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him for her suicide. In 1901, Anna’s mother was buried in the same plot, and so in 1914 was her aunt, Janet Stewart Paul. In Lair 59 of the Necropolis, the four of them lie together with their secrets.
    The Eastbourne photograph shows the widower and his three children a few years after Anna’s death. They are formally grouped as if in a studio conservatory. The father, sitting on a stone bench, is attired in morning clothes; the two boys (one sitting on the ground balancing a tennis racket, the other standing next to the bench) are dressed in Eton jackets and collars, with buttoned waistcoats and sober spotted ties. Norah, their sister, is perched on the back of the bench, aged about ten, wearing a long-sleeved pleated dress with a high lace collar and lace cuffs. What struck me most when first examining this picture is how old the father appears in comparison with his children. He is rather old to have a ten-year-old daughter – in his mid-to late-sixties. But, with his bald head and full white beard, half-closed eyes and melancholic expression, he seems nearer eighty. It is as if his wife’s terrible death has marked him for ever. The two boys themselves have somewhat wary and solemn expressions matching their father’s. Only Norah, from her superior position on the back of the bench, confronts the camera direct. She is not smiling, but she has a modern look. She appears forthright and freer than the boys.
    The four of them were living at a large, rather sombre flint house called The Links built in 1869 close to Beachy Head in the Meads district of Eastbourne. The house itself stood in extensive grounds out of sight of the sea and protected by a high flint wall. Behind this wall, on naturally-sloping, partly-levelled grounds shaded by beech and yew trees, ilex, chestnut and Cedar of Lebanon, lay a sunken garden with a large expanse of lawn over which crying seagulls would sail – a good place for games. During his twenty years there, Charles Holroyd enlarged this property considerably. His Will refers to outbuildings, cottages and pleasure grounds as part of his land. He employed a gardener (who lived with his family in a cottage on the grounds), cook, parlourmaid, housemaid, house parlourmaid, coachman and a governess, Mary Easlea, later described as a companion.
    The Major-General makes his appearance in the local newspapers as someone who ‘took no part in public affairs, for like other residents who have served their country in distant parts of the world, he came to Eastbourne in search of quiet and rest’. He was a Tory and a member of the Church of England, worshipping at St John’s on Sundays and going to the Sussex Club twice a day during the rest of the week. The two boys were ‘rather in awe of him’, my father writes. But as the tennis racket in the photograph suggests, there was an escape through sport. Both boys had guns, made their own cartridges, and would go rough shooting on the Downs. There were also the adventures of bird’s-nesting, moth-and butterfly-collecting, and fishing expeditions at sea. Eventually there was the more permanent escape to boarding school.
    But none of these escapes was available to Norah. Her chief pastime seems to have been stamp-collecting. Though she did have friends to stay – the 1891 census lists a fourteen-year-old visitor from Paris, Georgette Backellery – Norah’s life appears to have been somewhat solitary. She was educated at home under the supervision of Mary Easlea and remained at The Links with this middle-aged companion until after her father’s death at the end of the century. Despite her forthright look in that family photograph, she was said to have been delicate. ‘How much this state of health was a state of mind it is impossible to say,’ my father wrote, adding that he never heard his own father refer to his sister Norah when talking of his boyhood.
    Charles Holroyd was educated at the East India Company’s college at Addiscombe, and his