This article was published in the West Sussex Gazette on 29th May 2002.

Let's turn back the clock to the 19th century with engaging memories recalled by a lady who was actually born in 1877, well before townspeople celebrated Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee in 1887.

It may seem so distant now, but there really was a time when society was governed by rules of respect, vastly different from today's climate, in which the boundaries of tolerance are being forced back further and further.

Yet, some four of five generations ago folk lived by rigid rules, and knew how to behave and what was expected of them.

So many fascinating facets of Victorian life in Worthing have come to light in a detailed dossier kindly loaned by Mrs Beatrice Longhurst. The small package of ageing papers was handed down to her by her late aunt, Maida Butler, who lived in a road called simply Westbrooke, to be more precise, in a Victorian villa called Deverell Cottage, which is still there, opposite the Sion Junior School.

They were written, it transpires, by the previous incumbent of the cottage, one Helen Roberts, who was raised there as a child in the strictly disciplined Victorian Age.

A most descriptive insight into her formative years in the 1880s is revealed by the typewritten account, which is signed H.C.R. and dated November 1949.

There is no doubt that it was a privileged upbringing in a well-to-do family living in a large home. Helen told of how she and her young friends were expected to dress and behave in certain different ways, according to the direction in which they left home, either southwards down Westbrooke or eastwards along Richmond Road towards the town centre.

She wrote: There were two walks that we went for every day - one was called 'Down the Road', the other 'Down the Richmond.' You had to put on afternoon frocks, silk gloves and flower-trimmed hats to go 'Down the Richmond', for it led to the shops and the main street.

On the other route you enjoyed a far greater freedom. For 'Down the Road' you rushed, clad in pinafores and sandshoes, half a dozen times a day, carrying shrimping nets or gardening tools, or spirit-kettles and buns for tea.

For 'Down the Road' was not only the way to our beloved beach, but also to our garden at the top of Graham Road. With hard tennis court, its wide friendly summerhouse, and strip of lawn where, between two weeping ashes, we played touch-wood and rounders, and a sort of ritual croquet with imaginary partners and six balls apiece.

That high-walled garden, bordered with marigolds and hollyhocks, was a pleasant place on a summer afternoon, but I now find it difficult to identify its exact site and boundaries.

Helen had difficulty in locating the exact whereabouts of where the garden had been because of further road building since. At that time the section of Shelley Road running eastward from Crescent Road did not exist.

She continued: Shelley Road, in those days, ended at Crescent Road, and to reach Liverpool Gardens one had to go by Richmond Road and South Street. The new central road, which cut a bit off our garden, was badly needed long before the authority saw fit to provide it.

Our road, though in the heart of the town, had, in its greenness and quietness, something of the look of a country lane. It had no pavements and many flowering trees, hawthorns and laburnums, as well as chestnut and copper beech shaded its grassy borders.

It was dusty in the summer, and I should have described it as a flat road, but for the fact that we once spent a day riding up and down it on a borrowed tricycle, and made the discovery that we actually lived on the top of a hill. Few people walked down this byway to the sea, for it contained few houses - five on one side, two on the other.

Between them there was open ground, and we often paused at the white farmyard gate at the bend of the road, to pass the time of day with old Jerry Rumble who worked in the field beyond. He was a very ancient man in baggy corduroys, and his conversation was difficult to follow, except when he exhibited his pet cat, which always accompanied him in his labours.

The field did not belong to Jerry, but to Mr Head, the ironmonger of Montague Street, and famous pioneer of Worthing's first contingent of the Salvation Army. His shop we had, awe-stricken, once beheld, wrecked and ruined, all its surrounding pavement strewn with kettles, pans and broken lamps, in Worthing's notorious battle between militant Salvationists and the reactionary hordes of the Skeleton Army.

Jerry was one of Mr Head's first converts, once a reprobate and a drunkard who had now seen the light. But although he was certainly rather queer in the head, this brand from the burning seemed to us to be a very mild and friendly old man, as fond of his accomplished jumping pussycat as we were of our less gymnastic Lily and Billy (guinea pigs).

