The Girls at His Billet

They married early enough themselves, goodness knows. Father was twenty-one, and had only just taken on the big yacht-building business in this place. Mother was seventeen. A whole year younger than I am now, if you please. (I am what they called at school "a precocious eighteen.") Just because I've read a lot, and thought a good deal about what I've read. But what price Mother's precocity? which really seemed to be a distinct success. I know she and our good-looking Dad were awfully fond of each other, and awfully happy for the ten years of their married life. So why on earth did they make that absurd stipulation in their will?

That has been at the root of all our troubles!

Why did they say that Aunt Victoria (Mrs. Verdeley) was to take charge of their three daughters (that's us) "until they arrived at the age of twenty-five, in order that the said daughters may not plunge recklessly into the dangers of a too early marriage"?

Since this was what they wished (for Evelyn, Nancy and me to remain old maids until we are twenty-five) they've certainly done the right thing in sending us to live here.

Let me try to describe the sweet spot.

Imagine a village, a God-forsaken village on the bleakest part of the East Coast of England.

Imagine mud flats and wind-swept marshlands, and a sea that crawls out over miles and miles of shore that looks like nothing on earth but sheets and sheets of wet brown paper.

Imagine a street or so of small, red-brick houses. Imagine several boat-building yards, throw in a village green, a post-office, a church, a few better houses, and a railway station, where the trains go twice daily as far as "Nowhere," which is the junction to this place. There you have the delightful part of the world in which we live!

Its name?--well, perhaps the Censor might not like me to tell you its name. So I shall call it "Mud Flats," which is certainly descriptive enough of it.

And now imagine a house that's like a bell without a clapper. In other words, a house full of women, without any sort of a man at all about it. Unless you count Penny, our gardener, who walks lame with rheumatism and who's as deaf as a post, and at least 156 years of age. Poor dear, he's so old that he thought it would stand in his way of getting a job Even Here, so he always wears (over what I suppose is a pink Easter-egg of a head) a bushy raven wig that a baby could see through. He told me it had cost him no end of his savings to buy. Pathetic, isn't it?

A tragedy of old age, my dears. But no more pathetic than our own, which is a tragedy of youth!

To go back to it:

Imagine a life where nothing, absolutely nothing ever happens!

Imagine getting up in the morning and looking out of the window at the brown, flat shore and at the distant sea, with a few fishing-sails dotted about on it. Imagine dressing for the day in country clothes that it doesn't matter what they looked like exactly, considering that nobody ever looked at one, or saw whether one was plain or pretty, dowdy or smart. Imagine coming down to breakfast, always the same breakfast--porridge, fish (for Aunt Victoria won't have bacon in the place), toast, marmalade, and tea. We never have coffee. It is too much trouble to make for just a household of women. That's the keynote of our lives!

And now imagine looking round the table and seeing, morning after morning, the same faces. One old one, that's Aunt Victoria, and two young ones, my sisters, Evelyn (aged twenty-two) and Nancy, who is going to be twenty-one next month.