The Autobiography of Sherlock Holmes Read Free

absences due to business, as well as his reserved nature which, to a degree, extended to his children. Father was an influence, but we received affection or what was perhaps love from our mother. And, Nanny Dobney.
    Nanny Dobney arrived prior to Mycroft’s birth and remained with our family until her semi-retirement when I went to university. She then became nanny to a prominent Surrey family for another twenty years, a career of over forty years with only two families. She retired to Camberwell where she delighted in periodic visits from her then adult charges. Juliette was particularly good about visiting Nanny; they were very close as Juliette was the only female out of the eight children Nanny raised during her career.
    Nanny Dobney had a soft, ample figure. As children, we all delighted in her welcoming lap and arms as she read us stories or listened to our questions. Her hair always smelled of violets, even when it had turned silver. She wore a gold locket and only once showed us the picture of a young soldier inside.
    Nanny used logic and reason in her life lessons, whether on nature rambles or in discussions of choices and consequences. Her soft voice was never raised and she never resorted to even the mildest forms of punishment; she simply enlisted our cooperation and devotion.
    Church Court is an early, eighteenth century, stone, gray pile of a country manor house on the Isle of Thanet. It is built upon the site of at least one prior house dating back to feudal times. The family holdings covered a large portion of land in Maiden Wood, as well as fore-shore and docklands fronting on the English Channel. Our father’s firm, then in its third and last generation of Holmes ownership, factored corn, coal, minerals, and ore between England and Europe and its fleet of cargo ships used our ancestral lands as their home port as they moved between London, Amsterdam and Calais. For many generations before the establishment of the family firm, Church Court had been the feudal demesne of the Holmes family which had a long history as the minor squires of Maiden Wood, involved in agriculture and deriving rents from the thirty or so tenant farms across the family lands. As the only remaining member of the Holmes family, I retain ownership of Church Court but have not lived there since my university days. The house has been rented for income since our mother’s death and the farms were gradually sold to the farmers who held the tenant lifeholds.
    The year after the birth of Mycroft, Mother and Father removed to a villa in the south of France near Nice where they lived for a year. Similarly, one year after the birth of Wittrell, they decamped to Lake Como for a year. And, a year after Juliette’s birth, they resided in Venice, returning after nine months due to the heat. My first birthday was observed at a villa on Lake Geneva where the now numerically larger Holmes family lived during 1853. It was there, during reportedly pleasant hours of conversation at a lakeside coffee house, that my father became acquainted with, and thereafter maintained a many-year correspondence with, a brilliant private tutor in theoretical astro-mathematics who would, in later years, have a profound influence on my career, and I on his.
    As a family, we enjoyed, of course, the privileges of prosperity and class. As children, we were given the manners and social capabilities expected of families in our place in society. Our parents frequently gave parties, dinners and week-end ‘stays’ in the country for a diverse and interesting circle of their friends that included writers, politicians, government ministers, artists, explorers, actors and scions of business. My mother particularly enjoyed inserting strong, passionate feminists into the mix of guests to assure stimulating and lively interchanges during the long and elegant dinners at Church Court. Contrary to the family conventions of the time, our parents always included the four of us at dinner