On one side of us was the Vicarage, with the house on the other side, Westbrooke Villa, an educational establishment. This was advertised by its head, a widow with an excitable manner and a fluent tongue, as a 'Kindergarten', a word new to our generation, and by which we were naturally impressed.

In other days, however, I think a dame school would have been its proper title, for it certainly showed few traces of a Germanic origin. The assistant teacher, whom the pupils were taught to call 'Fraulein', (though they usually preferred to render it 'Floraline', came from a region no more remote than Teville Road!

We did not desert our beloved governess, Miss Warner, for Mrs Harwood's Kindergarten, but attended it through several winters for drawing and dancing classes. We were thus (perhaps somewhat to the disadvantage of our parents) on friendly terms with its small pupils, who soon began to treat our house as part of the school. They were frequently discovered in our greenhouse with their noses pressed against the parlour window, asking, 'Can I see the guinea pigs?' or 'Can I come to tea?' or, more pathetically, 'Please will somebody take me home?'

I did not enjoy my first dancing lesson, because I was put to shame by an ironical teacher for not knowing the difference between my right and left foot. However, when we had got as far as the polka and the quadrille, I began to think the class almost as good as a tea party. I was well satisfied with the pink dress I wore for dancing, which had a steel in the skirt, the nearest approach I ever made to wearing a real grown-up bustle.

Later on my younger brother attended the Kindergarten; and it was he who returned one day with the alarming announcement, 'Floraline has disappeared!' 'Oh dear!' said my mother, 'Yes', said he very gravely. 'Floraline has 'flucked' away to Germany'. A phrase so pleasantly alliterative that we afterwards found it useful when any small article, such as a thimble or a button-hook, went astray.

I do not know who, in those years, lived at No. 1, Lansdowne Lodge, the house now occupied by my second-cousin, Douglas Payne, and his mother. But the next house, Malvern Lodge, at the turn of the road, was the home of a grey bearded, middle aged bachelor, Mr Willy Mason, by profession a landscape painter, and a friend of my father. For he, also, was a yacht owner, and both shared the opinion of Water Rat, in 'The Wind in the Willows', that, 'there is absolutely nothing half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.'

Mr Willy's boat was called the Mermaid, and his pictures were generally marine in subject, Shoreham Harbour, the Solent, and Freshwater Bay, among others. Several of these beautified the silver-grey walls of our drawing room, but our admiration for these, however great, was pale in comparison with that of their author.

When he came to visit us, Mr Willy would stride straight up to one of his canvases, gazing long upon it with loving eyes. 'Yes', he would finally say, turning from it with a sigh of satisfaction, 'I am certainly not at all ashamed of that bit of work!'

He lived with his mother, a very ancient lady, so intimidating, both in appearance and speech, that we could not help scurrying past her front gate as if it had been bewitched.

Her grand-daughter, Lily, was an intimate friend of ours - not so much by choice as by circumstance. Lily was a pretty little girl with delicate features and hair that floated behind her like a soft brown veil. But she was our senior by a year or two, which might well have been twenty, for the firmness of her will and the assurance of her manners.

As she could get a glimpse of us at play from her bedroom window, across Jerry Rumble's field, we were obliged to invite her to join us in our games. But Lily was a tyrant, making and breaking rules at her own convenience, regarding us as her subjects. She was, we thought, the exact counterpart of Estella in 'Great Expectations', read to us on Sunday evenings, and we merely three pips all ready for her squashing.

With grownups she was a lonely child with an eccentric uncle, and a grandmother more terrifying than any Miss Havisham, but because she made a fascinating creation, in a great novel, came, so vividly for me, to life.

How it looked then: Deverell Cottage, 7 Westbrooke, Worthing was the home of Helen Roberts (born 1877) who was raised there. She became friendly with the next occupant of the cottage, Maida Butler, and gave her some Victorian memoirs. Now in turn Maida's niece, Mrs Beatrice Longhurst, has graciously loaned those childhood memories and this old photograph. Deverell Cottage is currently the home of eminent physician Dr John Bull.

This article was published in the West Sussex Gazette on 29th May 2002.