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Helen Roberts was born in 1877. She lived with her parents, two sisters and brother, at Deverell Cottage. This was, and in fact still is, opposite where the Sion Junior School is now in Westbrooke.
Helen's memoirs of her Victoria childhood were written in 1949. She compiled them for her friend, Maida Butler, who was the new owner at that time of Deverell Cottage. Maida in turn handed these wonderful memories down to Beatrice Longhurst who has so kindly lent them to me.
In this section Helen gives an account of some of the other houses and occupants in Westbrooke.
'In my earliest recollections, the house now called The Mount School did not exist, and we looked at Christ Church with only a cabbage field and low fence between us.
We took considerable pleasure in watching later the erection of, what seemed to us, a grand new ornament to the road, but my parents did not agree, saying mysteriously that this 'was not the house of an architect, but of a builder'. They even called it, in its raw brick and slate newness, 'an eyesore'. The builder in question was Mr Blaker, who lived in the top house in Graham Road. Everyday he watched over his rising masterpiece, accompanied by his son, who was a mental defective and wore, like Barnaby Rudge, a feather in his hat, and another between his lips.
The house when finished was called Lanarth, and its first owner was a widow and her family, Ms Nicholls, late of the long since vanished mansion, Warwick House. Soon after, our road was brightened by a romance, when one of her daughters married one of the gentleman pupils from the Vicarage opposite. We witnessed, from our grandstand of the nursery window, a splendid wedding.
This couple was Mr and Mrs W B Fletcher, who later became Mayor and Mayoress of Worthing, and lived for many years at Fairlawn, next to us when we moved to Tudor Lodge.
About the next house, Brandiston Lodge, which now forms the older part of St. Mary's Convalescent Home, I remember very little. A family of German origin called Hasslacher inhabited it, and we thought the three boys there fortunate because they owned a fat white pony and a little cart, and were the only carriage folk in our road.
St. Mary's Home, once started, continued to expand. In time its additional buildings reached, and were united with, it's nearest neighbour, Novello Cottage.
For this little house, with its garden full of standard roses, I cherish a certain affection. For here lived a dear old couple, Mr and Mrs Searle, who was a fairy godmother in appearance, with pink cheeks and curtains of snow-white hair under her black bonnet. She gave us a storybook for children, written by her sister, took a kindly interest in all our dolls, and knitted me a charming blue and white cloak and bonnet for my Dorothy Jane.
Though I did not recognise this till many years later, I now realise that this pretty old lady, née Sibella Novello, was, in some sort, a link with the musical and literary worlds of the eighteen tens and twenties. As a girl, she may possibly have met Keats, Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt and others of that famous circle.
Her father was Alfred Novello, the well-known music publisher and critic of his day. And her sister, Clara Novello, became an opera singer of European Fame, and the ancestress of today's spellbinder, Ivor Novello, composer, actor and producer. He had earned, at Drury Lane, the gratitude of millions on a thousand glamorous nights.
Proud as she was of the famous Clara, now retired to a Villa Novello at Genoa, Mrs Searle of our road spoke more often of her literary sister, Mary Novello, wife and collaborator of Charles Cowden Clarke, lecturer and critic. He was the author of a number of books once popular, which today remain unread, and chiefly remembered now as the life-long friend of John Keats.
It was Cowden Clarke, so the biographers tell us, who sent the juvenile poems of his school fellow to Leigh Hunt, editor of 'The Examiner'. The result was that the sonnet, 'Solitude' made its first modest appearance, tucked away in a corner of that radical and belligerent organ - 'The New Statesman', we may call it, of that day.
That was not perhaps a very good sonnet, but there were better to come, and the anecdote I like best concerning these two friends, tells of the fortunate evening when Charles invited John to his lodgings at Clerkenwell.
The after-supper entertainment would consist of their joint examination of a beautiful copy of the folio edition of Chapman's 'Translation of Homer'. 'On through the night until dawn they read', I quote from Professor Ivor Evans, 'plunging here and there, picking out the famourest passages'. Then Keats walked home. Cowden Clarke did not rise early next morning, but when he came down he found on his breakfast table an envelope in Keats' writing. Its sole content was a sonnet that began - 'Much have I travelled in the realms of gold'.
