Tall Chimneys: A British Family Saga Spanning 100 Years

by Allie Cresswell

  She follows my glance. ‘Divorced,’ she says, airily, ‘no kids. You?’

  I can’t keep my true feelings from showing on my face, ‘Married,’ I tell her, ‘two kids.’

  ‘Oh.’ She is nonplussed by my tone, and I can’t blame her. What should be a matter of pride and happiness is clearly, to me, neither. ‘Where have you come from?’ I ask, to change the subject.

  ‘From York - not far. You’ve heard of York?’

  I know York was a place Evelyn distrusted - where she wouldn’t go to the movies. But I must remember that the world which has occupied my waking thoughts for the past week - as well as my dreams - isn’t the here and now; it isn’t real. I rack my brains and recall a leaflet in the diner. ‘There’s a Minster? And walls?’ I hazard.

  ‘That’s the place.’ Emma eases her hand from mine. ‘I run a small hotel there. It isn’t mine! I’m only the manager, but it suits me, and it isn’t too far from Granny. She’s gone to the chiropodist, by the way,’ she says. ‘I am tasked with looking after you until she returns.’

  ‘You’re busy,’ I say, indicating the dishes I can see on the drainer. I take the towel from her hand. ‘Let me help.’

  ‘Alright.’ Emma plunges her hands back into the sink. ‘You’re reading Granny’s great tome?’

  ‘Tome?’

  ‘Her book - her memoir.’

  ‘Oh, yes. I just finished it last night. Now, of course, I want to know what happened next!’

  ‘I can help you with some of that. Let’s finish this, and I’ll make us some coffee.’

  We take our coffee to the garden seat. The hens roam around us without concern. ‘I let them out,’ Emma says. ‘Granny will scold me - she says they dig up her seedlings and make a mess, but I can’t bear to see them shut in. I like the new henhouse though - a vast improvement on the old one.’

  Emma tells me about Kenneth and Rose’s boys. She does it neatly, one strand at a time, satisfying my need to know how each story-thread pans out, right to its end. ‘Bobby wanted to marry my mother, but she wouldn’t have him,’ Emma says. ‘He proposed every time she came home on vacation from university and on the rare occasions she came back, afterwards. I think they did have a fling, later in life. He turned up, soon after my parents split up and,’ she makes speech marks with her fingers, ‘‘‘slept on the sofa.” He was already married to someone else by then. I haven’t told Granny that, by the way.’

  ‘Neither will I,’ I assure her. ‘Did his marriage last?’

  ‘Oh yes. They lived here in the village. He took over the business from Kenneth. He and his wife retired before the millennium and moved to Scarborough. He died there a few years ago.’

  ‘Kenneth and his wife?’

  Emma laughs. ‘No, Bobby and his wife. I’m not going to tell you about Kenneth. That’s Granny’s story to tell. So that’s Bobby. Who’s next?’

  ‘Brian?’

  ‘Brian emigrated to New Zealand where he married another ex-pat girl and bought a farm. They brought up four girls but none of them has ever come home. I offered to take Granny to New Zealand but I might as well have suggested a trip to Mars.’

  ‘Some things don’t change,’ I remark, ‘she never was one for travel.’

  Emma frowns. I prefer her smile; it is full of sunshine and honesty. ‘I don’t think that’s true,’ she says. ‘She would have done, if she hadn’t had that old-fashioned idea that she would be a pariah. You’ve read her story. Don’t you think that she’s an amazing, strong, resourceful woman?’

  ‘Incredibly strong,’ I say, ‘Oh, don’t get me wrong. I think she’s a wonderful woman.’

  ‘Such a pity that she was held back by some misguided idea of sin and judgement.’

  ‘Is that what held her back? I thought it was Tall Chimneys.’

  ‘Oh it was that too, of course. She felt they belonged together.’

  ‘I know that feeling,’ I nod. ‘I’ve been down there every day. It’s ridiculous, the pull it has on me.’

  Emma’s smile returns. That’s better. ‘I love it too,’ she says, enthusiastically. ‘When I was a child, and here for the holidays, I played down there all the time. I imagined living there - a forgotten princess in an enchanted castle. Imagine if it hadn’t burned down? Imagine if you could restore it?’

  ‘I’ve thought of nothing else,’ I admit.

  She gives me a straight look, then. ‘Have you?’

  I laugh off her scrutiny. ‘It’s a pipe-dream.’

