hung in Solomon’s Temple. Recesses in the walls were divided by wooden arcades of the Moorish onion shape and there were many beautiful objects made of brass, as well as other rarities displayed in a glass-fronted cupboard. Lucy said: "This unexpected room did not look at all like a Kardomah Café as you might think. It looked like a gentleman’s enthusiastic and satisfied near-lunacy." Her father was a passionate man with an appreciation of the aesthetic side of life, albeit channelled largely through his religious convictions, whereas her mother was devout and abstemious. Her mother had to perform duties as Mayoress for many years, at which Lucy says she must have been very bad. In particular, entertaining must have been a strain for her as "her idea of food was that it was a sad necessity. [After her husband’s death] she even began to think it was not even necessary and the boys raged with hunger." Lucy’s father died when she was six. This resulted in a change in the family fortunes. As was the custom, her mother had been left only enough money to keep the house together, while each child was left a small fortune to be spent on their education. The Wood children now were all sent to school. They spent a year near her mother’s family home at Arnside, Westmorland. This move to the countryside gave the children a more free and easy life-style than had been possible in Southport. Lucy describes the "wide and inexhaustible joys of Arnside", on an estuary of the river Kent. The children were free to wander woods and fields, explore the cliffs and coves of the river. The return to Southport, after the year in Westmorland, was hard for Lucy. Every night she wept for all she was parted from: worn rocks and turf under her feet instead of pavements, "the night sounds of the river birds, flocks of sandpipers in flight, curlews and solitary gulls". When she left school Lucy went to a finishing school in Paris and the time came for her to be formally received into the Wesleyan community. To her mother’s horror, she refused. Her mother wept and implored, told her she was "lost", but Lucy remained adamant. "Yet as I stepped out of the fold into the unknown I repeated privately to myself, ‘He shall keep my soul until that day’. I knew I was