When we East Anglians be set to do a thing, we be set firm. We come at what we want by slow thinking, but when we know what we want we hold fast by it—being born stubborn, and also being born staunch. It is the same with our hating and with our loving: we fire slowly, but when at last the fire is kindled it burns so strongly in the very hearts of us—with a white glow, hotter than any flame—that there is no putting it out again short of putting out our lives.
 
Men and women alike, we are born that way; and we fishermen of the Suffolk and Norfolk coast likewise are bred that way: seeing that from the time we go afloat as youngsters until the time that we are drowned, or are grown so old and rusty that there is no more strength[172] for sea-fighting left in us, our lives for the most part are spent in fighting the North Sea. That is a fight that needs stubbornness to carry it through to a finish. Also, it needs knowledge of the ocean's tricks and turns—because the North Sea can do what we East Anglians can't do: it can smile at you and lie. A man must have a deal of training before he can tell by the feel of it in his own insides that close over beyond a still sea and a sun-bright sky a storm is cooking up that will kill him if it can. And even when he feels the coming of it—if he be well to seaward, or if he be tempted by the fish being plenty and by the bareness of his own pockets to hold on in the face of it—he must have more in his head than any coast pilot has if he is to win home to Yarmouth Harbour or to Lowestoft Roads.
 
For God in his cruelty has set more traps to kill seafarers off this easterly outjut of England, I do believe, than He has set anywhere else in all the world: there being from Covehithe Ness northward to the Winterton Overfalls nothing but a maze of deadly shoals—all cut up by channels in which there is no sea-room—that fairly makes you queazy to think about when you are coming shoreward in a[173] northeast gale. And as if that were not enough to make sure of man-food for the fishes, the currents that swirl and play among these shoals are up to some fresh wickedness with every hour of the tide-run and with every half shift of wind. Whether you make in for Yarmouth by Hemesby Hole to the north, or by the Hewett Channel to the south, or split the difference by running through Caister Road, it is all one: twisting about the Overfalls and the Middle Cross Sand and the South Scroby, there the currents are. What they will be doing with you, or how they will be doing it, you can't even make a good guess at; all that you can know for certain being that they will be doing their worst by you at the half tide.
 
At least, though, the Lowestoft men and the Yarmouth men have a good harbour when once they fetch it; and by that much are better off than we Southwold men, who have no harbour at all. With anything of a sea running there is no making a landing under Southwold Cliff—though it is safe enough when once your boat is beached and hauled up there; and so, if the storm gets ahead of us, there is nothing left but to run for Lowestoft: an............