This difficult childhood was softened by the affection he received from the family housekeeper Maria Millis, and his sisters. Millis provided for Ashley a model of Christian love that would form the basis for much of his later social activism and philanthropic work, as Best explains: "What did touch him was the reality, and the homely practicality, of the love which her Christianity made her feel towards the unhappy child. She told him bible stories, she taught him a prayer." Despite this powerful reprieve, school became another source of misery for the young Ashley, whose education at Manor House from 1808 to 1813 introduced a "more disgusting range of horrors". Shaftesbury himself shuddered to recall those years, "The place was bad, wicked, filthy; and the treatment was starvation and cruelty."