Essex County Standard 28 December 1972
Transcribed by Joe Vince

Taking them all in all, my mother`s family, the Pullens, were a good looking lot as the family album records. Some were dark, some fair, some blue - or brown - eyed, but all the girls except my mother, Mary Ann, had wavy hair.

One clerk at grandfather`s seed merchants, it could have been Suttons or Waite Nash & Co, of Southwark Street, had an eye for a pretty girl. One of the eight went with grandfather on his annual trip to London.

"Are all your daughters as handsome as this one. Mr Pullen"?
"Well, Sir, they`re not to be sneered at."

After having 14 children my grandmother produced the loveliest of them all. Priscilla. She had a flawless fair skin, blue eyes, and auburn curls. Naturally, the rest of the family made much of her.

She was a merry child. Dancing in a patch of sunlight before she could speak painly, the family would hear her singing "Look the beautler morning`, look the beautler mornin`".

A busy needlewoman was Priscilla, struggling manfully to push a needle through.
"What are you doing ` Cilla?"
"I`m needleworkin` Bo`s shirt."
Bo was Uncle Joseph, one of her older brothers, who carried on the seedgrowing business after grandfather`s death.

The older girls went away to domestic service with families connected with local land - owners but as grandmother died in her sixties and grandfather lived to be 88 a succession of daughters kept house for him. Priscilla was one of them, until she married Edwin Langstaff Cooke, a member of one of the oldest recorded families in Mersea.

When the County Archivist brought some manorial rolls to a Mersea Island Society meeting, a Cooke was shown to be a tenant on the roll of 1557, in the time of Mary Tudor.

I remember as a child going to tea with Aunt Priscilla and her family (she had a boy and a girl) on Christmas Day, feeling very important and wearing a Christmas present, a much - embroidered pinafore with its yoke threaded with pink ribbon.

More important than going to tea on Christmas Day Was going to tea on Sunday. Not for the eats. I can`t remember a single thing we ate; it was after tea that mattered.

We trudged the best part of a mile to the Methodist Church in Mill Road. There we tasted the glory of sitting perched high above the congregation in one of two special pews at the back.

Uncle Ed, as we called him, rented it. The size of a small room with red cushioned seats, a flat table, and a drawer for books, it was far superior to our own pew in the aisle below. We could see everything but not be seen - at least, not by the good mannered people who wouldn`t turn their heads.

On weekday errands to Aunt Priscilla our eyes were drawn like a magnet to the high kitchen mantel - shelf. There on the end sat a tin with a double lid which kept the biscuits crisp.

We were always rewarded with a butter finger each: I never see them now. They were long and rounded out at the ends.

Later, my aunt and uncle moved to Colchester, where Uncle Ed had a fish and poulterers business complete with oyster room, and we moved to Paglesham near Foulness Island.

Aunt Priscilla`s letters were a delight, and not because of their calligraphy. She wrote in the economical fashion of the day, she crossed them. Consequently, after a second or third reading we`d decipher a piece of news entirely missed at first.

Aunt Priscilla had a generous nature.
The butcher boy pulled up his fast trotting horse and came whistling down the garden path with the joint. As long as there were apples on the trees he`d be greeted with "Would you like an apple?"

In later years, dressed for some function with black ostrich feathers on a black hat, tiny gold ear rings, a fur and her lorgnette, she looked what she was, the best type of country - woman.

Aunt Priscilla suffered a stroke in her sixties, but, undaunted, even learned to crochet with her left hand now the right was paralysed. Staying with her only daughter, and realising strength was failing, she made a request.

"In case I get so I can`t speak I want you to give Sybil (then she mentioned my sister and two other cousins) five pounds each."

We all had our five pounds after her death in 1938. It was a sum not to be despised then. I helped my cousin sort out her mother`s personal belongings. Suddenly she burst into tears; in her land she held a small bundle of letters tied with ribbon. They were the few letters Uncle Ed had written to Aunt Priscilla during their courtship. They were very few, for they both lived in Mersea.

My cousin said "I can`t read them" and put them on the fire.

So, Aunt Priscilla left this world, loved and mourned by us all.

Read More
An Essex family and their home in West Mersea, by Sybil Brand

More Mersea history