her cigarette.

  ‘And how far…’ I began, faltering, now that I was on this dangerous ground. How much did I really want to know?

  ‘Oh, you know,’ Amelia said, archly, ‘the usual things, what would have been natural, in the circumstances. We went at it very…’ she flicked ash onto the hearth. It missed, and cascaded onto the carpet, ‘professionally, let us say,’ she concluded.

  I swallowed down a lump in my throat. The absolute certainty I had had in John since seeing his pictures at the gatehouse began to melt. After all, it came to me, with a sickening clarity, those pictures could as easily have been of Amelia, as of me.

  John did not improve. The doctor expressed grave concern. ‘Without an X ray it isn’t possible to be certain, but given his history, I’d say the TB is back with a vengeance,’ he said. He suggested transferring John to a specialist hospital. ‘The journey alone, though,’ he warned, ‘will be dangerous.’

  ‘Then, of course, he should not undertake it,’ I reasoned.

  The doctor sucked on his pipe. ‘I’ve already told you the air here will never be conducive, even if we manage to shake this infection. Long term, Mr Cressing cannot remain here at Tall Chimneys. As before, he needs dry air, a warm climate, as well as medication which, unfortunately, doesn’t come cheap.’

  I gave a hard swallow, but Amelia said, ‘Whatever it costs, we can pay.’

  ‘We can’t.’ I corrected her.

  ‘We can,’ she repeated.

  I devoted myself to John’s care, sitting by his bed through the nights, wiping his mouth after the dreadful coughing fits, changing the pillowslips which were often dark with blood and mucus. His breathing was dreadful; bubbling like a subterranean geyser. Kenneth helped me move him off the bed and into a chair while I changed the sheets and several nights he came in unasked and ushered me off to bed.

  ‘I’ll watch him,’ he said in a low voice. ‘You can trust me.’

  I stood against him for a moment, my head drooping with tiredness, resting on the flat of his hard chest, and felt as though I was resting in the lee of a massive and ancient tree. I felt sheltered, momentarily, from the onslaught of John’s illness and what I feared would come. I could trust him, just for a few hours, to relieve me of the burden of it. Kenneth placed his hands on my arms and lifted me away from himself. ‘Go to bed,’ he whispered.

  To be fair, Amelia also took her turn. Whereas I sighed and wept, and stroked John’s hand, she sat impassively, doing what was necessary for his care but showing no sign of emotion.

  One night, as we sat in his room watching over him, she said to m
e, ‘I think we’ll have to take him to America. I can’t think of anywhere else where the climate and the medical help will be good enough, or where we can get to in safety.’

  ‘I shouldn’t think we could get to America, could we?’ I replied, dully. ‘Surely ordinary people can’t cross the Atlantic? And anyway, it isn’t safe. What about the U boats?’

  She shook her head with irritation at my naivety. ‘We will fly,’ she said. ‘John isn’t an ‘ordinary’ person, he has military clearance, and so do I. I can arrange transport on an aircraft for us.’

  ‘For… the two of you?’ My heart felt like a stone in my chest.

  Amelia gave me a straight look. ‘Let’s be honest with each other, shall we? John is dying here. If he goes to America and gets the best treatment he may survive. He might not survive the journey, it might be too late for any treatment to save him, but at least there’s a chance. If he stays here, he’ll have none. This infection or the next one. It will carry him off. Even if the TB doesn’t. But it will.’

  I began to cry. ‘You put it so baldly,’ I sobbed.

  ‘Of course,’ she nodded, reasonably, ‘what other way is there?’

  The room suddenly seemed very small and suffocating. A single lamp burned in a far corner of the room so as not to disturb John but the darkness which overlaid the rest of the space and the heavy curtains across the window seemed to smother me. The heat from the fire in the grate felt overwhelming. My sobs became more laboured, my chest rising and falling but seeming to bring no air and no relief. In a far, arbitrary part of my brain it occurred to me that this must be how John felt - asphyxiated, fighting for air. I was desperate to get out but the thought of leaving Amelia and John alone was equally unsupportable. I felt if I walked out now I would never see him again.

