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Born in 1934 into a family of what was known as the domestic servant class, Victoria Seymour spent her early years living in a clapboard cottage on the edge of Chislehurst Common. This wooded area and the gardens of the grand houses, where her parents worked as cook and gardener, were her playgrounds. Her two brothers were much older than her, this, and the lack of friends living nearby obliged Victoria to find her own amusements. The younger of her two older brothers taught her to read before she went to school and this generated in her an early love of books and later, of writing short stories and poems. These occupations compensated for the lack of friends.
The start of WWII in 1939 heralded inevitable social change, which impacted profoundly on Victoria’s childhood. Wartime conscription removed many of the younger servant class from the employment market and her parents, still domestics and by then middle-aged, were sometimes called upon to act as resident caretakers in wealthy homes, whose occupants had fled to find safety in remote areas. Victoria enjoyed the temporary, luxurious accommodation and the things that money can provide, such as a well-stocked library.
These high-living interludes were balanced by long spells in the bare, hard-up family home on a council estate .The proximity of Chislehurst to London meant that the terrifying effect of the war on the home front overwhelmed everything and she says, “This left its mark on me, a feeling of always waiting for the next ‘bomb’”.
After the war, in 1948,Victoria’s mother and father moved from Chislehurst to a residential job on a farm at Fairlight, near Hastings, as cook and farm hand. Victoria attended Rye Grammar School from the age of thirteen to seventeen and nurtured dreams of becoming a journalist.
However, Victoria married in May 1954, aged 19 and her first child, a daughter, was born in July 1955; a second daughter arrived in January 1957 and in December 1969, a son. Victoria’s married life was one of domestic obscurity, as she worked from home, assisting her husband with clerical work. In addition to this, from 1962 onwards, she was a host mother to hundreds of overseas students. Victoria was suddenly widowed in March 1980; as an old-fashioned, dependent, stay-at-home housewife she was ill equipped for the single-handed management of a family and large house. Eventually, Victoria became involved in local voluntary work and this was the start of her learning to know and love Hastings.
Her eldest daughter married an Italian in 1977 and lived in Milan, where she taught English; this grew into a travel/language school, using Hastings as its base. Victoria became involved in the administration work for the students and, as numbers increased, she became the company director of her daughter’s language school in the 1990s. As a result of the organisational work for the students’ studies, accommodation and leisure, Victoria’s knowledge of Hastings and its people was broadened, revealing to her the richness and diversity of the locality.
Victoria announced that she intended to retire from the language school business in September 1999; she would soon be 65 and wanted more time for herself. When asked what would she do with this time she said, “Grow better flowers!”
In May 1999, Victoria’s family had helped her to buy a computer; she said that she was feeling envious of all the interest and fun the family seemed to find on the Internet. It took about three months of patient tuition and support from her long-suffering children to teach Victoria how to use her computer. She says, “ It was so difficult at first, I was afraid of damaging this expensive contraption, which seemed to have a mind of its own. I wept tears of frustration at times”. By August Victoria had not only come to grips with her computer-she loved it!
The family suggested it might be fun to build a Hastings web site, “just a few pages”; now the site has over a thousand pages. Victoria was very keen to take part and after four months of local and historical research, plus website construction by other members of her family. Hastings.UK .Net was launched in early December 1999.
Victoria says, “ The Internet and our Hastings web site have changed my life, which I did not expect in my retirement”. She is kept busy every day, answering the site’s emails and the ‘Ask Harold’ questions. She says, “Far from the Internet keeping me indoors as people say it does, I have been out and about so much these past few years. I have been involved with a number of organisations and groups and have taken a part-time, local history course”.
One of the most popular sections on www.hastings.uk.net is the message board; visitors post notices on varied subjects; recounting memories of happy times spent in Hastings, greeting old friends or seeking lost family members or details for genealogical research, In April 2001 there appeared an unusual message, from Wendy Johnson of Canada, who subsequently sent Victoria a collection of rediscovered, private 60 years-old letters. These letters were posted from Hastings to Canada between 1942 and 1955 and they inspired Victoria Seymour to compile a part-biography of their writer, Emilie Crane. The book is called, Letters From Lavender Cottage- Hastings in WWII and Austerity.
In her retirement, Emilie shared a house in Hastings with her two friends, Clare and Edith and their much-loved cat, James. The almost one hundred letters Emilie sent to her Canadian cousins were initially of thanks for the food parcels they had supplied to the Lavender Cottage household in WWII and throughout the following years of harsh austerity, when food rationing and shortages became even more severe than during the conflict. The letters also detail the lively and kind-hearted Emilie Crane’s domestic and personal life and follow the joint fortunes of the three ageing women. Victoria Seymour has rounded the story by adding 1940’s and 1950’s national, local and autobiographical facts. “Letters From Lavender Cottage” is a touching, human history with an informative narrative.
Victoria’s solitary, book-loving childhood was a good preparation for what she is doing now. She says, “ The Internet has brought me email contacts and knowledge from all over the world and given me the chance of realising my childhood dream of being a writer” And yes, she has also grown better flowers! Victoria is now working on her next book but the details of this are not for publication.
Foyles
War, the ITV WWII detective series, was filmed in Hastings;
it stars Michael Kitchen, who plays the title role, Detective Inspector
Foyle. Foyle’s War is also set in WWII Hastings and uses some of
the locations mentioned in Letters From Lavender Cottage. |