by Barbara Vine
The marriage took place in the autumn. Helen had met Victor Chatteriss of the Indian Army, then aged twenty-eight, when he was home on leave. In Helen's wedding photographs, Vera stands half a head taller than the other girl attendants, gawky, thin, with big, serious eyes, wearing a calf-length dress of some glossy material with inset lace panels. She seems to have been a favourite with her father who wrote to his sister, Clara:
… My little Vera is turning out a fine-looking girl, prettier than one could have hoped. She puts me in mind of you at that age, she has that same true gold hair that shows no sign of darkening. I think her brain superior to her brother's which I can't help being sorry about in one way, though proud in another. Her school reports are really excellent. She came top of her class in English and history last term. I am giving in to her and letting her have tennis coaching, an added expense I should prefer not to have but she is doing so well I did not like to say no. It is a good social advantage too, don't you think? I believe in providing the best in that way for one's girl. But she will tell you all about it when she comes to you next week…
Clara, five years Arthur's senior, had married late in life and gone with her husband to live in Cromer where Vera spent occasional holidays. In Cromer her childless aunt made much of her and we have Vera writing to Helen in India that ‘Auntie Clo’ bought her two dress-lengths which were being made up by Clara's own dressmaker and had taken her to a photographer to have a studio portrait done. As well as the tennis, Vera attended classes in ballroom dancing. She received a school prize for perfect attendance in 1921 and another, a calf-bound copy of Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies, for coming top in handwork three terms in succession. On the face of it, this was a happy and successful girlhood.
In 1922, when her son and daughter were fifteen and her husband fifty-five, Ivy Longley, aged forty-four, gave birth to another child. It was a girl, to be christened Edith, a name that was already old-fashioned. Ivy had written to her aunt Priscilla Naughton in 1908 when the twins were babies that she dreaded having more children. After their birth she had been ill for months. The birth itself had been difficult and protracted, leaving her with a partial prolapse of the womb, and she had been unable to nurse the twins herself. To Miss Naughton she had written:
I am still only thirty and could certainly have several more children – dreadful prospect! They say you forget the details of birth, pain, etc., but I have not. Also there are twins in the family, as you know, not only mine but my mother had twin sisters who died as babies. I wonder sometimes if at forty I shall have a whole unwelcome brood…
Ivy's second daughter came at a time when she may have believed the danger past. According to all evidence and precedent, the new baby should have been an encumbrance. Its father was an elderly man with a weak heart, its mother menopausal and avowedly ‘not fond of children’, its siblings adolescents with established niches in the family. John, like his father before him, a pupil at Colchester Grammar School, was at an age when boys feel deep embarrassment in the society of their fellows at any evidence of sexuality on the part of their parents. And what stronger evidence could there be than a new baby? Besides, his parents were so old, his father twenty years older than most of his contemporaries' fathers. As for Vera, on the face of it we should need to look no further for a cause of personality damage. Here was a new child and of the same sex as herself come to oust her from her place in her parents' affections.
But none of this seems to have been the case. From the first, Edith – soon to re-name herself Eden – was generally loved. Adored might not be too strong a word, at any rate by her father, her brother and her sister. Mrs Longley's attitude towards the child remains a mystery. She was an infrequent letter writer, and seems to have written to no one between the time of the death of her aunt and the removal of her elder daughter to India. No photographs survive of her with Eden, if any existed. In one snapshot only do they appear together, and Arthur Longley, John, Vera and Clara Dawson are also in the photograph. It was taken on the beach at Cromer and shows Vera with the three-year-old Eden on her lap, Ivy very much in the background, sitting in a deckchair, her face shaded by a broad-brimmed hat.
Vera wrote to Helen Chatteriss in 1924:
I wish you could see my dear little sister. She is the most beautiful child that ever was and her photos don't at all do her justice. I will tell you something. When I take her out, holding her hand and walking with her or pushing her in her pushcart, I hope people will think she is my baby and I am her mother. Do you think that very silly and fanciful? Of course I am not really old enough to be her mother but people tell me I look eighteen. Last week someone Mother knows who had not met me before asked if I was twenty-four! Mother was not too pleased, as you may guess, for it made her seem even older than she is.
