Posted by Peter Willis on February 21, 2004 at 19:01:03 from 195.92.168.169 user PeterWillis.
In Reply to: Re: CITN posted by RichardG on February 21, 2004 at 15:53:36:
I'll confess I had to look this up to confute it (in fact almost believed it for a moment)
Accrding to Brogan's intro to CITN, it was the non-S&A The River Comes First,"about an old schoolmaster, a fisherman, a schoolboy and a river" which was started, and abandoned (in 1943), in between Picts and Martys and Great Northern? (It is included in 'Coots in the North and Other Stories')
The untitled fragment labelled (by Brogan) Coots in the North was started in 1948.
I can only surmise that he did so because he didn't want to stop writing and wanted to pull off a coup which united his favourites among the Broadland characters with the S&As.