SKIPPERS ISLAND PAPERS 53
Other problems and their possible or partial solution are dealt
with in other parts of this Log. They kept me occupied during the
next eighteen months and by the end of 1946 both house and
island were reasonably well organized.
But on 25th January 1947 a disaster befell. I was on the island
for a week-end shoot with C. A. P. Southwell of Tendring Manor
as my guest. We went out for the evening flight, and while at the
other end of the island saw flames from the direction of the house.
We hurried back as fast as guns and gum boots would let us but
found the house too well alight to be able to salve more than a
very few things. We could only watch it burn, which it did, to
the ground in two hours; as it was all of wood and full of paraffin
lamps and similar things.
The fire started in the stove pipe which must have been
obstructed with soot. That night the weather broke and in
trying to return from Tendring on the next morning to see the
final result, I drove my car into a snowdrift near Beaumont and
did not see it again for five weeks, as I had to return to Bury by
train and the roads were impassable till the end of February.
Pratt told me that the island was full of wildfowl all that
month so I missed some good shooting. I lost many tilings which
I valued, such as my first gun, a single twenty-bore best gun by
Hollond & Hollond, given me by my father in 1897, my photo-
graphs of my boat Meneen and some good oriental china.
The house contained a common room with an oil cooker and
suite at one end and two bedrooms. Two detached buildings
contained another bedroom and an Elsan closet. Fortunately the
wind was from the north and the fire started in the south, so the
workshop, which lay to windward was undamaged.
The fire was a great shock to me in many ways. The island
without a house was not much use, and rebuilding was impossible
in the conditions existing so soon after the end of the War. But
the island was giving so much health and happiness to us all that
I determined to find a way out. So I began to look for a house-
boat which I would beach on the saltings. At last I found Alpha
at Walton on Naze, an old Thames barge which had been con-
verted into a houseboat in 1935, belonging to Mr. Cyril Paul, an
ex-driver of racing motor cars. I bought her and took her over
in April. She required a good deal of repair but by mid-July she
had been overhauled, redecorated and refurnished, after the walls
of both cabinets and the galley had been lined with fireproof
sheeting and the chimney of the stove renewed, in consequence
of my mishap ashore. She was ready to be towed round on 16th
July and next day the tow started from the basin at Walton. But
she had not moved 100 yards before she fouled an obstruction at
the top of the tide, she settled down badly and took in water on
the next tide. Further repairs were needed, and were done, with
the result that she is probably sounder than if this had not hap-
pened, but it delayed the tow for six weeks and it was not till
the end of August that she was successfully towed round over the