We all call Edith Eden now because that is what she called herself before she could pronounce ‘th’. It is rather a lovely name, I think. Edith sounds like someone's old aunt. I can't think why Mother and Dad chose it. Her hair is the most brilliant pure gold. I do hope it won't darken. Mine has not, of course, but then mine was white when I was her age…
On leaving school, John Longley obtained a post with the Midland Bank. At the opportunity of working at a branch in the City of London he hesitated no more than a day before accepting and at the same time becoming a paying guest in the home of his mother's cousin and her husband. Elizabeth Whitestreet had been a Naughton before her marriage. She and her husband and their two children lived at Wanstead which is in Essex but on the eastern outskirts of London. While living in their house, John met a young half-Swiss girl, Vranni Breuer, who also lodged there and who, though untrained, had some kind of job in the local orphanage as a children's nurse. Vranni's father died in the influenza epidemic of 1918, her mother seven years later. She, too, had been a children's nurse, or rather nanny, employed by a family in Zurich which was where she met Johann Breuer. Vranni was two years older than John Longley, having been born in Zurich in 1905, and it was partly her seniority which led to his parents' disapproval of his choice when she and the twenty-one-year-old John were married in 1928. A greater cause of dismay to Arthur and Ivy was Vranni's provenance. In the nineteen-twenties, English people, notably English country people, still retained a deep distrust of foreigners. It would be no exaggeration to say that Ivy Longley, in 1928, felt much the same about her son's choice of a bride as today a woman of her background might feel about her son's marrying a black African. If it were true that Ivy had a Faroese grandmother whose genes were responsible for much of her own and her daughters' beauty, she had conveniently forgotten it now. According to Mrs Chatteriss, her refusal to attend the wedding – though Arthur Longley did so, accompanied by the six-year-old Eden – was the cause of a permanent estrangement between herself and her daughter-in-law, and when John went to visit his mother, whom he adored, he was obliged to do so alone.
What Vera thought of John's departure from tradition is not known. She also was not present at his wedding for by this time she was in India and had herself been married for two years. When she was eighteen, an invitation came to her from her half-sister asking Vera to come out to Rawalpindi. Helen Chatteriss offered to put up half the cost of the sea trip. Vera went to India in the late summer of 1925, arriving at Bombay just as the rainy season came to an end. As speedily as her twin brother was to settle himself, Vera, in the first week of her arrival at Captain (now Major) and Mrs Chatteriss's bungalow, had met and been attracted by a young subaltern in Victor Chatteriss's regiment, Gerald Loder Hillyard.
Socially – and these things were still of great importance in 1925 – Gerald Hillyard was a cut above Vera, several cuts above in fact, though by a quirk of fate (and the unpaternal attitude of Arthur Longley), belonging in the same class as Helen Chatteriss. He was the third and youngest son of a Somerset squire, a small landowner of good birth and very little money. There was a family tradition of younger sons entering the Indian Army and Gerald Hillyard had a forebear who had distingu
ished himself for gallantry in the First Afghan War of 1839–42 and a great-uncle who was with Sir Henry Havelock in the Mutiny when he broke through to relieve the residency at Lucknow. Gerald Hillyard was an old Harrovian and had been to Sandhurst. Physically, he bore a strong resemblance to George Orwell, or that is the impression his photographs give. He was very tall, over six feet three, thin to emaciation though perfectly healthy, with brown hair and a square, dark moustache. His younger sister, Mrs Catherine Clarke, writes:
I did not meet Vera until about seven years after they were married. They came home on leave in 1930 and 1933 but I was away at school the first time. My father was dead by 1933. I think my mother felt that Gerald had married beneath him, and that he had been deceived into marrying beneath him partly by his own inexperience and partly the fact that Vera was staying with the Chatterisses as Mrs Chatteriss's sister. You could say that, because she was with them in that way, she partook of their social position but really this would be a false impression. Of course, it is all nonsense but it wasn't then. My mother only spoke to me about it once. I remember that she said that Vera was ladylike in the wrong way.
