Tall Chimneys: A British Family Saga Spanning 100 Years Read online

  Tall Chimneys

  Allie Cresswell

  © Allie Cresswell, 2017. Except as provided by the Copyright Act [1956, 1988, 2003] no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Allie Cresswell asserts her moral rights to be identified as the author of this work.

  This is a work of fiction; no similarity to any real person or persons is intended or should be inferred.

  Chimneys photograph and author photograph © Tim Newell

  Cover image from an original artwork © Sarah Reid www.redrawstudios.co.uk

  Graphic design by Tim Newell

  Acknowledgements

  My grateful thanks to my beta-readers who have patiently read this book and pointed out all my spelling, grammatical and factual errors. I take full responsibility for any that stubbornly remain. They gave me helpful suggestions, encouragement and, in some cases, some pretty ‘tough love’, all of which has gone into making the book the best I can achieve. They are: Nikki Clark, Kath Middleton, Becca Dunlop, Sharon Turner, Jennifer Eds Peacock Smith, Terry Marchion, Catherine Clarke, Joanie Chevalier, Rosemary Noble, Patricia Feinberg Stoner and Angela Petch. Thank you to Abigail Gartland who let me bounce ideas off her and endured my endless deliberations about whether the Epilogue should be in or out. Thank you Sarah Reid, who so patiently and sensitively interpreted my ideas in her original artwork for the cover. Particular thanks to Kathryn Bax of One Stop Fiction for her invaluable advice and guidance. Thank you B. Fleetwood, encourager, cheer-leader and friend. Final thanks as always to Tim, who not only puts up with but actively encourages me to beaver away in the study despite the consequent irregularity of our domestic arrangements. I am so lucky to have you in my life. Dreams do come true.

  Prologue

  I have called Tall Chimneys home for as long as I can remember. But in fact this odd little gatehouse, standing sentinel at the top of the forested drive, feels more like home to me than Tall Chimneys ever did.

  Tall Chimneys is a Jacobean house, added-to over the years, a wing thrown out here, stables, a gun room and an estate office built at the back, bathrooms squeezed in when proper plumbing became a priority. It stands amid a series of concentric circles. First, of gardens; the gravel walkways, lawns and tended shrubbery in front, the vegetable beds, soft fruit bushes, glasshouses and orchards behind. Then a middle girdle of coniferous and broad-leafed plantation thrown around the whole and rising up the sides of a bowl-like crater, like a lifted skirt. All this is rimmed by the escarpment of a natural depression in the broad-stretched moor.

  The house’s sunken situation was never a happy one. The air within the crater tends to stagnancy; the brisk moor air skims over the bowl without entering it. There is a strong propensity for damp; the lawn is often soggy, the cellar sometimes floods. The chimneys failed to draw for years until some ancestor had the idea of building them higher, making them reach like cathedral pillars into the vault of the sky, out of all proportion to the house.

  In one respect only is the house well-placed; it is secluded. Our family annals suggest nocturnal visits of questionable political intriguers, secret stays by Catholic priests, even a visit by the Jacobite pretender, although history disputes this possibility. Its isolation in my lifetime has been both a blessing and a curse.

  There is a kinship between Tall Chimneys and me; we are twin souls. I have placed my hands on its masonry in the midst of a storm and the tremors in its architecture have shaken my own foundations. I have felt the glow of warmth ooze from its ancient stones and seep like sustaining honey into my bones. I have burrowed into the darkest recess of its shelter and teetered perilously on its highest parapet without fear that it would let me fall. I have known love here, and abject sorrow, happiness, and dreadful despair. Tall Chimneys has soaked up my life, and poured out its own, leaving us both derelict.

  We belong to a time which has passed, both designed for a life which is obsolete in these modern days, and although we have done our best to accommodate and adapt, our efforts have been outstripped by progress. We are calcifying, here, in this peculiar cauldron scooped from the prehistoric bog of ancient moor; we are petrified relics of an era long gone. And any little dramas we have enacted in our secret amphitheatre have been private and contained, and have caused no echo in the world at large.

