Last May my partner, Donna Curran, and I moved from downtown New Haven to Fairhaven on the banks of the Quinnipiac River in Connecticut. By car it’s ten minutes away from Yale and the New Haven Green, twenty by bus. Our house, a former oysterman’s, dates from 1880. The garden runs down to a small, oyster-shelled cove with a granite retaining wall and the vestiges of a small dock. A mulberry tree of some antiquity grows at the end of the meadow-rough lawn, shading much of the garden from blasts of the western sky and sun.

You are forgiven if you have never heard of the Quinnipiac River. It runs inland from Long Island Sound for about 70 kilometres, making it surely the shortest river on record. Broader than the Yarra at Southgate, the Quinnipiac is tidal. In the seventeenth century when the palefaces first settled in Fairhaven, the river teemed with fish, oysters, clams and lobsters. Seals were common and their strange barking was, lightly, imagined by the seventeenth-century settlers as the sound of dragons. This prosperous fishing village first took the name of Dragon.