then, was the arch enemy with whom my father spent his life in
terrible and ceaseless contest. To my childish imagination it was a
personal affair, and I for ever saw my father and this clean-shaven,
thin-lipped man swaying and reeling in a deadly, year-long grapple.
It was not until I went to the Grammar School that I understood how
many other little boys there were whose fathers were in the same
case.

Only once in those long years did my father return home, which will
show you what it meant to be the wife of a sailor in those days. It
was just after we had moved from Portsmouth to Friar's Oak, whither
he came for a week before he set sail with Admiral Jervis to help
him to turn his name into Lord St. Vincent. I remember that he
frightened as well as fascinated me with his talk of battles, and I
can recall as if it were yesterday the horror with which I gazed
upon a spot of blood upon his shirt ruffle, which had come, as I
have no doubt, from a mischance in shaving. At the time I never
questioned that it had spurted from some stricken Frenchman or
Spaniard, and I shrank from him in terror when he laid his horny
hand upon my head. My mother wept bitterly when he was gone, but
for my own part I was not sorry to see his blue back and white
shorts going down the garden walk, for I felt, with the heedless
selfishness of a child, that we were closer together, she and I,
when we were alone.

I was in my eleventh year when we moved from Portsmouth to Friar's
Oak, a little Sussex village to the north of Brighton, which was
recommended to us by my uncle, Sir Charles Tregellis, one of whose
grand friends, Lord Avon, had had his seat near there. The reason
of our moving was that living was cheaper in the country, and that