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Helen Roberts was born in 1877 and recorded some wonderful memoirs of the Victorian era. She lived in Deverell Cottage, Westbrooke with her parents, two sisters and brother.
She recalls that first thing each morning she would sit in the parlour with her mother and sisters, Mia and Mab, where they would enjoy hymns together, as well as playing with beads, picture lotto and doing painting. Helen remembers:
Long before eleven, Nursie would be ready to take us down to the beach where, in a state of sublime and active contentment, we remained till dinnertime.
It seems to me now, that it was a very fortunate chance that Nursie should have been affianced to the big waterman who kept his boats at the end of West Buildings during all those long summers of my childhood. We were there on every weekday from April to October, high or low water, but never, for me, too long or too often.
We had other pleasures - Sunday teas in the dining room with iced cakes and muffins, followed by selections from 'David Copperfield' and 'The Ingoldsby Legends'. Summer teas in our Shelley Road garden, followed by games on the lawn. Birthdays, Christmas time, our annual visit to the Brighton pantomime, and day-long drives to my uncle's near Henfield.
But there was no other moment in my life that touched the ecstasy of that first sparkling morning of spring. The hour ordained by Nursie to be fit for the pulling off of shoes and stockings and tucking up of petticoats, and for running, full pelt, over the wet and shining sands to the blue and golden spaces of the softly moving sea.
I remember the sense I had then of a renewed blissfulness, of greeting, as one might an old friend, this dear familiar joy. If I had not been carrying my spade in one hand and my bucket in the other, I should have instinctively stretched out both arms to embrace my whole visible world.
And these joyous mornings would go on and on (since winter was now so far away that one couldn't remember it). When we talked or played with other children on the sands, they would ask, 'Don't you love staying at the seaside?', then look as if they could and did not believe us when we replied, 'We live at the seaside'. 'Poor children, sad children!' we thought - they only had a week or two weeks, we a while long summer!
Nursie was not a very loveable person. She was what our parents would have called, trustworthy, but was sharp of tongue and quick of temper. But to sit on the beach with her sewing, with her own man generally in sight, seemed to bring out all that was amiable in her. Or possibly it was the tranquillising influences of sea, sky and air that moved her, as it did us, to an increased blitheness of heart.
Nursie's romance, as it seems to me now, was not unduly sentimental. Her Frank, who seemed to us, with his brown face and shaggy hair, his white ducks and his blue jersey, a rather heroic figure, she treated very much as she treated us. As a charge, a favourite child, no doubt, but one who was certainly expected to do as he was told.
Frank was always very kind to us, taking us out in his rowing boat whenever the occasion served, showing us how to mend a net or bait a hook, bringing curious objects like starfish and barnacles to our attention. But in time we became pretty good ourselves at marine biology; we were expert shrimpers, and our experiments in sand architecture, our mansions and cities of mansions, were, I am convinced, second to none.
Even in winter, when it was time to cross the Heene Fields and to bowl our hoops down the country lanes beyond, we spent some of our time on the seashore. But I have dwelt on the activity of our mornings because this may help to explain why we were disinclined, in the afternoons, to pursue our studies in the Parlour with readiness and concentration.
It was pleasant, certainly, to put on our clean afternoon frocks and neat sashes, and to sit all washed and combed, peacefully waiting for Miss Warner to go ahead with our education. It was restful too, if a little soporific. For the parlour, facing west, was warm and sunny.
My mother had had the happy notion of removing the lustres from a pair of old fashioned vases in the drawing room, and of hanging these round the greenhouse, so that they threw bits and pieces of prismatic colour about the parlour walls. We had, naturally, to watch out for these decorative rainbow effects - they were a mild diversion when we got rather tired of the multiplication tables.
On the whole we enjoyed these placid afternoons. It was agreeable to get out those old friends. 'Little Arthur's History', 'Mary's Grammar', 'Near Home', 'Far Off', and the rest. And we were sincerely attached to our gentle Miss Warner - a grey dove in comparison with the high-handed Nursie.
