Facing my father’s library, there was a sandy bank covered with blue delphiniums; dwarf ones - a mass of blue - like a blue hill.

Before I go further I might revert back a bit and tell something about my father. He was a widower when he met my mother - Amy Ann Haynes - or rather Bayly Haynes. (An ancestor called ‘Haynes Bayly^[1]’ wrote the ballad ‘The Mistletoe Bough’.)

My father’s first wife had been Helen St John - a sister of Sir Spencer St John - Queen Victoria’s representative in Mexico and a Knight of the Garter. She lived only two years after her marriage and left two sons - Percy and Henry - called Harry. Percy died when I was born on July 19 1877.

Saffory Middleton, my grandfather, left a coach building firm to his two sons - my Uncle William and my father. Saffory’s three daughters were all married. There was Mally, who was my father’s favourite; Clara who married a rich Irishman and Elizabeth who married that handsome scoundrel - Vane St John.

Now, William wanted to give up his share of the coach builders which was a big affair situated at Bromley in Kent. My father did not want the coach building firm and he said that nothing would make him into a businessman. He was a poet and meant to live his life as a writer. William was furious and said: “You mean to starve - as you’ll never make a living as a writer.”

However, William took himself off and went to live in London somewhere and left his brother at the business house where he lived with his two little sons and his housekeeper who happened to be his sister, Elizabeth.  

 One day a Lord Tavistock went to this establishment to buy a new vehicle. The foreman was dispatched to find the owner of of the business and to tell him that a Lord had ‘demanded audience’ from the head of the firm. My father was just then writing a life of Shelley and refused to budge: telling him to, “Leave me in peace - for what I am doing is far more important.” Soon after this he met my mother and married her. It was about the year 1865.

About two and a half years after his marriage he obtained a post on the ‘Times of India’ and sailed out to Bombay taking my mother and her two little boys, Horace and Charles. The two step-children were too delicate to take to this hot country and the doctor did not advise it - so they were placed with relatives and a friend of my father, a Mr Baldwin - whom I believe was very kind to them.

My mind is in a haze now as I have only memories here and there as I was the last of my family. I know the family came back from India after about four or five years and my father had a great struggle to live and to bring up his large family: but he was always happy and good tempered and sometimes used to pass remarks about his brother hobnobbing with Princes as he heard, among other things, that William was often seen at the races with King Edward - then the Prince of Wales - in fact, they were like brothers.

William lived in a grand house at Campden and rode in his own hansom cab which had yellow wheels. He had no children and a vulgar wife. I remember my father saying she reminded him of the epithet that Byron wrote of his stepmother: ‘she dines from off the dish she later washed’.