BIO: In all his years, Edward Harvey has never been able to resist the urge to trudge the shoreline and seek out whatever has been cast up; in fact, he is teased about his stoop from looking down at his feet for "treasures." Five generations ago his people were Cornish seafarers. In his schoolboy days, the early years of WWII, he was evacuated with his London school en mass to Westward Ho in North Devon. There was an infinite possibility to roam the shore towards Clovelly and glean whatever floated in from the many ships being sunk in the Western Approaches. The U-Boats were enjoying their early successes in torpedoeing whatever ships they sighted. He and friend Mike Newell would cut school to spend an hour or two searching the shoreline. Apparently their none-too-observant, but brilliant and extremely kind, Welsh math teacher, Mr. Thomas, never seemed to notice their absence and they would sneak back before the end of class. Despite all this they absorbed enough m! ath for Mike Newell to later navigate the Spitfires, Vampires and Meterors which he later flew in the RAF, and Edward Harvey served his years in the complexity of Airborne Radar. On that long expanse of beach they gathered all kinds of flotsam and jetsam, splintered wreckage, bits of aircraft. The most coveted of all prizes were the enormous bales of crude rubber, each weighing more than 100 pounds, from ships sunk in transit from Malaya (Malaysia). Each merited a bounty of 10 shillings from the Coastguard. That was ten weeks' pocket money! One find was a half-drowned dog whom they rescued and befriended. The truant beachcoming ended in 1943 and Mr. Harvey's parents moved house to North Foreland in Kent after the war where Edward amassed a sizeable collection of fossils, mostly sea urchins of superb quality. They were driven out of the chalk cliffs by stormy seas in winter. His mother found fine examples of golden amber that were made into a ring still worn by his sister. When beachcoming the gleaming beaches in the West of Ireland and the shores of Connemara, he found magnificently created seashells. He searched for specimens of intensely mauve tropical violet-snail of family Janthinidae, a pelagic and specialised creature which lives on the surface of the Atlantic Ocean supported by a tiny raft of bubbles. He discovered pudding stones, small pebbles within larger pebbles, and he made necklaces from Connemara green marble, red jasper (a form of red quartz), and white quartz, and looked for rare "floating stones." When he had two he would rub them together in darkness to see mysterious, brilliant internal flashes of light. He found a piece of very rare Beryl in Galway, a flash of palest green that caught his eye; this prize became the cabochon stone which he fashioned for setting into a ring. In the summer of 1940, on a holiday in Wales, he and a friend rigged a crude mast and sail on a two-seater canoe. They sailed out to sea to scour the secluded and inaccessible coves of Dinas Head where they found an airman's life-vest. Donning it for the return journey proved to be a stroke of fate, as the wind picked up and the canoe capsized and they were flung into the sea, to swim half a mile to shore. -- Excerpts, "Ireland of the Welcomes" July-Aug 2002