The marriage took place in Rawalpindi in March 1926 when Vera was nineteen years old and Gerald Hillyard twenty-two. In the following year, their son, Francis Loder, was born. When he was six years old, Vera and Gerald came home on leave to England, bringing the child with them, and leaving him behind at a prep school in Somerset not far from where his grandmother Hillyard was living. Two years afterwards, Vera returned alone. Her father was dying but she arrived in time only for the funeral, not to see him alive. She had been his favourite child and very much attached to him. It is unfortunate that none of the several hundred letters she wrote him from India survive.
Arthur Longley was dead and Ivy, his wife, had only a few months to live. It was 1935 and Ivy was only fifty-seven but she was suffering from an inoperable cancer of the uterus. Instead of returning to Gerald in India, Vera stayed with her mother and when Ivy died in the spring of 1936 remained to take charge of her fourteen-year-old sister, Eden.
Helen Chatteriss writes:
After the first year or two Vera had not much cared for India. She was very fair, you see, very fair-skinned and she found the sun unbearable. As far as I know there was nothing wrong with the marriage, this wasn't a separation because she and Gerald no longer got on. It was simply that she was happier and more comfortable in the English climate, and, of course, her son was in England. As I think I've told you, she was particularly fond of Eden and in fact it was the idea of separating herself from Eden that had made her hesitate about coming to India in the first place. I admit it, I invited Vera to come to us to find herself a good, suitable husband. And she did. It's hard to imagine now because things have changed so much but in the twenties girls did want husbands more than anything else and the main business of their lives was to get them. An awful lot of young men who might have been potential husbands for girls like Vera had been killed in the War. But there were a lot of eligible young men in India. I've never regretted inviting Vera and introducing her to Gerald; I don't think it was a mistake on my part. The marriage was happy, at least for years it was, and I still think it was the war, I mean the war of 1939–45, that spoiled things for them as it spoiled things for so many of us.
Catherine Clarke writes:
My brother came home with his regiment in 1939. Victor Chatteriss had retired the year before with the rank of Major-General and he and his wife and children were living in the house she had inherited from her grandparents in Suffolk somewhere. What home life my brother had was spent in the house called Laurel Cottage at Great Sindon with Vera and her younger sister. The house didn't belong to them. It had been left between Vera, her brother and this sister, each owning a third. When the war came, the regiment was sent up north – Yorkshire, I believe it was.
So in the early years of the Second World War we have Vera Hillyard living very quietly alone with her sister Eden in the house where Eden had been born, in a sleepy village that boasted one shop, a school, a typically enormous East Anglian ‘wool’ church and an infrequent bus service to Colchester. It is a truism to say of a mother and daughter who are close that they are like sisters. Vera Hillyard and Eden Longley, who were sisters, were perhaps more like mother and daughter. Vera in 1939 was thirty-two, Eden seventeen. In the school holidays they were joined by Vera's son, Francis. Occasionally there were visits from John and Vranni Longley and their daughter, Faith. And, of course, a few miles away in Stoke-by-Nayland, lived the Chatterisses, the General and his wife and their two teenage children, Patricia and Andrew. A Naughton cousin would sometimes come to tea. And there were village acquaintances, among them Thora Morrell, whose husband Richard was rector of the parish.
But the life led by the two sisters was a gentle and uneventful one, their recreations sewing, embroidery, baking, listening to the wireless. Yet already the drama that was to erupt in that house was slowly unfolding.
