It was in the library at Einhallow that my father composed that most beautiful book ‘Life and Immortality’ and Tennyson wrote him a long letter expressing his appreciation of it. I remember he also wrote ‘You are a man after my own heart.’ This letter from Lord Tennyson my brother Charles took to Australia with him after my father had died in 1896.

It was like the end of the world to me then. Life seemed relentless in its cruelty - to take from me the one being whom I adored. I had fits of melancholy and got so thin that my mother went over to her cousins at Froghole Farm near to where we lived - during the few years before my father died. He had thought the country air would be so lovely and it was indeed a beautiful spot being situated high up on the hills of Kent.

The surroundings and land and wood had once belonged to my mother’s father - Frances Haynes. He had pegged out a plot of land when it was an just an uninhabited island surrounded by pine trees. The virgin soil was deep with peat - a silver Siberian moss - and the area was called the Chart being almost four miles from the mill at Brasted and seven miles from Sevenoaks.

The mill had belonged to my great grandfather who had married Ann Collens^[1] from Ramsey,  Hampshire — where my  

mother used to go and stay when she was a girl. She told me that she used to put out her hand from the lattice window and pick big black grapes which grew on the walls of the house. Her days were spent riding about the country on horseback with her cousin, Poll Doubell - and sometimes she helped to milk the cows.

Polly and my mother were very close friends being first cousins. They came to Brasted and roamed over hill and dale on their horses. I always heard that they were the finest horsewomen in Kent. I still have my mother’s horsehair whip that she had bought from India - a dainty thing with an agate stone set in silver on the top and made of plaited horsehair. She used to ride wearing a white Holland habit when in Bombay and wore a boat-shaped hat swathed in white Indian muslin. She had the most perfect figure and a lovely face full of character and grace.

She lived till she was one hundred and two and retained the schoolgirl complexion of cream and roses and was sensible and entertaining till the last moments of her life.

Sometimes she told me stories about her childhood.

1. ↑ Was she actually Harriett Collins, Francis Haynes II's wife?