The Sea-Country of Mehalah by J. Wentworth Day. Page 1.

Geographical Magazine, date unknown.

Warning if you read this article, it will tell you far too much of the story of Mehalah. Read the book first, and then the article will provide good background.!

'Mehalah Baker! I know'd she well, poor gal. We went to dame's school together - three half-pence a week to learn reading, writing and 'rithmetic. She lived across the creek on Ray Island, with her old mother, who was forever drunk on gin. You could get a masterful lot of gin then for tuppence. Poor Mehalah - she had a sad life on`t. Course, the Raverand over at East wrote a book about her. That was all the go that time o`day. Everybody was a-readin' o' it. The Raverand was a tall, thin man. Used to walk about the marsh roads, singin` in the wind. He was a rare scholard, a right larned man'.

Thus spoke my revered, and now, alas, dead, friend, Mrs Jane Pullen, landlady of that very old, sun-warmed inn, the Peldon Rose, which crouches in its willows on the Essex shore, cocking a wary eye across the water at the independent isle of Mersea.

For fifty years she was landlady of this ancient inn, which the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, that master of [Victorian] melodrama, immortalized in Mehalah, A Story of the Salt Marshes first published in 1880. Today it is a collector's piece. It sent shudders down the delicate spine of our grandmothers.

Mrs Pullen was over eighty when she died, thirty years ago. That helps to date Mehalah Baker, the pathetic girl of the Essex marshes who lived in a small farmhouse built of wreckage timber and roofed with red pantiles, on Ray Island. You may still trace the foundations among wind - twisted thorn trees on that lonely little isle of saltings and coarse grass, between the shifting tides of the twin creeks, Ray Channel and Strood Channel, which cut off the bold, bright men of Mersea from the duller chaps over in England.

Baring-Gould`s story of Mehalah is high-pitched, grim, melodramatic, removed to the end of the 18th century for romantic effect. Redeemed by exquisite word-pictures of the marshes, and true-life portraits of marshland characters, it has been reprinted eighteen times.

Briefly, the Mehalah Sharland of the melodrama is wooed by Elijah Rebow, a marsh farmer, brutal, cunning, ferocious. He owns the Ray and lives in Red Hall. Mehalah, vivid, raven-haired and gipsy-fierce, hates him. Her heart is set on George De Witt, a young fisherman. Rebow, in revenge, supplies her mother with secret kegs of smuggled rum, steals their sheep, betrays De Witt to the press gang, and finally sets fire to the Ray farmhouse and takes the now penniless girl and her almost senile mother to live at Red Hall. In despair she marries him, swearing never to consummate the marriage.

On her wedding night, Mehalah hits Rebow with a bottle. It contains vitriol and blinds him. Stunned by remorse, she swears to look after him for the rest of her life. Her old admirer, George De Witt, returns from the navy; but it is too late. He announces that he will marry her rival, Phoebe Musset, and Mehalah realizes that Rebow, alone is constant. Later, in a passion the blind man knocks her senseless, lifts her into his boat, rows out to sea and pulls out the boat`s plug. The pair, their marriage unconsummated, drown together.

Despite this barn - storming quality, the book grips you. Those who remember, as I do, the fanatical, biblical frenzy of marshland religious beliefs and family feuds, glimpse flashes of truth. There are still De Witts, Mussets, Petticans, Pudneys and others in the marsh villages. And Rebow is a remembered name. The melodrama, however, as told by Baring-Gould is, I believe, pure fantasy, apart from the use of local place-names and surnames.

Except for the seaward side of Mersea Island which is ruined by a sprawl of suburban bungalows, utterly alien to the island tradition of building, this fascinating half-land of sea-creeks and salt marshes is much as Mehalah knew it. Salt tides still gurgle in crab-holes. The ebb bares the shining mud-flats. Lonely creeks are opal in the dawn, sword - blue in the sun, greyly silver under misty moons. Curlew whistle haunting music. Redshank ring their million bells in the courting days of spring. At night, bar-geese laugh their ghastly laughter far out on the crawling tide - the ghosts, they say, of drowned sailors, down in the green alleys of Fiddlers` Green, mocking the living about to join them.

In winter the brent geese come south over bitter seas from Spitsbergen and Novaya Zemlya to winter on Dengie Flats where the sea-wall ...

Transcription by Joe Vince.

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With thanks to Royal Geographical Society, publishers of Geographical Magazine.