Icame back from Ireland and was so happy to be home again on the Chart. My sister Rosie had made an arrangement that there should be a three year engagement to Harry Watkins as his father thought they were too young to marry and neither had the capital to set up home. Old John Watkins used to say, “Live on sixpence and earn it.”

We lived at ‘Myrtle Bank’ - the house that my father had bought before he died. The tenant had gone and not paid any rent for a year. We three sisters, Amy, Rosie and myself scrubbed out room after room. The dairy was re-papered and this made it all look very nice.

Rosie thought of getting a few pupils. There were some children living within walking distance - the Masons - two girls of ten and a boy of eleven and a half.

My mother always had the ‘Daily Telegraph’ delivered and she used to read every advertisement. One took her fancy and she replied to it. The advertisement was ‘Gentleman seeks a happy home in the country for his four children where he could spend the weekends - no distance objected to’.

When he received our letter - my mother always asked me to write her letters - Mr Lowe told us that he laughed and felt full of joy for I had said we lived miles away in the country and our house was surrounded by woods and bluebells with rabbits running in every direction.

Mr Lowe came straight away and bought the children with him and poor little devils they were too! There was Edwina, aged eleven; a son aged twelve, Jo aged six and May aged two. Mr Lowe had dressed them as well as a man could be expected to. My mother’s heart was good and she instantly took to them as we all did and we got milk and some food and said we would really care for them.

Mr Lowe said he would come each weekend and he made terms which were to my mother’s and his own satisfaction. He went away a far happier man than he had been for some time.

We fed the children and bathed them and, to our horror, we found the little girl Mary’s hair was full of lice - which had to be cut off and attended to at once. She was a funny little thing -  

a bit cross-eyed with fair curly hair and poor little Jo had bruises on his terribly thin body. Eleanor was a healthy girl - full of fun - but she appeared frightened and George kept near my mother and seemed not to want to leave her.

Soon Rosie’s little school was in full swing, with Mr Mason’s children too, and she let me teach the children painting and botany.Two afternoons a week I walked out with them into the woods where we picked ferns and wild flowers. These we pressed and each boy and girl had an exercise book to stick the flowers in. We loved those walks where we heard the cuckoo and, in the evening, an eve-jar which made peculiar noises. From the hedgerows, we picked wild strawberries and huttleberries. Hairbells with black stems like thread, shone their blue light, as we wended our way past the knoll to Toys Hill. With a clear view one could see the train which looked tiny winding along though the hills - like the hills of Maine in Cornwall which I saw fifty years later - but nothing ever touched me like that lovely place; Toy’s Hill and French Street and Cut Mill and Froghole Farm, Browns Oven and Puddle Dock.

I think George Lowe never forgot it either as we kept up a correspondence for years.

There was a lot of lovemaking between Amy and Mr Lowe but I knew very little about it as she was much older and, also she quarrelled with everyone. I believe she got him to give her reference for a job she obtained as a governess to some titled man’s child. We were forever thankful to him for this, as she walked out of our house to our glory and did not even say goodbye.

Poor Rosie was glad to see her go as she was continually being insulted by her.

Perhaps Amy was jealous of her engagement to Harry Watkins because she said, “Why don’t you marry Arthur Patterson instead of a brewer’s drayman.”

Once she said that Harry was a tradesman because he mended the gate that was off it’s hinges.