Our plan was to work on Monday; enjoy fishing, etc., on Tuesday; work on Wednesday at the breakwater, at the garden on Thursday; on Friday at the breakwater again; and on Saturday till noon also, after which we devoted the rest of the day to baking, clothes washing and mending, and other domestic duties.  How my mother and ’Cilla would have laughed to see me at the wash-tub, or hanging out the linen to dry on the furze bushes; or to have seen Alec using a flat iron which, with great labour, we had forged, and which was of a peculiar construction, but still very efficacious in its work.  Men are notoriously awkward in their manner of wringing and other laundry work, and I expect we were no exception to the general rule.  We made our clothes clean, and that was all we required.

Alec was a capital baker, so we had some excellent bread, while my pastry was not to be sneezed at; in fact, at a rabbit pie I was quite a grand chef.  I also introduced several new culinary matters to Alec, some of which he had never seen before; among them being the all-filling Norfolk dumpling, which at first he did not seem to care for, but in time he became inordinately fond of them, and would often ask me to make him a pouding de rien (a pudding of nothing), which was his idea of these articles of everyday diet in East Anglia.

But I am not building my breakwater of dumplings, so will get back to stone; not that I wish the reader to infer that my dumplings were ever approaching that substance in their degree of firmness.

First we collected all the very large stones we could find in the bay, and placed them as a foundation for our breakwater; but these only formed a layer about a foot deep.  All these were large stones (some of them weighed nearly three hundredweight), so to cope with them we made a kind of four-handled hand barrow, upon which we rolled our rock, and then taking two handles each, staggered off with it.  These large pieces we placed near the end of the breakwater, and when we had denuded the bay, we obtained, with “Eddy’s” help, some large piece of massed rock and mortar from the ruined boathouse.  These pieces we took in the sledge, and built into a kind of wall to form the outer shell of the breakwater, while the interior we filled with any odds and ends of rocks (none of them less than a man’s head in size) which we could find on the shore.  The interstices we filled with shingle, and the detritus of granite, but when we had raised our structure to the level of high water our available stone gave out.  This rather nonplussed us, but at last we decided to open a small quarry and see what granite we could obtain to raise our undertaking another four feet in height.