'Waiting for my father in the Military Service to be placed in a permanent station, we lived in Yarmouth, Isle of Wight, England. Another family, also waiting a transfer, was living there also. They had an older girl than us in their family, and we got to be real friendly. There was three children in our family at the time, the oldest named Richard, next a girl named Ada Margaret and then one named Ellen...' And so begins Ellen Victoria Jane Stevenson's personal journal of her life and family at Hill Lodge, a grand Georgian house in Freshwater with tree-lined moat and gravel drive, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Military actions, brushes with royalty and escaping disaster on Titanic … Ellen invites us to share her family's remarkable journey in her own distinctive words. 'Oh yes, my dears, I remember Hill Lodge…'