'In Norfolk the
freezing wind which roared in the trees around Paston
church battered all the flint churches which stood
parish after parish along the coast of muddy cliffs and
salt marshes and shingle foreshores, frenzied to a St
Vitus' dance the blizzard-stunted sycamores and oaks and
thorns. In the region of windmills, the storm shrieked
in their rusting turning gears, shook their groaning
spars.
The anchorage at Brancaster was protected by the island
of Scolt Head, but even inshore before the village the
white waves reared awesomely around the moored
fishing-smacks. All afternoon in the relative hush of
low tide the men had checked their warps. They had
overhauled mooring-chains, they had laid out
kedge-anchors. They had rowed ashore in their cockling
scows. Now at high water their smacks were exposed to
the undiminished force of the gale; they chucked their
tethered heads like frightened horses; they shuddered
under the blows of the breaking seas.
At Burnham where Horatio Nelson had learned to sail, at
Wells where he had watched luggers loading and
unloading, the black tide foamed up the creeks, it
flooded the marshes of sea-lavender and marram grass, it
stormed against the sea-walls. Off Stiffkey, where at
low tide in summer the Lammas family liked to walk their
dogs on the revealed sand-banks, by nightfall the
harbour bar was a maelstrom thirty foot deep, the tide
had advanced two miles inshore, had whelmed the samphire
flats and the river mouth and the mussel beds in one
navigable welter of crossing pale crest and dark
troughs. At Mundesley, where Charles Lammas' father
Roland had lived and had his studio at Cliff House,
winter by winter yards of what had been his rose garden
and tennis court and vegetable garden had been lost to
the North Sea.' |