Enid’s Christmases

ENID was the Jane Austen of Darlington. She lived and loved and soul-searched in great luxury 100 years ago – and she wrote it all down in her vivid diaries.

Some of them survive. Earlier this year, her 1901 diary of her love-lorn summer holiday among the artists’ colony at Staithes, on the east Cleveland coast, was published – a compelling couple of weeks as she waited with a broken heart for a proposal of marriage from one of the romantic, smockwearing painters.

Then Echo Memories rediscovered some letters of Enid’s that had been consigned to a skip in Middleton St George, near Darlington, where she lived from the age of 30.

The letters showed that she holidayed at her aunt’s exotic house – La Mortola, one of Europe’s greatest botanical gardens on the Mediterranean shore.

Now we turn to two more of her diaries that are still in Darlington, her hometown, where she was born in 1881.

Her full name was Enid Lucy Pease Robinson – her great-great-great-grandfather was Edward Pease, known as the Father of the Railways, and she grew up in Beechwood, one of Darlington’s great lost mansions, which once stood in Grange Road, where Sainsbury’s is today.

1897 ENID was 16. Her Christmas began on Saturday, December 18, when she and her father, Robert, went to the Mechanics Institute, in Skinnergate, to see the Cinematograph entertainment put on by the Modern Marvel Company.

“It is a wonderful invention by which a thousand or more photographs are thrown on to a screen by means of an oxy-hydrogen lantern with such rapidity as to give the appearance of movement of the figures.

The first view was one of the best. First you saw a station with a few porters walking about and talking and a French cook walking up and down with this dog, which wagged its tail, and looked round till you would have thought you were looking at a real dog and man! Then a train appears in the distance on the right hand side. It comes nearer, nearer, nearer until it stops in the station. All is as large as life.

Then the porters suddenly wake into action. The stationmaster walks along with his coat-tails blowing in the wind and his flag in his hand…”

Quite how she’d handle the excitement of X Factor is anyone’s guess.

Four days before Christmas, the new nurse arrived at Beechwood.

“She looks at one with the privilege of an Oriental beauty with half-closed eyes.

Unless people are of an Oriental type of beauty (and Nurse Lucy isn’t, for she isn’t beautiful at all!), they cannot afford to look at people with limpid dark eyes shaded by long black lashes.”

Enid spent Christmas Eve “busy sending out Christmas cards and buying presents”.

On Christmas Day, the laterising Robinsons decided to put off a visit to St Cuthbert’s Church for a day, and sat down to goose before gathering around the tree in the evening.

“These are all the presents and recipients of presents on the Christmas tree last night.

Father: The Life of Grace Darling, and an Orange (from me) Mother: From Father: Classified Gems of Thought, and a bottle of white rose scent. From me: Pot-Pourri from A Surrey Garden and an Orange.

Bownie (whom we invited up for the occasion to have some tea with us and taste our Christmas goose): Photograph frame with four spaces, light oak. A blotting pad. A Bottle of Scent (Lily of the Valley), and an Orange.

Nurse Lucy: Book of Views of Darlington. Pomponia (a bottle of scent) and an Orange.

Florence Houston (housemaid): Sibyl Falcon*, brown Japanese cotton-reel box, needlecase with portrait of Queen Victoria on the front, and an Orange.

Edith Stephenson (cook): A Story of Sea Faring Life, Green Japanese Cotton box and green needlecase with portrait of the Queen on it, and an Orange.

Me: From Father: Don Quixote and a bottle of Stephanotis scent.

From Mother: A red leather Autograph album and a beautiful enlarged photograph of Seven Puppies.

These are my presents which are not from either Father or Mother: From Grandmama: a white nightdress-case with a raised pattern of corn and flowers on it, and a Xmas card.

From Auntie Margaret Hogg: A Liberty velvet work bag in the form of a jug with a ring round the neck, the pattern being yellow daffodils, lined with yellow silk.

From Mrs Pritchett: A pretty little green box containing a bottle of Parma Violets scent.

From Cousin Rachel Mounsey: A brown lizard skin purse, with gilt metal scrolls.

From Bownie: Brown holland shoe bag.

