In the midst of wader smoke
“A son of the marshes” is a name that always fascinated me. It is the nom de plume of Denham Tordan. Like me, he was born on the north Kent coast, spending his early years with the smell of saltmarsh mud in his nose, and like me he moved to the Surrey hills as a youth. In fact, while we were born 119 years apart, our home villages were about three miles apart, as the crow flies.
Tordan was clearly at home in the Surrey hills, but like me he was drawn back to the shoreline, too. His book , published in 1893, has a splendid mix of essays from across these two environments. Forty years ago, in my avid book-collecting days, I was fascinated to
