Letters from Lavender Cottage 

A collection of recently discovered letters, posted from Hastings to Canada between 1942 and 1955, inspired Victoria Seymour to compile a part-biography of their writer, Emilie Crane.

In her retirement, Emilie shared a house in Hastings with her two friends, Clare and Edith and their much-loved cat, James. The almost one hundred letters Emilie sent to her Canadian cousins were initially of thanks for the food parcels they had supplied to the Lavender Cottage household in WWII and throughout the following years of harsh austerity. The letters also detail the lively and kind-hearted Emilie Crane’s domestic and personal life and follow the joint fortunes of the three ageing women.

Victoria Seymour has rounded the story by adding contemporary national, local and autobiographical material. “Letters from Lavender Cottage” is a touching, human story with an informative narrative.

   Letters to Hannah

This book visits the lives of ordinary people, who endured extraordinary times. Among many others is the account of a Battle lad, born in a cottage beside the famous 1066 battlefield. Aged fifteen he enlisted as a Home Guard, the youngest member in the country at that time, a Hastings, wartime milk delivery girl details her working and family life under fire and a young first aid volunteer highlights the horrors of bomb and machine gun attacks on civilians. The living memories are linked via a series of autobiographical letters to the future, describing the author's war-troubled childhood to her newborn, 21st century granddaughter, Hannah. Extracts from Letters to Hannah were included in the BBC Radio 4 history series, The Archive Hour, in July 2003.This social history is rich in anecdotes and information on food rationing and shortages, the blackout, air raids, population evacuation and civil defence. Letters to Hannah provides a moving and factual account of wartime Hastings, the town which features in the ITV detective fiction series, Foyle’s War. 
 

  Court in the Act

This book concentrates on the work of the police force, the magistrates’ and other courts in WWII Hastings. As the war took hold, there was hardly any aspect of home front life that was not controlled by some Government Act, Regulation or Order, putting even more pressure on police officers already under pressure from the effects of conflict.

 During the war, there passed before the courts a parade of ‘spies’, aliens, pacifists, looters, racketeers and small-time criminals. Added to these were thousands of usually law-abiding people, who found themselves in court for flouting often not properly understood laws. Sentences were handed down that sounded like something out of early 19^th century history: A fine for stealing one onion from an allotment, a few apples from a tree or vegetable peelings from a dustbin, a month in prison for allowing light to escape from behind a curtain.

Meanwhile, the formidable Government Enforcers stalked the land incognito, seeking to entrap unwary traders and citizens and bring them to justice. Hastings Magistrates’ Court reports of the period 1939 to 1945 give an insight into a little discussed aspect of local history. ‘Vigilant’, the wartime Hastings and St Leonards Observer’s column writer, provides a background to the period, with personal comments on the foibles and morals of his home town.

 Fact met fiction, when in June 2004 Victoria Seymour was asked by Greenlit Productions, who film Foyle’s War; the WWII detective television drama set in Hastings, to assist in re-creating a 1940s Hastings’ magistrates’ court, for series three.

  The Long Road to Lavender Cottage

The now famous occupant of Lavender Cottage, Emilie Crane, returns to let us back into her life and the daily doings of her neighbours on the Ridge. What was the truth about the supposed nudist colony opposite Lavender Cottage? Was the guest house close by really a haven for left wing agitators and a bolt hole for a scandalous occultist?   

Victoria Seymour has meticulously researched the background and history of a period and place that was peopled not just by locals leading ordinary lives but by notable figures from the worlds of literature, religion, the arts, healing, politics and entertainment - the famous and infamous.

We are given glimpses into the Ridge’s former large Victorian houses, cottages, farms, institutions and businesses and the lives of their occupants in peace time and war. The Long Road to Lavender Cottage also reveals dramatic events in Emilie Crane’s daily life that she was not able to write about in her wartime letters, for fear of the government censor

Audio Book

Letters from Lavender Cottage is also availabe as a CD.   Emilie Crane's letters are read by Maxine Roach, well known in Hastings for her appearances at the Stables Theatre, and the author reads her own narrative. The running time of the CD is 3 hours 40 mins.