The Real-Life Chilbury

When I first sat down to write The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir, I had the painstaking task of deciding where to set the story. My criteria were simple: it had to be somewhere in Kent, a location that would have been impacted by both the 300,000 men rescued from the Dunkirk beaches to Dover and the air fights and bombs during the Battle of Britain.

But crucially, it had to be a place of beauty, both in the countryside setting and in the village itself—preferably old, with plenty of listed buildings around an ancient square. There would be a manor house nearby, one that had a profound impact on the life of the people in the village.

Before I got on to thirdly and fourthly, a distant memory came to me, and I recalled a place from my past, dusty with age and uncovered for many years. I brushed off the cobwebs and took a good look. It was Chilham, a tiny, beautiful village nestling in the north Downs near Canterbury in Kent.

In my twenties, I’d spent an idyllic summer there, staying with friends on a farm in an oast house, which is a nineteenth-century building originally made for drying hops to make beer, with an iconic conical white-tipped roof. It was blissful. We’d draw back the curtains every morning to hazy sunshine over fields of ripening wheat and fresh green pastures with frolicking lambs. It was a sheep farm, raising lambs for market, and part of the oast-house rent was helping with the lambing in February—standing in a cold barn every night grabbing little hind legs and pulling out babies, cleaning them and the all-important mother-lamb bonding moment.

That year there was only one case of maternal rejection; the farmer covered the rejected lamb with the coat of one who had been born dead and presented him to the dead-lamb’s mother, who took one sniff and adopted him, thank goodness. Otherwise it would have been the farmer hand-rearing the poor little lamb.

The village was a mile away, and we would go there to the little tea room or, more usually, to the iconic pub on the corner of the square. The White Horse is everything that you’d imagine an old, traditional English pub to be: a whitewashed eighteenth-century building with low ceilings and cozy crooks and crannies to sit and have private discussions and a more open space by the bar for groups of hikers or horse meets. The walls are covered with horse-riding paraphernalia, horse shoes and pictures of gentry on horseback—icons of a former era.

A huge open fireplace spread a wonderful warmth in the winter, and the windows opened in the summer to let in the scents of pinky red fuchsia and begonia from the hanging baskets in the square. Good atmosphere lends itself to great conversation, and I recall discussing meaty topics inside it’s heady interior, sitting beside the fire late into the night.

The village square is impossibly picturesque: a rectangular center surrounded by tiny, timbered Tudor shops, their little shop windows crisscrossed with old lead strips. The shops—now little cafes, a post office, and antiques dealers—would have been the bustling mainstay of village life, selling daily meat, bread, and vegetables through eras without refrigeration. The space in the center of the square is currently used as a small car park for the locals, which reminds us that the village is still a functioning place, a busy little spot and not just a museum piece. That is, unless they’re filming there.

Inevitably, a village of such beauty is often used as the backdrop for historical movies. All the locals and the cars are shooed off, and horse-drawn carriages and ladies in long frocks are brought in for a TV or movie adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma or Moll Flanders. Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot have also been filmed here, as well as The Canterbury Tales, which is very apt as Chilham was traditionally the pilgrims’ last rest, just six miles from Canterbury Cathedral.

The crumbling stone church sits on one side of the square. It was built in the fifteenth century, although there has been a church here since the seventh century. The graveyard is prosaic and sinister; there’s a rumor that the remains of Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury murdered by King Henry’s knights in 1170, are buried in an anonymous grave here.

On the opposite side of the square lies the gateway to the dramatic heft of Chilham Castle. The main building, a Jacobean manor house, was built in 1616 beside the ruins of a medieval castle keep, built on the defensive hilltop location in AD 709 by Wihtred, King of Kent, to fight off neighboring kingdoms, notably Wessex who clearly had their eye on it.

The village sprung up originally to service the fortress, and then the manor house, with food, soldiers, farm laborers, and servants. It probably had its own ironsmith as well as the pub, shop, post office and even a cricket ground by the nineteenth century. The twentieth century saw the gradual end of the power of manor houses, and when the lord of the manor died at the beginning of the Second World War, Chilham Castle was used as a military base. At the end of the war, unowned and run by trustees, the house was put up for sale. The estate—and the village—were in peril.

It’s hard to imagine an entire village in crisis, with jobs and homes lost as the estate was broken up and sold, the heart of the village lost. The multitude of servants dispersed; the shops and blacksmiths and pubs replete of their customers; the square deserted.
Little by little, the village clawed its way back to life, local hops for beer, lambs from the hilly pastures, crops of all kinds. People began working further away, Canterbury, Ashford, London. Then a different type of person began to come. Tourists came to see the buildings, to witness the past, to understand the way we used to live.

The setting was perfect for the book, and I fictionalized the name, and so The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir was born. Every time I wrote about Mrs. Tilling bustling into the square, or Venetia knocking on one of the old row houses, the delightful village of Chilham was fresh in my mind, as if I was still spiritually there, and always had been.
The Chilbury Ladies' Choir