NOTABLE BOOKS
SHOALWATER AND FAIRWAY. By H. Alker Tripp ("Leigh Hoe"). (The Bodley Head. 8s. 6d. net.)
MR: TRIPP has chosen with some ingenuity the pseudonym, —" Leigh Hoe "—under which he is already known as a writer of serial articles about the Thames Estuary. To those who can see into the name it is a compendium Of thespirit of this author, who* loves London River, knOws every channel and swatchway between Harwich and the Foreland and can write the language of the Essex and Kentish, fishermen. For Leigh is the name of that ancient smack-building Centre, a little further up the river than Southend, which is .the home of the Bawley rig ; Hoe is a nautical word of proud tradition and will suggest the wider seas of the Elizabethan seamen only to those who do not remember such a characteriatieEssex port _ as Wivenhoe. put Leigh and Hoe ,together and you have a phonetic identity With the cry of the helmsman to the "ere*—" Lee-hó'. "—as he puts his helm down 'for his ship to run into the wind and come about upon the other tack. Compared with the mouth of the Thames Most other cruising grounds of the Dritish yachtsman are easygoing. The great estuary is a labyrinth of swift running tides and innumerable sandbanks, all the more treacherous because they are only occasionally revealed at low tide. No wonder that most of the crews of racing yachts, in whom alertness is the primary virtue, come from the Thames.
Although the stretch between Harwich to the North Fore- land, which has been held in the Admiralty Court to mark the mouth of the Thames, has not the gaiety of the Solent nor the blueness and clearness of Waters further west, anyone who reads this book will understand why it is Mr. Tripp's choice. Here you have a sea which is often of an astonishing jade colour. You have low-lying watery glimpses of land which, by curious effects of mirage, often seem to be detached and to be swimming between sea and sky. You catch the. vision of trees across the water befOre you calm. see the land: upon which they grow, so that they look like the palms on some flat coral island in the Indian Ocean. Tile vast glistening mud flats are dispraised by some, but they' have the 'quality of water and a beauty of their own. They are covered by a strange variety of sea birds and they resound from end to end with the cries of gulls, and the whistling of the curlew and-red:shanks; as the tide.falls away and a renovated feeding ground is displayed.- The shoal- waters inshore are among the most unspoiled and least known waterways in England, though you are within sight of the busiest sea road in the world. Mr. Belloc in one of his books has ventured the paradox that the quietest places are near the busiest. That is true, anyhow, of much of the Thames Estuary. Mr. Tripp's drawing and his remarkably good selection of photographs are j-ast right ; the soul of the place has entered into him.
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