  ‘Hmm,’ she narrows an eye for a moment. ‘So, where were we?’

  ‘Anthony, I guess.’

  ‘Yes. Uncle Tony was gay. My grandfather was locked up for being gay, you remember?’

  I nod. ‘Wasn’t he chemically castrated?’

  ‘No, he did his time in prison but it broke his health. Mum did visit him before he died, which he did before they legalised homosexuality - that was in ’67. Don’t you think that’s a terrible shame? In a way, that law would have released Giles Percy like walking away from Tall Chimneys released Granny. Anyway, Uncle Tony came out in the 70s - not that it was a surprise! Granny puts it down to him losing his mother at such a young age. She thinks that being gay is a bit like eczema or depression - something that circumstances in life can cause you to have. But - whatever - Uncle Tony had a happy, gay life. He and his partner took over the shop when Granny retired. They were pillars of the community - running the village hall committee and organising the annual fete. Everybody loved them!’

  ‘You’re speaking in the past tense, though.’

  ‘Oh,’ her face falls, ‘yes. Uncle Tony was diagnosed with dementia. He died three years ago.’

  ‘So there’s nobody here, in the village, now? For Evelyn, I mean? Don’t you worry about her here, on her own, at her age?’

  ‘About Granny?’ Emma turns an incredulous face towards me. ‘You must be joking! She’s as tough as old boots.’

  ‘But,’ I indicate the house behind me, ‘is this place even fit for human habitation? There isn’t any heat. There isn’t a refrigerator. There isn’t a telephone. What would she do in an emergency?’

  ‘She had a fridge,’ Emma replies, a little defensively, ‘but it broke and she wouldn’t replace it. She eats mainly fruit and vegetables and they don’t need refrigerating. As for heat, she has the fire and the fire has a back-boiler which makes hot water. I come over whenever I can. I do on-line grocery shops for her. She won’t have a telephone. She’d be glad of an emergency and she has told me specifically that the last thing she’d want would be to be ‘saved’ or resuscitated if she was taken ill. She’s ready to die.’

  I am gripped with sadness. ‘She is?’

  Emma nods. ‘She’s old. She’s tired. She’s a hundred years old, you know! But something is holding her back.’

  I sipped my coffee. ‘It’s the house,’ I say, in a low voice. ‘She says it won’t let her go. I thought she’d gotten free of it.’

  Emma swivels on the seat to face me. She looks me in the eye - I like it, her frankness, and that we both have Evelyn’s welfare at heart. ‘She had,’ she says, ‘But Ratton...’

  ‘That guy!’ I burst out, ‘he’s a low-life!’

  ‘I know,’ Emma says. ‘He left the house to her when he died - it was his last act of callous vindictiveness, to shackle her to it again.’

  ‘She owns it? And she hasn’t ever..?’

  ‘Oh God no.’

  I like it that Emma follows my train of thought.

  ‘Much too expensive, and these days everyone would want to stick their oar in: English heritage, the planning officers, the listed buildings people. You can’t move in Britain these days for red tape, and, usually, the tape has the EU written all over it.’

  ‘The EU?’

  The European Union. We’ve been roped in by stealth. Don’t get me started.’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ I hold up a hand in surrender, ‘I won’t. But, if she sold it to someone, do you think she’d feel released?’

/>   Emma shrugs. ‘She might do.’ Her face begins to crumple, ‘but then - it’s selfish of me, I know - but I can’t imagine life without her.’

  I put my hand on her arm, ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, ‘I know how it feels, to lose someone.’

  Emma sniffs, and draws a Kleenex from her jeans pocket. ‘Don’t take any notice of me,’ she says, with a thin smile.

  Presently she goes on, ‘Yes, she might feel released if some-one bought it. But who’d do that? You’ve seen the state of the place! Only a multi-millionaire or a fool would contemplate such a thing.’

  Her words sound like a call to arms. Or a prophecy.

  That afternoon I get the conclusion to Evelyn’s story. While she and I talk, Emma busies herself discreetly about the place. She brings in a bale of clean laundry I gather she took away with her last time, and spirits away some soiled stuff for washing. At one point she places a bowl of hot soup in front of Evelyn, then I hear her upstairs, changing the bed and cleaning the little bathroom. But often she is in the room, interjecting, reminding Evelyn of dates and details, and I find my eyes drawn to her, where ever she is.

