Many residents from Barking and Dagenham will have taken the train along the Thames Estuary towards Southend on a work excursion - the old beano totheseaside.
But the house was deep in the country, with no other house in sight, and the children had been in London for two years, without so much as once going totheseaside even for a day by an excursion train, and so the White House seemed to them a sort of Fairy Palace set down in an Earthly Paradise.