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You leave Debenham, and you enter a
land of apple orchards, mile after mile
of them. This is the Chevallier estate,
home of the Aspall Cyder Company, still
owned by the Chevallier family of Aspall
Hall.
The family came here from
the Channel Islands in the 18th Century
to make cyder, and were using the same
apple-crushing wheel until fairly
recently. The company has undergone
something of a revolution in the last ten
years though, being launched as a
national and even international brand,
and an industrial-scale cyder plant now
rises incongruously above the Debenham to
Eye road. The family name is remembered
by Chevallier Street in Ipswich.
A long straight road cuts
westward through the orchards, and leads
us into a gentle dip. This is the tiny
village of Aspall, not to be confused
with the larger Stonham Aspal on the far side of
Debenham, and the church
sits there with its attendant houses. The
setting is completely rural, although
thoroughly 19th century. On the occasion
of my first visit, the little lodge
beside the church gate had a brace of
pheasants hanging from its door.
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I
didn't get to see inside the church on the
occasion of that first visit, and I didn't when I
came back in 2011 either. But in between times,
something seemed to have happened. It appeared
that the church had been pretty much abandoned,
and the ivy allowed to creep over it. I could
find no evidence that the church was still in
use, but over the last months some attempts
seemed to have been made to rescue it, the bleak
strimmed undergrowth and the dead ivy still
clinging in upper reaches evidence of this. The
church still had a desperate air of neglect in
comparison with its neatly kept near-neighbours,
and there was obviously no keyholder notice.
Although
the Victorians were busy here, adding a north transept and generally giving the
place a makeover, there is still the 15th century
tower. The locked north porch is rather pretty,
with banding characteristic of the 17th century.
The west door has been blocked, but its age is
revealed by the array of brick and flint above
it. A trefoil window is there now.
In
the graveyard, just to the north-west of the
church, you will find the grave of the film
producer Emeric Pressburger. The inscription,
from Scott's A Matter of Life and Death,
reads: Love rules the court, the camp, the
grove, This world below and heaven above, For
love is heaven, and heaven is love. Pressburger's
biography, The Life and Death of a
Screenwriter, by Kevin Macdonald, notes that
he had expressed a wish to be buried in the
village church at Aspall. It was a cold dreary
day and a small funeral, a few friends from the
village, theSchopflinns, my brother and I and our
father. Michael was unable to come. Martin
Scorsese sent flowers. At the last minute a
long-forgotten Yugoslav cousin rang from Belgrade
to ensure we gave our grandfather a Jewish
burial. He assured us that Emeric had been a
practising Jew. No one else could remember him
going near a synagogue. As a concession, the
liberal Anglican vicar allowed a Star of David to
be engraved on his grave stone. And there it
is today.
The
Chevallier graves are to the south-east of the
church. Among them is one to Peronelle Mary
Guild, the grand dame of the Chevallier dynasty,
who gave her name to the company's 'blush' cyder,
popular with London's fashionable young things
I'm told.
The Chevalliers, as the
owners of the Manor, supplied Rectors to
the parish throughout the 19th century.
Arthur Mee in The King's England
recalls John Chevallier. He was Rector in
the mid-century, and was also the village
Doctor. He lived in the Hall, where he
prepared a clinic. Most famously, he was
the person responsible for cultivating
Chevallier barley, a high-yield variety;
it was taken out into the Empire, and
provided three-quarters of the world's
barley crops by the century's end.
John's daughter Anne married
into the Kitchener family, and her son
became Lord Kitchener, whose
propagandising and ranting persuaded
hundreds of thousands of young Englishmen
to their deaths in the First World War.
Mee adored Kitchener, and his entry for
Aspall is a treacly homage to the old
Angel of Death. He does mention, however,
that the young Kitchener was so lazy at
school that his mother threatened to
withdraw him from it, and apprentice him
to a hatter. You wonder if the world
would have turned out differently.
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