  Evelyn tells me her version of the history of Kenneth and Rose’s children. I listen patiently although I already know much of what she tells me. Then, as the afternoon draws to a close I say, ‘Now, no more delay-tactics. Tell me about you, and Kenneth, and Awan.’

  Evelyn sits on her chair by the hearth. She seems engulfed by it, incredibly small and frail, a wisp of a woman, and very tired. Perhaps her outing today has been too much for her. But her eyes are as sharp as gimlets. The papery skin around them folds now, as she smiles. ‘Oh, well,’ she says, with a coy twinkle, ‘yes, as Charlotte Bronte once wrote, ‘reader, I married him.’’

  ‘I’m so glad,’ I burst out. ‘I wanted you to have married him - or that you’d be together at least. Oh! But on the other hand, I wanted you to be free, too. I wanted you to choose, to be able to do anything you wanted, like other women. It seemed to me, Evelyn, reading your memoir, that you hadn’t had any choices in your life. Things just happened to you and you handled them.’

  ‘She handled them alright,’ Emma comments from across the room.

  ‘I did choose,’ Evelyn assures me, ‘I didn’t marry Kenneth because he was the only man left! I married him because I realised that’s what I really wanted to do - more than anything. And Kenneth was patient. He waited - well, I suppose he waited for me to fall in love with him. He made me do all the running. Talk about playing hard to get! By the end I was absolutely desperate for him!’

  ‘Ew! Granny! Too much information!’ Emma groans.

  Evelyn ignores her. ‘He let me come to him and when I did he folded me into his arms and it felt wonderful.’ She heaves a heavy sigh, remembering it. ‘We married in ’53, the same week as the Coronation. The bunting was still up in the village! We had two street-parties in one week!’

  ‘It sounds very romantic. But you told your friend Patricia that love wasn’t all about reckless romance and dancing,’ I remind her.

  Evelyn considers. ‘It isn’t all about that. We were friends. That’s what counts. He was a good, good man. I was lucky. He was so… solid. But,’ she adds with a mischievous glint, ‘I did teach Kenneth to dance.’

  ‘Ah!’ I breathe. I wonder if I can settle for ‘solid’ from Tammy, if I can compromise with friendship. It feels like a bleak prospect, without even the occasional dance.

  ‘We were very happy,’ Evelyn says. ‘We had twenty seven years. I ran the shop and he had his business. His mother suffered a stroke and I nursed her until she died. I looked after his boys until they flew the nest. He was a tower of strength, my hero in every way. But,’ she falters, and looks down at the knitting in her lap, ‘I didn’t forget my John, or that poor American boy. I loved them all, you know.’ She looks up at me then, and her eyes are glassy with tears. ‘It is possible, you know, to love more than one person at once. Our hearts are big enough for it.’

  Emma leans over to kiss her. I find the puckering of her full lips very distracting. ‘Of course they are, Granny,’ she says.

  ‘I’m thinking of John,’ Evelyn says. ‘He loved me and Amelia, I think. It needn’t detract from either one of us.’

  ‘No ma’am,’ I say, thinking that my grandma would have seen it the same way - reasonably, pragmatically.

  We sit in silence for a while. Evelyn’s knitting needles rest in her hands. Of course, I want to know the end of Kenneth’s story, but it seems indelicate to ask, and Evelyn’s eyelids are drooping - her head rests back onto the wing of her chair.

  ‘He died in 1980,’ Emma murmurs, as though sensing my thought. ‘He was eighty - he aged with the year, you know. He never knew a day’s illness and then one morning - he just didn’t wake up.’

  ‘He died in his bed,’ Evelyn murmurs, wistfully, ‘better than your poor mother, Emma, who managed to make a spectacle of herself even in death.’

  ‘Tell me about your mom, Emma,’ I speak quietly, so as not to disturb Evelyn, and because I am sensing a kind of valediction. The picture is almost complete, my questions all answered, and then there will be nothing to keep me here.

  By now Emma is sitting on the floor in front of the fire, which we have lit, the late afternoon having turned chilly. It casts the only light into the room and sets her hair aflame, like so many filaments of gold in a halo round her head. ‘Mum was a wild child,’ she says. ‘She went from school to university where she studied politics and graduated just in time to throw herself into the mass hysteria of the 1960s. A proper beatnik, if you know what that is?’

  ‘Erm, flower power? Anti-war?’

