Metchosin-

I'm looking forward to it.

Here's an excerpt of C. Fox Smith's thoughts about Victoria Harbour, looking back from her return to England (from SAILOR-TOWN DAYS, 1923 pp. 181-182):

"They were talking of improving the Outer Wharf at Victoria when I was last there; indeed, they had begun to build a pretentious breakwater and concrete piers which, so far as I could make out, nobody wanted in the least.

I hope they have not improved it – or, if they have done, I hope that at least they have left the old piers with the piles upon which teredo navalis had been so busy that one always felt a delightful uncertainty whether the next Blue Funnel liner that chanced along might not give it an extra nudge and send the whole thing galley-west.

I hope the water still goes singing through them tide by tide, and that the planking still gives through its interstices those green glimpses of jade-coloured water beneath. I hope there is still that sound as of ghostly sailormen along the wharves, and voices talking away in strange tongues, and that the gulls still mew and pipe and sit in long rows upon the sheds as they used to do. I hope the old sheds still hold their old mixed smell of nitrates and whale oil and Chinese bales … and that the Chinese firemen still play fan-tan in the evenings, squatting on their heels on the forecastle head of the Blue Funnel liner … I hope these things have not changed; for it is one of the bitter things of life to find a place changed that has shared your dreams.

I think I will go again, one of these days, and see … It may be I shall still find ships at the lumber mill, though not the ships I knew. It may be that still, at high noon in some street of China-town, when the shadow lies on the white-hot pavement in dark pools, in some dusk room with a dwarf tree in a blue-and-white pot in the window they still play the same little tune on a two-stringed fiddle of China: a little tune of a few notes that seems to have neither end nor beginning – dropping like a thin thread of silver into the hot gold of the afternoon…"

I can trace elements of several of her poems in the above musings. Maybe we'll find her initials on an old piling!

Cheerily,
Charley Noble