Parker, then 15, was in her own way, a pretty and inventive girl. She was, as her diaries bear out, a gifted writer even as a youngster, with a quick wit and a vivid imagination, though it has been said that she lacked the natural grace and porcelain beauty of Juliet.
But unlike the Hulmes, her family was firmly ensconced in the workaday world of this farthest reach of the realm. Her father managed a fish shop, and her mother took on boarders to help make ends meet in their little home at 31 Gloucester Street.
Though she was precocious in many ways, she was also sheltered to an extent that only a girl raised in that time and that place could be. One indication of just how sheltered she was came not long before her mother's murder when, during a period of separation from Juliet, she was seduced by one of the family's boarders, a young student. Their first encounter was short lived — her father barged in on them before anything had happened, but Pauline assumed that simply sharing her bed, however briefly, with the boarder had claimed her virginity. Later, perhaps in response to the shame her family had heaped on her, she did consummate the act with the boarder, though she would later discard him in favor of her consuming relationship with Juliet.
But there were similarities in the two girls' worlds as well. Some, of course, were beyond their ken. For example, much as Hilda Hulme had managed to hide her secret passion for Perry from her daughter, Honora Rieper, who apparently clung to the ideal of social and sexual mores with the kind of iron fisted grip that only the working class has the muscle for, also had a secret.
The truth was, her name was not Rieper, though that was the name by which everyone in Christchurch knew her. Though she had been faithfully devoted to her "husband" for more than a quarter century, and had given him four children, including a boy who died soon after birth, the couple was never legally married, though that fact was unknown, even to Pauline, until after Honora Parker's death.
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