Xmas cards, to the number of: 16”

Bownie seems to be an old favourite of the family who crops up fairly regularly. Enid was particularly pleased with the pot pourri book that she gave her mother.

“I hope it will please her, as she loves gardening books (and so do I, in a way, I don’t mean books telling you when you ought to sow cabbage seed or manure roses, but nice, fresh, poetically written books about gardens, the flowers that grow in them, the owners and one or two funny incidents or a story running through the book interspersed with notes on cabbages and kidney-beans).”

By Christmas Day, Enid had decided she quite liked Nurse Lucy, especially as one of her presents was the highlight of the day: “Nurse got a photograph of a most hideous, weasly little clergyman with the following enamoured message on the back: “My darling! How I wish I could spend Xmas with you! From your devoted Admirer (see other side)”.

Nurse says that one of her Girlfriends had done it for a joke! Well, to be sure! The best of it is a photograph of a real parson, not a made up affair! He looks just as if he were saying savagely ‘I’ll cut your throat!’ His lower jaw sticks out (he has lost some of his teeth, nurse says) and it makes him look “radle wicious”. Nurse is very much ■ Continued from facing page amused, but says she will consign him to the flames.

1906 ENID was 25, and had taken to blacking out any names, leaving only an initial, for fear of future embarrassment.

In the days before Christmas, she devoted herself to icing her cake at the Technical College – “I was so done up with all the standing that I was in a very weepy condition when I came home” – and decorating a window in St Cuthbert’s Church. She bought books as presents and spent days painting her Christmas cards.

To no avail. Her pride and prejudice meant she had a miserable time.

“A very quiet, and, for me, sad Christmas Day, for I could not help thinking of the last two, when I had my dear little F with me. If it were not for the small chance of his ever making sufficient income on which to keep me in comfort, I would that I had never dismissed him.

I do not think I should have done so, could I have looked six months ahead!

I never felt so appallingly lonely in my life before, for I did not get a single Christmas card from any one of my former lovers, though I sent cards to them all! Women are ■ Continued from overleaf always more constant than men, even in thought. Of course, I did not expect one from J nor from T. But ER and F might have sent me one, and H, too, I think!

Everything seems desolate, and my life seems wrecked and completely spoiled. I am growing so old, too – 25! If I don’t hurry up, I shall never get married, for all my good looks will go, and then nobody will look at me, except for my money.

Oh, I do wish so that I had never refused poor H! We could, and I am sure now should, have got on capitally together and he has £1500 a year! Why on earth did I let consideration for poor F weigh with me, and stand in the way of such a likely match, even though H’s hands were sticks, and his breath not over-sweet! He is a kind man, and makes a good husband, and at least he is big and manly, and I think I must have been mad to refuse him!

I ought to have listened to Father, and then I should not be eating my heart out like this with regret for what cannot be undone!

And he was handsome too, and I may have to take some miserable little red-haired weasel or great, ugly, brown toad, without even a penny to redeem his ugliness!

I went to church with Father and cried unobtrusively the whole time over the dear old Xmas hymns. Of course, I stayed behind to Communion, which was fully choral.

That big, handsome, bald Choirman (called T, I think) was looking at me from one side, and another man (the tall, thin weird-looking man who lives along Grange Road and always sits in the south transept) on the other, so I felt rather nervous and embarrassed, though their admiration might be considered flattering in some ways!!

I read a bit of the book which Aunt Margaret has sent me, Some Irish Yesterdays, aloud to Father and Mother and we all went to bed fairly early, as it seemed too dismal to sit up, and both Father and I were on the point of tears.

I wept bucketsful when I got up to my room into bed.

Snow fell during the night. I started with a bad cough this morning and feel very tired and listless, and aching in all my bones. Life really doesn’t feel a bit worth living!”

Poor Enid didn’t move from her bed for the rest of the year, battling with influenza.

She did, though, recover, and in 1911, aged 30, she married Dr Charles Stanley Steavenson, the eccentric GP of Felix House, Middleton St George.

■ With thanks to Miranda Richardson, of Darlington, for the loan of the diaries.

* Sibyl Falcon was one of the first books by adventure and detective writer Edgar Jepson, published in 1895.