Bright clustering curls blown wild and golden

In early July 1875 Frank Kilvert was at the seaside. He had hoped to meet his mother, brother and sister at Shanklin station, but 'to my disappointment they did not come'.

When he went to the beach, 20 minutes after they had failed to arrive, he had family much on his mind.

He threw himself into building sandcastles and trenches, enjoying the tide , and watching the children playing at the fringes of the sea.

And then the tone changes:

Oh, as I watched watched them there came over me such a longing, such a hungry yearning to have one of those children as my own. Oh that I too had a child to love and to love me, a daughter with such fair limbs and blue eyes archly dancing, and bright clustering curls blown wild and golden in the sunshine and sea air. It came over me like a storm and I turned away hungry at heart and half envying the parents as they sat upon the sand watching their children at play.

Remembering that he did not actually write this entry on the beach, but wrote it up at some later point, the two exclamatory 'Oh's are interesting.  He wanted to record something of the depth of his feeling, and set it next to the vivid memories of what he had seen at the beach. His description of the daughter he longs for isn't some Platonic  and theoretical ideal, nor a simple amalgam of the children he had seen at the beach. Rather he selects the almost cinematographic images from the beach which appealed to him and uses them to frame the daughter he never had.

His imagined child was not those we see in studio photographs of the era, starchily dressed, posed formally, and holding a smile-less expression for the long exposure to catch the image. (A smile was so much harder to hold successfully, and early photographers avoided smiling shots.)

There is, instead, fun here. There is archness in the eyes, and a hint of the uninhibited in 'curls blown wild and golden'. This is an outdoor child, enjoying life unconstrained by the conventions of school or the dining table.

It is hard not to wonder if Kilvert wanted to be that child himself, if he wanted greater freedom that his calling and social status allowed him. Perhaps he was regretting his own lost childhood, a sheep remembering gambolling lambhood. There is such powerful vicarious pleasure in the children's happy exuberance.

He was 35, still single, and, one feels, unfulfilled.