  I have tried to save Tall Chimneys, and if my feeble aid could have sustained its ailing stonework, I would have left nothing wanting. Almost nothing. But our ways seem destined to part, now. If one of us is to survive, the other must be allowed to fall.

  1910 - 1929

  I was born in 1910, the last of seven children, the youngest of four daughters, born when my parents had given up expecting (or, I suspect, wanting) any further additions to the family. I made odd what had been even before. A new baby caused a negligible stir; I was of scant interest to anyone. Nanny, who had been anticipating a retirement of darning and dozing by the fire in the nursery apartments in the east wing, grudgingly sent for the bassinet and other baby paraphernalia long-since consigned to an attic. My oldest brother was already at Cambridge, my oldest sister recently married and soon expecting a child of her own. One other boy and two girls were away at school leaving only Colin, aged six, to be my reluctant and sometimes rather spiteful playmate for two years until he, too, went away to boarding school.

  My father was well into his fifties when I was born, my mother in her late forties. Having me, I have been told (again, by Colin, who likes to be cruel when he can) broke her health and more than partly explained her death a few years later. Personally I prefer to attribute her relatively early demise to the loss of my father and my oldest brother in the First World War, which began only four years after I made my arrival. I have only the very vaguest memories of either of them; my father tall, with grey eyes and wavy hair smelling of some unguent supposed to tame it into slick submission, my mother rather wispy, diaphanous in some garment which she cannot possibly have worn outside her bed- and dressing-rooms; I suppose I was taken to her in the mornings, before she changed out of her night clothes, and again in the evenings, while she dressed for dinner. I recall her always horizontal, on a day-bed or settee, listless and feeble.

  With all the children but me at school and father at war, the house shrank into itself. Rooms were shrouded and closed up. Many of the male servants joined the local yeomanry and marched away to Flanders; a few housemaids, the cook, the house-keeper, a limping gardener and an ageing butler were all that remained of the household staff.

  Those, and a sandy-haired stable lad.

  He was older than me by about ten years - fourteen, perhaps, to my four - but he suited his speech and gait to mine; he was gentle and kind. He took my lonely hand one day and led me to the kitchen gardens. He introduced me to the wonders of the glass house where soft fruits could be picked and exotic flowers grew. He brought me to a hay-filled stable and placed a squirmy puppy into my arms. He led me through the woods to where a rivulet tumbled over mossy rocks, and we peeled off our shoes and stockings and put our feet into the icy water. His feet were grubby and calloused, mine pink and soft. He climbed a tree and brought me down a bird’s egg, still warm, from the nest. But then he went away, to war, I supposed, and I was alone again.

  I got used to being over-looked by everyone, the family and the servants both. Often meals did not arrive in the nursery for me. The governess supposedly overseeing my early years’ education was desultory in her efforts and many days I sat alone in the school room while she pursued the loca
l curate around the parish, trying to ensnare him. (She succeeded. They went as missionaries to Africa where they died of malaria, I believe.) I got used to exploring the lesser-used areas of the house, out-buildings and gardens on my own. I got into the habit of lurking in shadowy corners, listening in to conversations I was not supposed to hear. (That’s how I found out about my governess and the curate.) I was nearly always on the look-out for food, haunting the larders, the pantry, the orchard and vegetable garden. That’s how I first encountered Weeks, the gardener; he caught me gorging on strawberries in the kitchen garden, and took me home to his wife.