  ‘That was part of it, certainly. Anyway, she travelled - she hitchhiked round America and she spent several years bumming round the Greek islands.’

  ‘Emma!’ Evelyn murmurs, scolding, but gently. Her eyes remain closed.

  ‘Sorry, Granny. She worked her way around the islands. She partied and did music festivals. Let’s say she sampled everything that life had to offer.’

  ‘Drugs?’ I venture.

  ‘Oh yes, lots of those.’

  Evelyn lifts her hand in a gesture which tells us she has something to add, but is too tired.

  ‘Granny says Mum was a free spirit with a thirst for life. That’s right, isn’t it Granny?’

  Evelyn’s head nods assent but Emma throws me a look which tells me that Evelyn does not know the half of what Awan got up to in her youth. ‘Moving on, she came back to the UK in ’68 fresh from the Paris riots - although she had no reason on earth to have got embroiled in those. She was over thirty by then - her student days were long passed. She hooked up - sorry, Granny - got involved with my father. He was a music producer, he managed various pop groups. He was very successful for a while and Mum changed from wild-haired hippie to sophisticated socialite overnight, attending launch parties and awards ceremonies, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Tony Blackburn and Debbie Harry, Marc Bolam, the Sweet.’

  I look suitably impressed, though I haven’t a notion who any of these people are.

  Emma laughs. I don’t fool her for a moment. ‘Google them,’ she says. ‘It was a very glamorous decade, you know, the 70s, celebrity culture was just taking off, but it was a tawdry kind of glamour and lots of things have come to light since that show it was an era of abuse and shame. Outside the charmed circle of fame life was very hard; there was a miner’s strike, power cuts and the working week was reduced to three days. Not that I remember any of this, you understand, but,’ she cocks a head at Evelyn, ‘I have been told.’

  I nod. I am child of the seventies myself. ‘Anyway,’ Emma goes on, ‘the tinsel-seventies gave way to the new-romantic eighties and left Mum behind. She turned her back on celebrity and qualified as a teacher. She didn’t become any more conformist, though. She drank wine and smoked cigarettes and supported left wing politics. She ‘wore purple’ as the saying goes.’

  ‘Purple?’

  ‘It’s a poem about
disreputable old age.[22] You should read it.’

  ‘I will. Your mother and father didn’t stay together?’

  ‘Sadly not. He was a man who went from one hare-brained scheme to another. He thought he’d like to buy Tall Chimneys, at one point. He wanted to knock the house down and build something monstrous in pre-fabricated concrete and plate glass, didn’t he Granny?’

  Evelyn gives a slight frown. She is not asleep, but she is in that state where the body sleeps while the mind remains active.

  ‘Appalling idea. It had Granny quite worried for a while. But, like so many of Dad’s enthusiasms, it waned.’

  ‘Ratton had died by then?’

  Evelyn shakes her head. Emma answers for her. ‘Not until after Kenneth. I forget the exact year.’

  ‘But he didn’t bother Evelyn any further?’

  ‘No. She never saw him again. He sold his businesses and moved to Spain. The Costa del Crime. He had a yacht and a swanky villa, I believe. And also skin cancer, which is what did for him in the end.’

  ‘A thoroughly unpleasant man,’ I say, ‘but still, cancer is horrible.’ I am thinking of my mom, who died of it too.

  ‘Mum died when she was seventy, three years ago,’ Emma says. ‘She retired from teaching and took up horticulture. By which I mean that she grew cannabis on an allotment.’

  Evelyn, in her doze, gives a little chuckle.

  ‘She had terrible arthritis - she said it helped with the pain. Anyway, she was up there, in the poly-tunnel, when she had a heart attack. It was a swift end, but nobody knew where she was. She got her three days of fame and once she was found she had her front page splash: “Missing woman discovered dead on cannabis-farm”.’

  ‘Oh, don’t,’ Evelyn mutters.

  So there it is: the end. I ought to get up and shake their hands and leave. I have got what I came for, and more. There is no point in remaining.

  And yet I do remain. I am rooted to my chair; the gatehouse around me feels as comfortable as a womb, Evelyn and Emma my oldest friends.

  Presently Emma helps Evelyn up the creaking stairs and I hear the soft music of her voice as she helps the old lady to undress and wash, and then the slight creak of the bed, the sound of clean sheets and warm blankets being drawn up, the squeak of the window being opened to the night scents of the benign moor.