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stroll across the wild marshes of the North Norfolk coast before retiring to the gentle old-world charm of the local pub for a warm pint of beer and a singsong to anti-English wartime German songs.
    Alerted to this phenomenon by Captain Mayfield, resident of Gunner Creek Cottage in Blakeney, we dispatched our reporter to the Map and Sail dressed in deer-stalker and binoculars. True enough, as the evening wore on, and tongues became loosened, regulars collected round the piano at the far end of the bar with Mrs Balls at the keys. An instrument probably not tuned since the turn of the century - and hammered ever since - the music began with local favourites of ‘The Bold Young Sailor’ and ‘Shoo Arlo Birds’, before ‘The Foggy, Foggy Dew’ broke out, during which Mrs Balls strained her right hand in the difficult chorus section. Mrs Balls returned to the keys after receiving the appropriate treatment to perform a tune closely resembling ‘Jawohl, meine Herren’, a cheeky propaganda song of the German National Socialist party.
    Our reporter threw off his disguise to confront Mr Arthur Quail, patron, who seemed to express genuine surprise that he had been singing German propaganda tunes of the last war. In his defence he maintained that ‘Jawohl, meine Herren’ was in fact the lesser known, if not entirely unknown, ‘She Were a Blakeney Marvel’. He denied any accusations that Blakeney offers, or had ever offered, clandestine support for the German National Socialist Party, and with short shrift showed our reporter the door.
    Outside, Mr Albie Smee claimed the scandalous tunes had been taught to those who frequented the Map and Sail by a vagrant card shark who had holed out there during the war, before disappearing one night after conducting many thefts in the area. Sightings have continued unverified over the last few years. His residence is not known.
    Captain Mayfield saw active service at Modder River and Bloemfontein in the Boer War, and was a discipline instructor during the Great War, though sadly too old to see active service in any foreign theatre.
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    German tunes were never heard in the Map and Sail again, and Hands was dropped as a topic of conversation. To cover up the truth, it became general knowledge that Arthur Quail’s great map of the North Sea had not, in fact, disappeared in the back pocket of the man with the royal flush, but had been eaten by Sambo, an overweight black Labrador famed for his appetite for anything paper and, in particular, the beer-soaked cardboard mats at the Map and Sail.
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    â€˜Thassit,’ Arthur Quail finally answers the longshoreman, ‘this pub ain’t called the Map ’n’ Sail no more. Now on it’s the Albatross Inn. Soggy - you get some paint and do the sign, should’ve done it years back.’
    Later that day Soggy’s paint covered up the Map and Sail’s history under the wings of an albatross, which became popular with birdwatchers because the picture was so clearly of a black-backed gull. But Arthur Quail had made his point all right, he was rewriting the story, in the same way that my family, right back to their origins in the mud of North Norfolk, went silent, went missing, erased and reinvented themselves in times of trouble.
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    So Hands used the map to navigate his way back to Germany. Wrong. Let my mother describe how she found it when she was a young girl: Yeah, in an old pot, hidden in an old pot well away from prying eyes. Took me half an hour getting that cork out, she says, if there han’t been a cork I shoun’t have bothered looking in there. She told me that when she’d unrolled Arthur Quail’s missing map she’d seen a large round island drawn in the middle of the North Sea, ‘big and beautiful with mountains and fjords like old Norway, marshes and creeks and wide empty beaches like Norfolk’. A proper little Atlantis. She did what any