The theme for this week is Gone Too Soon.

My maternal grandmother Lily Hunt was the tenth and last child of school teachers Edwin Hunt and Margaret Morgan who married in Reading, Berkshire in 1862. The seventh and ninth children, unfortunately, did not survive early childhood. The ninth only survived a few months, but the seventh lived for two years and her death was never forgotten, even in such a straight-laced Victorian family, and my Aunt Betty remembered hearing about her in the 1930s.

Alice Katherine Hunt, known as “Eulalie” or “Little Lallie”, was a real Christmas present, a much-loved child born on 25 December 1870 in Reading. She died two months before her third birthday. I do not know the cause of her death.

My aunt passed on to me a lovely little Memento Mori, a brooch of amethyst and seed pearls containing a lock of golden hair and inscribed on the back EH.