Re: Mersea natives


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Posted by John Barton on October 27, 2004 at 13:20:41 from 203.97.116.188 user Nostalgic.

In Reply to: Re: Mersea natives posted by Andrew Craig-Bennett on October 27, 2004 at 10:25:05:

There's a tradition that 'Macbeth' was written at Earls' Colne, and I think Mersea may have been Prospero's Island of The Tempest, the nearest large island. Discounting the Warwickshire guy and assuming Shake-Speare was an Essex man!
I never learnt to sail, since the beaches were mined during the war (two school mates went rabbit shooting and were blown up). One day Miss Webb, who taught at The Nothe school before it was sold to the Cunningtons, kept us in the 'strong room'after class due to 'planes- just as well, because a few minutes later there was a bomb crater completely across the width of Firs Chase (near where it joins The Lane). Friends in an old house in the part of Firs Chase which joins the Coast Road discovered a centuries-old smugglers' tunnel beneath the house, going all the way to Ray Island. Which was I think privately owned; the oyster-man George Stoker bought Cob Island for 1000 pounds.I went fishing from a motor-boat after the war,which (the war) I recall as six boring years of rationing, restrictions, bombs and air-raids.
Ransome was not being anachronistic when he wrote of smugglers and pirates. Before the beaches were mined, we rushed to pick up anything washed ashore - once it was hundreds of sacks of flour - the outside like concrete, but still a lot of dry flour inside! And in '39, the sea froze, with pack-ice and aurora borealis. I had uncles in Colchester; one was secretary to the Mayor, another curator of the Hollytrees.


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