The day after Vera appeared in the magistrates' court to be charged with murder, my father went about the house collecting up and concealing everything that might connect her with him. Destroying too, I have no doubt. This may sound callous. My father was not unfeeling, far from it, but respectability was very important to him, that and his probity, his need to be beyond reproach. People must not know Vera Hillyard was his sister, the bank and its clients particularly must not know. He sorrowed in silence, letting concealment feed upon him inwardly. The outer man conducted himself as if Vera had never been.
It was my mother who told me what happened that evening. I wasn't there, I was in Cambridge, stunned by what I had read in a newspaper. My father came home from the bank. He ate nothing, he had eaten nothing for two days. He said to my mother, and it seems a curious question for a bank manager to put to his wife:
‘Haven't we got a strongbox somewhere?’
She told him where it was. He took the box up to the spare bedroom, that room where Eden had once spent a night and enraged my mother by dusting the furniture, and there out of her sight – he would not carry out this solemn, almost ritualistic, task under her eyes – filled the box with his sisters' letters and with photographs of them. In the room where my mother was sitting, our living-room, were two framed photographs, a portrait of Vera and one of Eden in her wedding-dress. My father came in and removed these pictures from their frames. One was the kind where the back is in the form of a hinged door secured shut by clips but the other was backed by a sheet of gummed paper and this he ripped away in a single movement, so anxious was he to rid the room of Vera and her baby son. He cut his finger on the corner of the thin sheet of glass and the brown mark, circular and, unless one knows, unidentifiable, on the edge of the photograph, is his blood.
It was one of those that went into the box. After my parents were dead, I found the box in the back of their wardrobe. There was a picture hanging on the spare bedroom wall that I had never liked though the frame was pretty. The backing had been clumsily sealed with scotch tape and when I pulled it away I discovered between the Millais print and the sheet of cardboard two snapshots of Eden as a child. This gave me ideas and all over the house I began finding mementoes of my father's sisters. Not for him to follow Chesterton's precept that the best place to hide a leaf is in a tree. He knew that the best place to hide things is where no one will look, not in the family album – every photograph extracted from there, the blank spaces bearing witness – but between the pages of an annotated New Testament, among the end papers of A Girl of the Limberlost, slipped inside the embroidered cover someone (Vera? Eden?) had made for the album of Kensitas cigarettes silk flower cards, between the plywood base of a drawer and the red oilcloth that lined it.
I put everything into the strongbox along with those mementoes which had seemed most precious to my father, took the box home with me and hid it in the cupboard under the stairs. A friend who came to stay found the box when sent by my husband in search of rubber boots to wear on a
walk. We lived in the country then. She spent the evening going through the photographs while I answered her questions with white lies and my husband sat silent, looking at me sometimes, saying not a word. But I, too, am a Longley with my share of their need to be private and withdrawn. My friend found the portrait of Vera Great-aunt Clara had had taken of her in Cromer and passed over it with the comment only that she was a pretty girl, but when she came to the Colchester photograph of 1945, the one that was in all the papers, some chord in her memory was struck and she paused a long time, staring at it, and telling me she was sure she had seen it somewhere before, years ago, in connection, she thought, with something terrible.
When we moved here, I put the box in our littlest bedroom and covered it with a brown blanket stamped with the letters M of D that someone had acquired (or stolen) during the war. If I asked why my father hadn't thrown away the contents of the box, I might equally ask why hadn't I? It is as well for Daniel Stewart that I haven't.
Alone in the house at three in the afternoon – it is not Helen's day nor our day for sitting alongside Gerald's wheelchair – I feel as though embarked upon some guilty exercise and anticipating the flurry I should be in if surprised, I open the box and take out the pictures and letters I had only glanced at when I gathered them up from the bookshelves and drawers in my parents' house. My inquisitive friend hadn't, of course, looked at the letters, though I had been on tenterhooks that she would. She had withdrawn them, or some of them, from the large brown envelope that held them all and pushed them back again with a quick explanation that these must be family letters. But perhaps if she had read them they would have given her no real clue to the identities of the writers.