  ‘Couldn’t Awan and I come with you?’ I gasped out.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Amelia said, indifferently, as though considering a trifle. ‘And even if you could, would you? I mean, aren’t you rather…’ she gave a dry smile, ‘rooted here?’

  ‘I have had to be,’ I said, bitterly. ‘Life has offered me no alternative.’

  ‘Life has plenty of alternatives to offer,’ she countered, ‘it is you who have not grasped them. Evelyn, what do you image the world out there to be like? Do you think of it as it was when you travelled to Isobel’s when Mother fell ill? When was that? 1915? 1916? Were you taken in a pony trap to the station, and collected at the other end in a hansom cab? Did Isobel wear corsets and a dress to the floor?’

  I stared at her. She had described exactly the world I remembered.

  She went on, rubbing salt into my wound. ‘Were there bobbing servants and dainty sandwiches and little girls being seen and not heard? I suppose church-going was obligatory, and tea with the Vicar, and modesty and maidenhood placed on the altar along with the chalice and holy wafers? A girl’s ‘reputation’ was as precious as her actual virginity - more precious, probably.’

  She stopped to light a cigarette. In the light of the match her face was angular and ugly. ‘That was thirty years ago!’ she muttered, almost to herself. ‘My God, the hypocrisy of it!’

  She smoked for a while in silence, but then burst out again. ‘I know plenty of girls who screwed the footmen but wore white to marry earls in Westminster Abbey! But Evelyn, those thirty years have seen indescribable changes. The world of now is unrecognisable! Life is hectic and noisy. It’s fast and exciting. Women have broken free. They are working alongside men, outside the home, going to university, living alone. They have their independence and they use it to live how they damned well like. Think of that, will you? A woman with a lover is nothing - lots of women have lovers, several lovers! And children too. You aren’t as special as you think. It isn’t easy, sometimes, in practical ways, but it’s done and no one turns a hair. You could have lived out in the world, Evelyn, with John, and although some few old-fashioned, small-minded people might have judged you privately no one would have done so publicly; they understand that the world has moved on. You would not have been shunned, as you seem to imagine. In some circles, you would have been respected, held up as a positive example, even, of what emancipated womanhood looks like in this day and age.’ Her soliloquy ended, Amelia threw her cigarette butt into the fire and leaned back in her chair with the air of a woman who has at last got something off her chest.

  Her tirade had brought my tears to a halt. ‘It’s too late, now,’ I said, tremulously.

  ‘Too late for you,’ Amelia said, shortly, and, with a glance at the bed, ‘and for him, more’s the pity.’

  A few seconds passed before she added, almost to herself, with a shake of her head, ‘The life you have led him.’

  Her doleful judgement on the deleterious impact I had had on John’s life caused me to lift my head up, presenting her with, I suppose, a tear-streaked face. ‘He talked about it?’

  She gave a snort of derision. ‘He spoke of little else, in connection with you. His frustration at your stubbornness, your shrinking timidity, a sense of being pulled in two.’

  ‘Oh!’ It was too much. I thought my heart would break. I had ruined John’s life. ‘I thought he loved me. Whatever compromises we have had to make, I thought it must be worth it for him, because of that,’ I cried, ‘because at least, despite everything, he loved me.’

  Amelia stood up. In the shadowy room, lit from behind by the lamp, she seemed enormous to me, towering over the bed, the prone figure of John and myself, perched round-shouldered like a defeated bird on a hard chair, a balled up handkerchief clutched in my fist. ‘You ninny,’ she jeered, and I thought, for a moment, I heard something else in her voice, more than just derision, more than sneering rebuke, but another, sourer note, something caustic which burned her as much as it did me, ‘he does.’

  Amelia spent the next few days organising things on the telephone. It wasn’t easy. Christmas was almost upon us and it seemed the people who could help her had already left for the holiday. In desperation she caught a very early train and travelled to London, returning late at night but clutching a sheaf of paperwork; Visas, letters of authority, medical certificates and the like.

