Solicitor: Where do you live?
Witness: Hoo.
Solicitor: You.
Witness: Hoo, sir.
Solicitor: You, I mean; you yourself.
Witness: Hoo.
Solicitor: Oh! at Hoo?
Witness: Yes, sir.
Following the road on to Hoo St. Mary, where the large church stands prominently ringed about with trees, the remote little village of Allhallows is reached, rather over half a mile from the shore. Here is an ancient church, with little western bellcote instead of a tower. Turning to left here, along a very bad track, the waterside will be reached at Allhallows Fort, a modern masonry work at the spot called “Bell’s Hard,” looking across to Southend, some four miles away. Southend from this point looks almost as red and yellow, and the sea, under favourable conditions, as blue, as the places pictured on the familiar advertisements of the railway companies. “Almost,” you will observe, not quite! There is nothing on earth really so gorgeous as those. But Southend, from these muddy shores, on a glorious day in July wears the likeness of some Celestial City or New Jerusalem.
In the peaceful times which until recently prevailed the only apparent inhabitant of Allhallows Fort was usually one soldier of the Royal Garrison Artillery, whose chief preoccupation seemed to be the potatoes, cabbages, and beans of a garden at the rear. A mile or so eastward is the muddy Yantlet Creek, which separates the Hundred of Hoo and the Isle of Grain. At the mouth of it, besides a coastguard station, is the obelisk called “London Stone,” marking the limits of the Lord Mayor of London’s jurisdiction as Conservator of the Thames.