Sit back and enjoy the memories of a Victorian lady, Helen Roberts, who was born in 1877, and spent some wonderful childhood years, along with her two sisters and brother, in Deverell Cottage, Westbrooke. The cottage is still there, opposite Sion Junior School.

'When we were very young indeed Mia, Mab and I had been dressed alike in toe-length Kate Greenaway frocks of black velveteen and white straw poke bonnets. But these were very fettering, and when a cheerful uncle began to speak of us as 'the three young widows', my mother, to our great advantage, fell out of love with this romantic trend. Mia and I were, unfortunately, considered too elderly for smockery, but Mab now rejoiced in a succession of up and down styles with embroidered collars and fascinating slung pickets.

This was only fair, because as the youngest of a trio, she had often lamented that she was obliged to wear, at third hand, many garments outgrown by her sisters. For Nursie was very thrifty in that way, and had moreover an almost passionate love for snipping, cutting and contriving. One of Mab's saddest experiences was that she had once been compelled to wear a frock made out of an old sunblind, discarded from the south window in the upstairs landing. The orange coloured stuff was incredibly board-like, so that, even to please Nursie, Mab could not say that she enjoyed being a child in buckram.

But Liberty's fashions lived up to their name, and were as soft and yielding as their colours. If the dining room had not, in my time, been 'done up' in terracotta, it must have been 'done up' in shrimp pink, eau-de-nil, or hedge-sparrow egg blue.

My father had a second cousin, a few years younger than himself, called Charles Holland. He was also the Mate, because he had, from boyhood, been my father's invariable second-in-command when the two of them set out from Shoreham Harbour in the Grebe or Mayfly Two. They would go on adventurous cruises to the Solent and far beyond, the rounding of the Eddystone Rock being the crown of these achievements.

On these occasions, the Mate kept a noble log book, in which he inscribed, not only the technical details of tides and weather, but a great deal of poetry of a pre-Masefield, but very much of the wind's way and the gull's way kind. Describing, when they left the painted buoy that floated at the harbour mouth, how madly their hearts had beaten with joy, as fast they had fleeted to the south - though, to be quite accurate, the west was their objective.

Cousin Charles considered that my parents' taste in reading was old-fashioned, and, having introduced them, with success, to Hardy and John Inglesant, he came to stay with us for a weekend. He brought with him, as presents, a copy of Swinburne's 'Poems and Ballads' for my father and 'Chastelard' for my mother.

On the following Sunday, for some reason, I did not attend church morning service. They found us both ensconced in the side armchair while Cousin Charles read aloud to me in his pleasant and rather drawling voice:

'You might be anything save good
And chaste of mien,
And that you would not if you could
We know, Faustine.'

My father took off his top hat, glad that he would not have to put it on again till next Sunday, and brought sherry and, possibly, cherry brandy out of the cellarette. My mother untied her velvet bonnet strings. Sunshine brightened the eastern garden, the gilt picture frames, and glossy details of the terracotta dining room. 'You see', said Cousin Charles, 'At any rate Nelly is enjoying this stuff'. And while I listened, proud of my acumen, he continued to read 'Faustine' till he had reached its last chiming quatrain. We all lived a long time ago, but the times were good.

We had a dog called Fluffy, a brown Sussex spaniel. But one sunny Sunday afternoon, when we were all placidly eating cherries in the dining room, the verger of Christ Church came rushing up the curving garden path. He was crying out to us that Fluffy had gone raving mad in the churchyard, so that the afternoon congregation, scared to death of hydrophobia, were barricaded into the church with no prospect of ever getting home safely to their teas. So my father got his gun and shot Fluffy among the tombstones and the congregation was saved.

'Poor old boy, I had to do it' he said, when he came back to us. 'Those people were in such a stew'. He told us that Fluffy was in a fit, but was beginning to come round. 'I think he knew me, poor old boy!' My mother had taken us into the parlour, in order that we might not hear the shot, and I felt, in a vague sort of way, that this was not quite right - that if Fluffy had to die it was up to us to endure that report.

Though I was never a bright child, I think I had a very fair sense of justice - or proportion. When a little brother arrived he was accompanied by (we were told she had brought him in a basket) an elderly nurse called Mrs Collins, who stayed with us for a month, and with whom both we and Nursie became very good friends.

When it was time for her to depart, Nursie said to us, 'Don't you think it would be nice if you put some of your pennies together and gave Mrs Collins a nice pocket handkerchief?' 'No', I replied, 'I don't want to give Mrs Collins a handkerchief.' 'But Mrs Collins has been very kind', protested Nursie, shocked at my uncooperative attitude. 'Bringing you a little brother and all.'

I could not have explained my feelings. I was, in fact, extremely - almost passionately - grateful to Mrs Collins for her noble present. But to give her in return for a little brother, an article worth a dozen French dolls and a wilderness of guinea pigs was what I had in mind, not a mere hankie! It was out of scale, wrong. Just silly. Better, more dignified, to give her nothing al all.

As this delicacy of motive was not appreciated by the others, who regarded me, naturally, as a skinflint, I set the incident down, to my own credit, here.

