Troy Chimneys

"Golden lads and girls all must,

As chimney-sweepers, come to dust."  

(Shakespeare's Cymbeline)

It is no coincidence that Margaret Kennedy describes the dandelion seed-head  "chimney-sweepers" in her elegiac novel Troy Chimneys, for this is a story of love, of loss, of the wrong road taken, and of the unattainable haven.  Her protagonist  (for he is not a hero) Miles Lufton, M.P. is a Regency gentleman of sensibility,  but without a fortune, who must use his alter ego "Pronto", the climber and ladies' man, to make his way in the world.

" 'I quite dote upon Miles Lufton,' these ladies would cry, 'and it is a great shame that he should be so poor, for he is a delightful creature.  We must get him a seat, we must get him a place, and help him to grow rich'.  They liked me for my interesting poverty, my sensibility, my freshness and my innocence.  They were therefore in great haste to destroy in me every quality which they had praised and found delightful, to corrupt Miles and conjure up Pronto in his stead."

A subtle, complex novel, perceptive about its characters and the class systems by which they lived,  it portrays all Miles' dreams slipping away:

"I saw,  in Paris,  a painting by David which recalled Edmee to me; a young girl drawing by a window, who turns to look at the new-comer just as she turned from her embroidery frame.  By what genius is that evanescent magic caught by the painter!  Long after we are all dead she will glance up from her drawing-board with a look that shall recall, to men unborn, the loved and the lost,  -- the transport of an hour, the regret of a lifetime."

Young girl drawing  Marie-Denise Villers, pupil of J-L David

© Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Miles purchases a house in Wiltshire for his future retirement, called Troy Chimneys, once Trois Chemins for the three roads which meet before it, and with a river below the house.

"I sat in the window seat of the larger parlour and watched the slow, liquid play of the sunlight upon the ceiling, with its reminder of the constant current passing below.  This particular has always delighted me in Troy Chimneys.  …upon a sunny morning...the passing of time never presents itself in a more agreeable fashion; I like to think that when I am dead, as long as the house stands, the sun and the water will write these chronicles upon the ceiling, -- the same sun, the same river, -- only the current gives the illusion of change.  I already saw myself living there and beholding it daily…and the stream of time, rolling ever past us, might carry away all that I wished to forget."

The author moves her narrative backwards and forwards in time, between the 1780s and 1818, with diaries, memoirs and family correspondence,  and the recollections of a later Victorian generation, gradually revealing Miles Lufton's compelling story.  But, as his Memoir says:

"In any case, time will not run back.  Not even the river at Troy Chimneys does that, where time runs at its gentlest.  Elsewhere he tramps forward.  'And the foot of Time advanced!'  "

May chimney-sweepers

Dr Johnson in his Dictionary cited Shakespeare for his provenance for Chimney-sweeper: "One whose trade it is to clean foul chimneys of soot".

"Chimney sweep, chimney sweep, hear Maid!

To sweep sooty chimneys is Tom's trade."

Chimneys appeared from the 13th century onwards when the wealthy began building private heated rooms,  separate from the open-hearthed great hall.  The building of the Elizabethan prodigy houses with their displays of fancy chimneys developed the need for a chimney-sweeping trade, with more than a bunch of holly to brush away the soot.  The first printed mention of the chimney-sweepers' trade occurs in Cocke Lorell's Bote, c. 1510.

Tudor chimneys at Hampton Court Palace

©  Photo Christine Matthews

 This was made even more necessary as sea coal with its tarry deposits replaced smoky wood fires, and after the Great Fire of London in 1666, new regulations made chimneys narrower, so sweeps needed their small climbing boys.

"Boys is wery obstinate, and wery lazy, gen'lmen, and there's nothing like a good hot blaze to make 'em come down vith a run.  It's humane too, gen'lmen, acause, even if they've stuck in the chimbley, roasting their feet makes 'em struggle to extricate theirselves."   Charles Dickens, in Oliver Twist 1837, saves Oliver from this fate, but the climbing boys' dreadful conditions were only halted at last by Lord Shaftesbury's Act in 1875.  (my thanks to Benita Cullingford's British Chimney Sweeps).

On a happier note, May Day was traditionally the time when sweeps, like the milkmaids,  dressed up and paraded the  London streets as the old Jack-in-the-Green, with their blackened faces, and covered in leafy branches.

Fowler's Troop in Deptford, 1900s

see deptford-jack.org.uk

This urban greenery image brings me circuitously to Shakespeare's Cymbeline, (in my April 12th blog), for oral history suggests that in the Warwickshire countryside, "golden lads" were dandelions, and "chimney-sweepers" was the name given to the dandelion's puffball seed heads, blown away "to dust".    

And, "My passion blows away like the chimney-sweepers", writes Margaret  Kennedy in her novel Troy Chimneys*  
[*of which more anon].

"Golden lads and girls"

The first performance of Cymbeline, one of Shakespeare's less familiar plays, took place in the month of April, 1611.  It was the first Shakespeare play I saw performed professionally, at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in 1958, with two friends from school.  We stayed in a very uncomfortable B&B and queued for tickets each day, taking turns if only two cheap seats were available.  This strange fairytale melodrama, with a preposterous plot, shifted between Roman Britain and "Augustan" Rome (with Frenchmen and ducats), including key scenes at Milford Haven in Wales.  

Posthumus and Imogen  Henry J. Ford (Folger Shakespeare Library)

The leading lady was Dame Peggy Ashcroft, already fifty, but totally memorable as a radiant and youthful Imogen on stage.    "She is alone the Arabian bird,…"

I was lucky enough to see another memorable production at the Globe Theatre in 2001, with just six actors, including Mark Rylance and Abigail Thaw.  Staged like  a modern ballet, with dazzling choreography as the six players exchanged places and characters, as well as lines, it brought the text to the fore, although for me it lacked the enchantment of the Stratford Peter Hall production.

Cymbeline at the Globe Theatre  (reviewed in The Guardian newspaper)

But it was witty and playful, even more so when the emergency understudy, who had to read his lines that day,  had his book snatched from him by Rylance and was left speechless.
 "…Speak, man; thy tongue
May take off some extremity, which to read
Would be even mortal to me.
….Please you, read; "