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Helen Roberts was born in 1877 and remembers her Victorian days in the nursery with sisters, Mia and Mab, and the governess, Miss Warner, whom they all loved.
'All through the early months of winter we looked forward to the morning when Jack Frost would have painted his ferns so thickly across the window, that it would be impossible to see the tiniest bit of the church porch, the cabbage field in front of it, or the three May trees in the garden. The window would stay like that, in a state of silver enchantment, all the time we were having breakfast. After that, unless the eastern sun had begun to thaw these lovely patterns, we scraped three little holes for ourselves, as small as we could make them.
'Now I can see my May tree,' we said together. There were three of the, and three of us, Mia had the red one on the north, Mab had the white one on the south, and I had the pink one in the middle. I was the middle child, so I always got the middling things - never the best, perhaps, but fortunately, never the least best.
But what an unreliable thing is memory - no sooner had I set down those words than I remember (with something like a twinge of remorse) that there were only two hobs on the nursery fireplace, and these, from time immemorial, had been firmly annexed by Mia and I.
They were particularly nice hobs, exactly like two little rooms that had broken loose from the doll's house, and you could set them out with bits of coal for furniture and old matches for people, in the most pleasant and realistic way. But Mab felt very badly about it. She simply could not imagine where she was going to live!
'Well, you can live on the bars in between our two houses,' we told her. 'Think how nice and easy it will be for you to come and see us.'
'It won't. It will be horrid.'
'But think how lovely it will be on the bars for roasting chestnuts. We shan't be able to do that at all in our houses. And every time we want to toast a chestnut we shall be obliged to ask you permission'.
Mab was pleased by this thought and all ended well. We had more affection for these little fireside homes, I think, than for the dolls' house, which stood on a chest of drawers, facing the window. It was a crude affair in bright red and green paint, and we were annoyed by the fact that it's tenants could not get from the ground floor to their bedroom unless the whole front of the house, from chimney pot to the front doorstep, was bodily removed. It did seem a silly way to go to bed!
We knew some children whose magnificent dolls' house was fitted up, almost incredibly, with an inside staircase and a bathroom!
The nursery was a pleasant room, and its wallpaper was quite the jolliest that I have ever known. Wildly twisting branches took their way from floor to ceiling; all bearing bunches of blood-red fruit, which we took to be prize redcurrants. And among these boughs hundreds of life-sized birds, robins, thrushes, sparrows and jenny wrens disported themselves.
One day a little boy, called Freddy Smith, came to tea with us in the nursery, and no sooner had he taken his first bite out of his bread and butter than he began to find fault with our aviary.
'That robin isn't right'.
'What's the matter with him?'
'Robins don't have great thick legs like that!'
'But those brown things aren't his legs, they're the twig he's sitting on!'
But it was true that those bow-shaped twigs really did make our robins look rather as it they were striding up the walls in seven league boots, and, as for ever afterwards I saw them doing this. I was sorry that Freddy Smith had ever come to tea at all.
A high fender bound the nursery fireplace, and near it was the low chair where Nursie sat sewing in winter, under the light of a single fishtail gas burner. The pictures hanging round the room pleased us only moderately well, for we thought they contained too many children, who were dressed, for the most part, in a silly way. Particularly 'The Babes in the Wood', who were not babes but looked like two quite elderly girls. There was also 'Cherry Ripe', in a mobcap, and 'A Message from the Sea', in a sun bonnet.
Facing the fireplace stood a high yellow wardrobe dotted with little spots - (the style I fancy, known as imitation bird's eye maple) on the top shelves of which stood our breakfast and tea china, each cup and plate marked 'nursery' in blue letters. In the drawers below were our toys, of which we had a great many.
When our bricks, and horse vans, and grocers' shops had got too large to go in, Mr Grant, the carpenter, built a strong new cupboard for them near the window. We enjoyed watching him perform this clever job, but, as he was a Scot, he had not much to say to us.
For breakfast in the nursery we had bread and milk every day except Sundays, when we had boiled eggs, and for tea we always had bread and butter, for we were brought up on a dietary system which clearly put great faith in monotony. Our mid-day meal was delightful, for we had it with our mother downstairs in the back parlour, but, far more often than not, it was graced by rice pudding.
But Sunday would come at last, those dear fruitful days when we dined with both our parents, and there was apple tart, oranges, French plums, and cake for tea, with Bible pictures and 'Nicholas Nickleby' to follow. This was the day when Nursie had gone out and would be seen no more till Monday morning.
Nursie was, in fact, the only thing in our nursery that we did not much like. She was a terrible martinet, but, as she was much too good and trustworthy to ever think of leaving, she remained with us for eleven years, leaving us only to marry a faithful waterman on the beach, to whom she had been engaged for the same long chain of years. It was an event which gave great satisfaction to all of us.
She had, however, her mellower moments. And she did not object to our making a noise. Playing hide and seek on winter evenings, we rushed all over the house - hiding in my mother's wardrobe or behind her swinging pier glass, under the table in the billiard room, out in the greenhouse with the guinea pigs and the pots of musk. Behind the screen in the night-nursery, in the cellar, the pantry, the glass cupboard, or down the passage to the spare room, where one could sit snug under the elegant pink draperies of the dressing table.
It was a thrilling, laughing, nerve tingling game, for after five o'clock, the whole house, with the exception of the kitchen, which Cook, busy with late dinner, had forbidden us to enter, was wrapped in complete darkness. Only the nursery upstairs was warm and welcoming with its dancing firelight, Nursie at her eternal sewing, her white apron rosy in its glow.
In those tense dramatic moments of discovery and flying pursuit, the nursery became a sanctuary, and we never loved it better.'
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