On Sundays, to our delight, Nursie was invisible for nearly the whole of the day, which she spent tramping with her Frank ten miles or more round the countryside. Nursie had bought, as a present for Frank, a smart yachting cap, and this he wore when she took him home to Liphook to introduce him to her family circle.

Her people, being shepherds and cow tenders, did not know anything about the lives and prospects of longshoremen. But when they saw Frank's peaked cap they felt sure he must belong either to the Royal Navy or The Merchant Service, and were well satisfied that Nursie was making a good match.

My father, on Sundays, wore a frock coat and a top hat, and my mother a black silk mantle trimmed with hundreds, or it may be thousands, of beads, and a tiny pointed bonnet made of purple velvet pansies, in which she looked beautiful. The church we attended was not the scene of Fluffy's tragedy, but was called the Chapel of Ease, because, we supposed, all the box-like pews were furnished with splotchy red cushions. When these cushions were worn out and plain benches replaced the lock-up pews, the name was reasonably altered to St Paul's Church.

The first time I went to church the service was so long that my father handed me his prayer book and gold pencil case, so that I could draw portraits of the congregation. The next time the sermon was so lengthy that I pulled hundreds of beads off my mother's mantle, so that she looked quite lop-sided. After that, it was decided that I was too young to attend church for another year; so I spent the interval at home watching Eliza cook the dinner, admiring the clever movements of the Sunday joint revolving on its spit before the open fire.

But soon I grew wiser, went to church with pleasure and decorum and further discovered that the most fascinating articles of furniture in the dining room, were the mahogany bookcases on either side of the fireplace. The one on the left, which was full of Encyclopaedias, was less excellent than the one on the right. This held the complete works, with illustrations of Dickens and Scott. Thackeray was there too, but negligible apart from 'The Rose and The Ring', and a row of poets, from Milton to Keats, in noble bindings of tree calf.

On Sunday evenings there was room for two of us on the outlying flanges of my father's wide easy chair. Mia had a stool on the hearth rug. After two or three winters, we supposed that he had read us all the Dickens and half the Scotts, but now I recognise that we received them boiled down, like the classics in 'The Children's Hour', so neatly translated and curtailed that we were unconscious of gaps.

On the same shelf were English versions of Hugo's 'Les Miserables' 'Notre Dame de Paris' and 'L'Homme Qui Rit', which came to us standing out on a blackcloth of convicts, gypsies and beggars, as simple tales of a little girl who had a knife for a doll and some little boys who lived inside a stone elephant. Also a poor ugly baby left on a doorstep, and two children in a caravan with a wolf for their friend.

In the afternoons my mother often read to us, Bible stories, Hans Anderson and 'The Idylls of the King'. Though Tennyson was her favourite author, she was not, what I suppose people to mean by the words, 'a typical Victorian'. She was simply too gay, too active and too adventurous. She hated tight gloves, bothering veils, railway carriages labelled 'ladies only' (because of the 'horrid individual' who got into them) and busy-bodies disguised as philanthropists. When she was obliged to pay, or return, afternoon calls, she defined them as 'punitive expeditions'.

In conversation she was a minor Mrs Nickleby, darting from theme to theme in a way that delighted my father. He himself loved to address her in remembered scraps of grand-eloquent verse. When he rose in the mornings, he would salute her with' Farewell, Clorinda sunk in deepest down slumber secure. Me other sports invite', to which she would reply: 'Go and eat your bacon before it gets cold.'

And when he had put on his bowler hat and was starting off to his office in Warwick Street, he would say: 'Ere I fly to Istanbul', to which she would promptly add, 'You will give me seventeen and nine for the laundry'.

Although she was so temperamentally impatient that she could never wear a watch, she was so kind-hearted that she would allow the most tedious of our visitors to bore her for hours on end, so that my father was sometimes obliged to dash into the drawing room to rescue her from their clutches. 'Why do you stick it?' he would reprove her, and she would reply with her favourite, I think it was her only maxim, 'my dear, one must be civil'.

I was once in the room when she was being discoursed to by an old gentleman with the appearance and verbosity of Mr Ruskin. 'Ah, Mrs Roberts,' said he, following up a brief pause, 'Whence have we thoughts?' To which she replied, sympathetically, 'Horrid things: Mr. Morris, so worrying. I wish we never had any at all.'

My father was no great talker, but, as his voice was low and his laughter inaudible, he was regarded by many as an ideal listener, who cared for nothing better than to hear a catalogue of their vexations.

An elderly woman, recently widowed, once asked him in the street if he would give her five shillings to buy a bit of crape. 'I will,' he said, 'but I rather think I wouldn't buy crape'. 'Sign of respect, Mr 'Robbuts',' said she, with a profound sigh, 'It's a sign of respect'. 'I was sorry to hear about your husband. You will miss him', commented my father, but she shook her head. 'You are better without them' Mr 'Robbuts'. Yes, you are happier and you are better off without them.' 'You are right, Mrs Briggs' said my father, 'We are happier and we are better off without them.'

And she went, rather more briskly, on her way to purchase her symbols of woe.'