In the 1890s the family moved the short distance to Sherbourne (Lawford) Mill, in the next village, where my great grandfather Frank worked as a farmer for the Dunnett family and where Alice and her sisters would spend their time playing in the fields and collecting watercress from the millpond. 

Relations were always close at hand and in later life Alice recalled the excitement of taking a carrier the three-and-a-half miles from Ardleigh to visit her grandmother, Sarah Simson, at Colchester (according to Kelly’s directories for the 1890s, the carrier ran on Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays, leaving Ardleigh at 1.30 pm, so arriving just in time for tea). Sarah Simson was born in 1818, during the reign of George III, and died in 1895, so she would have seen some extraordinary changes in her lifetime, which spanned almost the entire century.

Layer Marney Tower?

When the census was taken in April 1901, Alice was at home with her parents in Lawford, aged sixteen and with no occupation. 

There is a family story that on leaving school Alice entered service and joined her sister Kitty, a housemaid at Layer Marney Tower, a large Tudor house near Colchester. The story goes that when Kitty found herself pregnant by another of the staff, Tom Ebbs, she was promptly dismissed, along with Alice. 

Kitty was indeed with the family who owned Layer Marney Tower in 1901 (although Alice was not). She would have found herself pregnant in the spring of 1903 so presumably this was when was dismissed. In which case, Alice must have been at Layer Marney between the summers of 1901 and 1903.

Felixstowe

By 1904 Alice must have moved to Felixstowe to help her aunts Kate and Maggie run their guest house, as this is when her name first appears in the guest book. 

She was here when the 1911 census was taken. Also at the guest house were three young lodgers, all roughly the same age as my grandmother: Guy Oliver, a bank clerk; Reginald Charles Westing, a corn and coal merchant; and Herbert Stanley Borrett (1886–1919), a sorting clerk and telegraphist for the Post Office. How easy might it have been for my grandmother to have become friendly with one of them?! How different life would have been for her. 

Sid fought in the Battle of Jutland during the First World War and received the 1914–15 Star, followed by British War and Victory Medals.

In 1918 he was posted to Ireland and he and Alice travelled to Ireland and to Belfast on 6 June. He was stationed at nearby Rathmullen in County Down (now in the Republic of Ireland), where by 1921 the Royal Navy was involved alongside thousands of British troops sent to quell the armed struggle for Irish home rule.