But, I too, am travelling far from the denizens of our road.
Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke lived to be very old, so had plenty of time to publish numerous books. They wrote, in truth voluminously - with what an irreverent friend of mine would call, 'with glibbery and volubery'. Charles supplied 'The Examiner' and 'The Academy', with innumerable articles on the theatre, and art criticisms, and the titles of his works varied from 'Readings in Natural Philosophy' to 'Adam, the Gardener'.
Mary dwelt largely on Chaucer and his Times, and her 'Shakespearean Concordance', so scholars assert, is still the standard work of its class, and must always remain an honourable monument of patience and thoroughness.
As in the case of all writers whose talents are journalistic rather than creative, time has obliterated the fame of these two who were yesterday's intellectuals and progressives. Writing and lecturing with the fluency, let us say, of Mr and Mrs Sidney Webb, whose work, a hundred years hence, may be as easily forgotten.
None of the major works I have already mentioned found their way, however, from Novello Cottage to our parlour bookshelves. For, in her more romantic moods, Mrs Searle's versatile sister composed poetry, and it was these three volumes of verse, in their grass-green bindings, that were successively presented to my mother at Christmas time.
I regret that these books are no longer in my possession, for I remember that I read at least two of them with enjoyment. Mrs Cowden Clarke, as a poet, was, as I now clearly realise, strongly under the influence of Elizabeth Barratt Browning. Her first little book, inspired by 'Sonnets from the Portuguese', and dedicated also to a loved husband, had for its title 'A Score of Sonnets to One Object. By Her whom he made his Second Self'.
Mrs Browning, as when she describes the bumping sounds made by the dropping of angels' tears, was sometimes short in a sense of humour. In our day, the word 'object' was commonly used to define a frump or a fright. My sisters and I, therefore, though we did not open this book, had some reason to consider its title an unflattering one.
Her second venture, however, was all that we could desire in the realm of poetry. For this, inspired by Mrs Browning, in the vein of her 'Romaunt of Margret', was a collection of romantic ballads, tales of knights, and spells, and deadly deeds. It is necessary, we all know, that ballads must be furnished with refrains.
One of these ballads, which related the tale of a distraught mother in search of her murdered child, had for its refrain, 'Oh woe! Look into the well!' which, after one has repeated it for perhaps twenty times, has a tendency to lapse from the impressive to the ludicrous. All the same, we liked these swinging verses, which we sometimes chanted as we swung up and down on our gallant grey rocking horse Duchess, in the billiard room. The two seemed to go very well together.
I was rather older when Mrs Searle's third present, modestly called 'Honey from the Wood' arrived, and had got as far in my reading as 'Little Women' and 'The Wide Wide World'. This new book, in emulation of 'Aurora Leigh' and 'Bertha in the Lane', consisted of domestic novelettes in metrical form.
The one I preferred, perhaps because its heroine had the same name as mine, told of a maiden who loved and was loved by a poor young man called Harry Gray. Because he had heard her spoken of by her brother as 'poor church-mouse Nell', he decided that it was quite fit and proper to ask her hand in marriage. But when he learnt that she was only temporarily poor through being an under twenty-one, and that on reaching her majority she would come into an immense fortune, he, in honour bound, vanished away and Nell proceeded to die of a broken heart.
'To whom do you leave your great estate?' they asked her on her deathbed. 'I leave it all', she whispered, 'to Harry Gray!' When the news was brought to him it melted Harry's pride. Like a man he married her, and they lived happily ever after.
Though I have since discovered that this is one of the Six Great Plots in the World of romantic fiction, I have never lost my affection for this simple tale.
When I began, at the request of one of its present residents, to set down these memories on The Road as it appeared some sixty years and more ago, I had no idea that the pleasant task would lead me know so many turnings and byways. Or that these random notes would run to so many pages, and but for the fact that I know M. M. B. (Maida Butler) to be interested in local history, I should certainly have been less garrulous.
The period covered by these reminiscences, though it seemed long to a child between the ages of six and eleven, was, in reality, very short. In ten years many of the houses in many of our roads will have changed hands. In twenty years, it is probable that not one familiar face will remain. Since the remote days here chronicled, many men and women of more interest, of greater talent, and of more importance will have lived here and gathered their own memories.'
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