A Floating Home

by Cyril Ionides; J. B. Atkins

‘Go on. Yaou knaow,’ he shouted back.

‘No, we don’t,’ bawled the new owners.

‘Go on. Yaou knaow,’ he repeated, as the Playmate forged on.

‘No, we don’t,’ yelled the new owners, becoming nervous of running aground.

‘Yaou let the ould girl goo herself, then. She knaow the way in!’ was the last they heard.

During our short cruise we found out how best to arrange everything on board so as to avoid breakages in a sea. Our furniture, of course, had not been specially made for a ship; some of it had already been screwed to the walls or bulkheads; the rest of it could be quickly wedged. The shelves were all fitted with ledges, so that china and silver had only to be laid flat behind the ledges. On deck we hung thin boards over the windows, as these might easily be broken.

At Osea Island in the Blackwater we took in eight hundred gallons of water. We then visited Heybridge, Brightlingsea, and Wivenhoe, and still left ourselves ample time to make the passage to Newcliff and settle down comfortably before the boys were due at their school.

To revisit the Essex sea-marshes is always to discover something new. The dim low land may be called dreary compared with the more vivacious Solent, but when the spell of this Dutch-like scenery has been laid on you it has touched your heart for ever.

Not all people who are in love with Essex have always been so. The charms of the county inland, as well as on the coast, have to be discovered gradually, because they are widely spread.

Essex has no cathedral which gathers up the interest to one point. Yet its houses are an epitome of its history and character; they look as though they were part of the landscape, as though they had grown up with the trees. Some houses in Essex—farmhouses and inns—often welcome you with a clean white face, but the complexion of a whole village seen far off is nearly always red, and a thin spire generally tapers above the roofs. Churches and houses alike were built with the materials which were ready to hand. There is much timber in the building, because Essex has few quarries. In hundreds of churches, too, you may see the relics of the Roman occupation. The Roman bricks are worked into the lower parts of the walls; flint commonly comes above the brick, and stout timbers are used not only for the roof, but in the whole construction. Sometimes the spire is made entirely of wood, and there is surely something beautiful and touching in the exaltation to this use of the characteristic material of the county. When a beam was wanted for a house, or a roof for a church, chestnut was the wood, no doubt because of the belief that no insect takes kindly to it. The great building age of what is now rural Essex must have come immediately after the suppression of the monasteries, and you can hardly go into an Essex village without finding a Tudor house. If it be a manor-house, it may have a moat or a monkish fishpond; and perhaps the pigeon tower, which dates from the times when the lord of the manor had his rights of pigeonry, is still standing. The old inns have a spaciousness which informs you of the well-being of agricultural Essex when they were built. Where the land is good there the inns are good also; where the land is poor the inns are built on niggard lines. You can come across Essex villages—such as the Rodings, the Lavers, and the Easters—which for remoteness of air and unsophistication could not be matched except in counties so distant from London as Cornwall and Cumberland.