The girls at his billet — Reading Companion

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!

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.

Also, if I craned my neck a little to look into the gilt-framed mirror over the mantelpiece, I could see a third young face--my own. Really, I sometimes get as tired of that view as of the view out of the windows.

Nancy and I often say what a mercy it would be if, one morning, one could look in the glass and suddenly see a perfectly different face staring at one! The face of quite another girl: dark instead of fair, say. (For all of us are sickeningly fair! I get so tired of it sometimes: tired of the gold and blue and pink and white colouring.)

Or, better still, if the face of one of us suddenly turned into the face of a young man with a nice, firm, jutting-out chin, and a toothbrush moustache! Really, it would be a comfort! Anything for a change, in fact.

Even a change for the worse! Not that there could be anything worse than this stage of absolute deadly monotony. For we never catch a glimpse of the world outside, even though it's no more than a two and a half hours' journey up to London. Aunt Victoria never lets us go. Also she is very, very "difficult" about when we get invitations to stay from girls we were with at school. It would be awful if we went and actually SAW anything of Modern Life! We can only read in the papers about what is going on. And isn't that a flavourless way of getting to know what's on at the theatres, and what sized hats people are wearing?