She was very slender, light-haired and brown eyed, with a pink spot on either cheek, which foretold (though we never guessed it then) that she was to fall an early victim to consumption. But I like to think now that, in spite of our disobedience and inattention, she found her afternoons less fatiguing than her mornings.
She lived near the Town Hall, and from there walked every morning, wet or fine, to a country house a mile beyond Broadwater, where it was her business to instruct half the members of a family of ten children, locally famous for their intractability. They were, people about us said, 'a wild lot'. It was, to us, a romantic adjective. And we were always glad to hear any anecdotes that Miss Warner was willing to relate concerning her 'wild' pupils.
In comparison it may well be that we appeared tame. We were not precisely insubordinate, but we were intolerable hecklers, arguers and obstructionists. When Miss Warner set us sums, we protested that dictation would do us much more good. When she told us to learn 'The Village Blacksmith' by heart, we declared that we preferred to learn 'The Wreck of the Hesperus' - and did so. When she said that the word 'character' must be pronounced 'caracter' we firmly maintained that in no circumstances, could it possibly be right to drop a letter aitch.
Her method of teaching Geography, (and it certainly was a rather boring one) was to cause us to turn over the leaves of an Atlas, pausing at every page to repeat the principal towns and rivers. We told her that we could not possibly take any interest in any one of these countries, unless it was 'biscuity'. Spain, for example, was a nice 'biscuity' country, so were Ireland, Australia and South America. The adjective (which still seems to me apt) is descriptive of a neat flat country, divided into pink and green segments of a reasonable size.
An 'un-biscuity', otherwise an unpleasant country, on the other hand, is a close formation of tinted spots, made uglier still by too many clustered towns, snaky rivers and scriggle-boggle mountains.
But, time, happily, did not stay still in the parlour. And there is a gulf between pupils of six and seven and pupils of nine and ten. Miss Warner, who had begun with Alfred and then Cakes, was not coping with the careers of Numa Pompilius, Charlemagne and Christopher Columbus. My sister, Mia, had gone to school, leaving us for new worlds. Mab and I had not merely amended, but entirely reversed, our former line of conduct. Now, instead of opposing her wishes, we did all we could to please Miss Warner.
We abandoned beads and treasure hunts, and devoted all our morning hours in the parlour to self-inflicted prep - rejoicing in French exercises and conjugations. When Miss Warner asked us to choose verses for recitation, or a subject for 'compositions' (for she had grown accustomed now to leaving this to us) we took infinite pains to avoid such questionable lyrics as 'The Raven', 'Sister Helen', or 'The Demon Lover'. And to select poems like 'The Poplar Field', 'The Better Land', and 'The Kitten and Falling Leaves', which could not, in any circumstances, affect her disagreeably.
And for our compositions, we chose, with equal unselfishness, to write on 'Spring Flowers', 'Under the Snow, Waiting to Grow'; and on 'Patience'... 'This is a very noble Virtue'... and on 'Florence Nightingale'... 'My Favourite Heroine'.
We discovered by subterfuge the date of Miss Warner's birthday, and on a cold morning in early March, lodged, for a surprise, a windswept basket of flowers on the top step of her tall house in Chapel Road, that was full of canaries and knitted anti-macassars.
In mutual affection, she now rewarded us at Christmas time with books with such titles as 'Little Tim's Mother', and 'Try Again'. These we received gratefully, for we had now learnt from our mother that 'Politeness comes first', and from our father, through his glorious Sunday evening entertainment's, that there is enough robust literature in the world to last us all for a lifetime.
Our great-grandfather now, I am sure, began to look at us, from over the fireplace with approbation. And it is just possible that we might either have developed haloes, or grown into shocking little prigs.
From such a fate, however, we were saved, for our afternoon studies were coming to an end. We said goodbye to our dear Miss Warner on the same day that we said goodbye to the sunny parlour. We moved to another house, and we went to school.
My grateful thanks go to Beatrice Longhurst who loaned me these beautifully written memoirs, after they were handed down to her by her aunt, Maida Butler. Maida became the new occupant of Deverell Cottage after the Roberts' family moved and Helen Roberts became a friend of Maida's.
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