  They lived here, in the gatehouse, an odd, hexagonal little building perched on the rim of the crater, the thick belt of woodland behind and below, open moorland and an impressive view to the front, where the drive meets the road to the village, a mile across the moor. It was small, just one up and one down in those days, with a lean-to kitchen at the back and a lavatory in a shed amongst the trees. But the gatehouse held a special appeal to my childish eyes, and still does - I am sitting in it as I write these memoirs. A fire burns in the grate, and the exposed stone walls are warm, the colour of honey. Its windows are small and crazed with leading but its exterior stonework is rather grand, with stone gables topped with ostentatious orbs and a crenelated parapet added, I suppose, to give a grand first impression. I didn’t see the upper chamber until much later, but the living room was a wonder to me, a small child, like a scene from a fairy-tale; an old oak table and two chairs, a dresser with their crockery set upon it, a shelf with their three or four precious books, a rag rug before a tiny, shiny grate. The rug and crocks are long-gone, of course, but I am writing, now, on that same oak table and the dresser stands still in a shaft of sunlight from the milky, leaded window.

  Weeks and his wife, childless, showed me more care and love than anyone at the big house. He would find me in the arboretum or loitering near the greenhouses, or, once, halfway to the village, along the windswept road across the moor, and take me to their cottage to be fed on warm bread and fresh cheese and sometimes cold cuts of pheasant and partridge about which, it was hinted, I should “keep mum”. Mrs Weeks let me collect the eggs from their little flock, and taught me to sew and make pastry and bread. She showed me my letters, too, writing my name, Evelyn, with her finger in the soot of the hearth, tutting and sucking her teeth at my woeful lack of acquaintance with these things.

  Anytime I could make my escape from the school room (which was often), my steps took me straight to their door, my lurking in gloomy shadows and dalliance in the grounds having lost their appeal. The days in the gatehouse passed in blissful happiness, exploring the further reaches of the garden they had hewn from the woodland while she stuck peas or weeded the onions, or basking by their fire while she stitched and he fiddled with his pipe in the late afternoon. Then, as evening came on, he would take me by the hand and lead me back to Tall Chimneys. Unconsciously I adopted the odd drag and hop of his game leg, the two of us making identical tracks through the leaf-mould of the secret woodland ways he showed me, past the fountains and through the parterre, delivering me with a sad eye to a side-door and leaving me there as he melted back into the night.

  My father died early on in the war, my brother a year or two later. My mother’s health broke down altogether in 1917 and I was sent away to live with Isobel, my oldest sister, who had a house by the sea on the south coast. She already had two little girls and, it was explained, I would be less inconvenient to her than to any other relative. This move surprised and angered me; I had been perfectly content at home. I didn’t want to leave my friends at the gatehouse.

  Isobel was an old-fashioned woman, even then, very strict; we girls were seen and not heard. She was a good woman but there was no nonsense about her, no softness, and she quashed a tendency to sentimentality in her girls. I frequently got into trouble for challenging her hard-line ideas and it was this - the threat and actuality of punishment - which eventually bent me to her will. I forced myself into her values as one might force a foot into a shoe that is too small. It hurt and I resented it, but the idea of being barefoot and vulnerable hurt more. It taught me two things about myself; I was not naturally ‘good’ and following my natural instincts would get me into hot water. Looking back now, I can see that my life has been defined by the tension of obeying rules I do not respect and finding that, when I have been wilful and fallen foul of society’s mores it is myself that I automatically blame and punish, not them.

  Being placed under Isobel’s influence seriously curtailed my freedom but at least it meant I had the company of my nieces - a welcome addition - and my schooling was rigorously taken up again. The governess there informed me of my mother’s death. I cried, but almost as a duty; death seemed such a very small step on from the listless, somnolent existence my mother appeared to me to have had in life. I lobbied to return - what disturbance could I create, now, I reasoned. But I was told Tall Chimneys was to become a hospital for wounded officers; no place for a child. This piqued my interest; I longed to see the wounded men and hear their stories. Colin, when he came to visit for his summer vacation in 1918, gave me lurid chapter and verse on the variously maimed and deranged soldiers sent there for treatment. If he’d hoped to shock or even sicken me, he failed; I was a self-assured, sensible girl even then, aged eight. Seeing he had botched his attempt to upset me, he got more personal, accusing me of being the cause of our mother’s death.

  ‘You were the last baby,’ he said, spitefully. ‘She was never the same after you were born.’

