MARGINAL COMMENTS
By M. L. WOODWARD
LAST week a sea-gull settled on Edgbaston cricket ground while the players were sheltering in the pavilion ; a topsy-turvy, dream-like version of Noah's Ark and the dove. The oldest inhabitants of the cricket- ground said that a sea-gull had never appeared in Edg- baston within their memory. It is difficult to believe that there can be any town or village in England where one cannot at some time or other catch sight of a sea-gull. One talks of the Midlands, but you cannot get a hundred miles from the sea anywhere in Great , Britain. At Leamington, or Leicester, or Rugby, you may breakfast mediterraneanly, but you can always take a train in time to eat your sandwiches on a beach. For those who live in the home counties, the southwest wind, among the twelve, brings to the elms and oaks the noise of the sea and the sound of the tide rising and falling. There may never. be a day in which you. forget, the Land's End ; or you may like only the untroubled hours and the humming of the bees. You may dismiss the five oceans, and, with Mr. Beerbohm, write shudderingly of the C. Yet there it is ; C, or gannet's home ; wine-dark, unharvested, or merely the joyless shadow upon a crossing to France ; the non-turnstile end of Southend Pier, or the Gateway to the East ; the nursing-mother of Englishmen or of oysters.
There are moods in which one thinks of the sea merely as old-fashioned, a thing belonging to the 1860's and 1870's ; such is the sea fixed for ever in the picture of Pegwcll Bay hanging in the National Gallery ; water, seaweed, chalk cliffs, women and girls in grandmotherly clothes. Looking out from St. Anthony in Roseland two days ago towards Pendennis Point (almost the last of England seen by hundreds of Englishmen who went to India a century ago) you could notice three ships at anchor; the Victoria and Albert,' and two windjammers. An old railway engine looks gawky, an old motor-car ridiculous, an old bicycle unbelievable ; yet an old ship is never absurd. For all her unmodern fines, and all the suggestions. of Queen Alexandra's gift book and earlier times and royalties, there was nothing of the artificiality of a pageant about the 'Victoria and Albert' ; she was as unself-conscious as the windjammers. These three ships belonged to the past, but they had not come out of a dressing-room to return again after a few aimless prancings. They could ride out a storm. The most rigid functional architects would have found no fault with them. Only they gave a different scale to time. (Meanwhile, the .` Britannia,' a spoilt and lovely child while the ' Victoria and Albert' kept her solemn course, had just been sunk fathoms deep ; surely the one purely romantic gesture of an English monarch since the reign of Charles IL) This old-fashionedness may be woven merely of one's own associations ; let any one of those who will go down to the sea in the next few weeks ask whether he does not think of the sea in terms of his own childhood ; the tide frothing round a newly-dug trench to decorate and then to destroy castles and mounds ; rock pools and sea ane- mones ; men in blue jerseys who let one take a hand in pulling up the boat ; nets hanging up to dry. All these things are there today, except the bathing-machines, with their horrible, fascinating smell of dried sea.
The bathing-machines. A word of warning to thou- sands. The sea in Cornwall looks like the sea at Hono- lulu ; less blue perhaps, but only a matter of shades. Try getting into it. You discover the much-talked-of treachery of water. Very cold sea is as pellucid, as enticing to the eye as very warm sea. In 1985 our domestic coasts and inlets may have been welcoming to strangers. This year the Atlantic is la belle dame sans merci.
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