  Meanwhile John’s fever broke and he seemed better, although very weak. The doctor came and listened to his chest and took samples of sputum away for analysis. He shone a bright light in John’s eye, and frowned.

  John had no energy at all, even walking from the bed to the chair seemed to exhaust him, so he gave up on it. I washed him and dressed him in clean pyjamas each morning, and propped him up on many pillows, which seemed to ease his cough. I gave him books to read, but they lay unopened on the bedside table. Sometimes a programme on the wireless would interest him, but usually his attention would stray before ten minutes were out, and he would doze. He liked having the curtains open so he could see the kitchen garden, bare of interest as it was, and the sparrows in the trees. Awan came to show him some of the things she had been making at school and to sing carols to him from the other side of the French windows, which she did so loudly that the rooks on the chimneys all took off in fright. John smiled and applauded and I hoped Awan could not see the tears which coursed down his waxy cheeks as he did so.

  Christmas Day came. I went across the yard to give Awan her gifts in the morning, and later again to eat my second Christmas dinner with Rose and Kenneth and their family. Earlier, Amelia and I had shared a scrawny chicken and some vegetables. The atmosphere between us was leaden. She drank most of a bottle of champagne.

  After the meal she got up and picked up the bottle. ‘I’m going upstairs,’ she said, heavily. ‘We leave on New Year’s Eve. It’s all arranged.’

  I took John his meal on a tray. He ate very little of it; next to nothing, in fact.

  ‘Amelia is going to take you to America,’ I said. ‘You’ll get better, there.’

  ‘So I believe,’ he said, wanly.

  ‘You don’t want to go?’ It was craven of me to ask. ‘I don’t know,’ I went on, with an atte
mpt at hilarity, smoothing down an already smooth bedsheet, ‘I seem to be perpetually sending you off abroad into the arms of other women!’

  John threw me a look. ‘My neck is sore,’ he said, by way of rejoinder.

  I ran my hands over it - it was clammy to the touch although the room was warm. His hair was long again, as it had been the day I had first seen him, but silvered now with streaks of grey and lacking the lustre it had had then. I pushed it to one side. There was a lump beneath the surface of the skin, the size of a quail’s egg, quite hard and red.

  ‘A boil,’ I said. ‘I’ll get you a dressing.’

  As I dressed the lump, I said, ‘I found your pictures at the gatehouse. You caught me unawares.’

  ‘You were not at all aware, when I sketched them,’ he said, quietly, ‘altogether in another place.’

  ‘They are nothing like your work of late,’ I remarked.

  ‘You are like nothing I have ever painted,’ he said. ‘No style I tried could capture you.’

  ‘You needed no style to capture me,’ I replied, in a quiet voice. ‘I was yours from the moment you appeared on the north wing.’

  ‘And I was yours.’

  I kissed him, very gently.

  The effort of talking had tired him; his eyes were dull with fatigue. ‘We can get married now, if you want to,’ he murmured, but he was more asleep than awake, and I did not reply.

  We celebrated Awan’s birthday quietly. It would have been a boring day for her but that it snowed heavily in the late morning and she spent all afternoon out with the boys building a snow man and throwing snowballs. Being a girl seemed no hindrance to her, and buttered no parsnips with the lads, and why should it? She was hale and strong, had a good throwing arm, was equal to climbing any tree and could whittle a decent stick - all essential attributes for being in Bobby’s crew. (She also, I heard much later, from Bobby, had a convincing right hook and a ribald line in swear words.) I watched them playing on the whitened surface of the front lawn. The sky above was purple with more snow, the trees absolutely still, as though playing musical statues with little crystalline peaks of snow balanced on every limb and twig. Above, behind and around me, the house was silent, as though deserted, although I knew that in Mrs Simpson’s room Amelia was packing, (lamenting her lack of wardrobe for January in Texas) and John was listening to a concert on the wireless. I felt as though I, the house, the whole of our weird little depression in the Yorkshire moor, had been frozen in time, or perhaps were echoes of a myth, smoky reflections of an enchantment intruded upon through some trick of mystery by these children, to play in the charmed grounds in make-believe snow.