  This news did distress me, but once Isobel had got to the bottom of my tears, she dismissed the accusation. ‘Stuff and nonsense,’ she said.

  From my sister’s I was sent to school, along with my niece Joan, to whom I had become very close. The school - like Isobel - was strict, run by Anglican nuns. Academically it was fairly good, but the whole school ethos was undergirded by the assumption that the women who emerged from it would be obedient and submissive, long-suffering adherents to the status quo. Once I came to terms with this school became a period which was not unhappy for me, but which has long since faded in my memory. I remember almost nothing about it except for a sponge cake occasionally served for dessert which oozed with syrup – it was delicious.

  After school I returned to Tall Chimneys. I expected to experience a warm rush of home-coming, but ten years of absence had dulled the visceral associations of the house. Many of the staff I remembered had gone, including the Weeks. The gatehouse, now, was shut up and dilapidated, the woods reclaiming the Weeks’ hard-won garden. My sister Isobel’s house, I found, felt more like home - I had lived there since I was six and spent every vacation there. My nieces there felt more like siblings. I missed them, especially Joan. But returning to Isobel’s permanently wasn’t an option for me; they were going to India, her husband having been sent thither by Mr Baldwin as part of a parliamentary commission headed by Sir John Simon, to deal with the intractable Mr Gandhi.[1] I wished I could go with them - I felt wretched to be left behind while they went out into a world of adventure and interest.

  With the death of my father and oldest brother Tall Chimneys had devolved upon my middle brother George. He had served only at the tail-end of the war, escaped unscathed and married the daughter of a wealthy American businessman. They had spent most of the intervening years in London, part of a fast set who had flung themselves into a wild era of partying and reckless behaviour. According to Isobel they were dissipated and carefree, morally loose; no kind of guardians for a girl my age, but there was, she said, no help for it. Of my two other sisters, one was an invalid installed more or less permanently (and at great expense) in a Swiss sanatorium, the other single, in health and solvent, but wildly political, shockingly modern in views and behaviour, affiliated to the Bloomsbury group of which Isobel disapproved with a passion.

  So, back to Tall Chimneys I went. I was admitted back into the household, as I had left it, with indifference, given some draughty ro
oms in the north wing and more or less left to my own devices. I was eighteen years old.

  George and Rita were only rarely at Tall Chimneys. To their credit, though, using, I presume, funds from Rita’s wealthy papa, they did initiate a programme of repairs and modernisation to the house; under their benefaction we had improved plumbing and electricity produced by a noisy generator installed in the cellar. We had a telephone but it was very unreliable, the wires strung across the moor and through the trees were very vulnerable. These up-grades, the house, lands and tenant farms were in the hands of George’s agent, Sylvester Ratton, who oversaw their management in George’s absence. Ratton was perhaps ten or twelve years my senior, a man of few personal charms but large ambition; I took an instant dislike to him. He had round, lashless eyes and a small, misshapen blob of a nose. Nothing escaped him, not the least suggestion of an extra bucket of coal in the servants’ hall or the hint of a purloined hare in a ploughman’s pot. He sniffed out and came down hard on any perceived misdeed, reducing housemaids to tears for the smallest misdemeanour and dressing down farm-workers in a voice which carried from the estate office, behind the stables, to the morning room without any tempering of volume or expletive colour. While parsimonious with others, he denied himself nothing, living, while George and his wife were in town, as de facto owner of the house, lording it over the servants and tenant farmers, occupying the second best suite of rooms and wolfing down the choicest of comestibles and the finest wines in the cellar.

  The first evening of my residence we dined together, he at the head of the table, me at the foot – a ridiculous and anti-social arrangement which made conversation difficult and made extra work for the servants. It soon became clear that these things were entirely by Mr Ratton’s design. He enjoyed sending the staff scurrying hither and thither, rejecting dishes and then changing his mind about them so they had to be brought in again. He spoke to me as though from a great height as well as a great distance, emphasising my extreme smallness and insignificance.