The Alma Inn, 25 Kings Head Street, Harwich (photograph by Suzanne Falkiner)

In some of the remaining pubs – The Alma, The Stingray, The New Bell Inn, The British Flag, and the seventeen-century Hanover Inn, where I find a room – at almost any time of day a clutch of elderly men, looking as if they've been preserved in salt, line the front bars, often in silent solitude. Are they all widowers, or long-time bachelors, as men of the sea often are, or do women wait patiently at home for some of them? The tiny, mainly eighteenth-century terrace houses do not have much heating, so that it is little wonder that the pubs, warmed by big log fires, became the living rooms of the town.

Randolph 'Mick' Stow liked to tell people that hardly anyone in Old Harwich knew he was a writer, and that in the Harwich winter 'uniform' of blue jeans, boots, heavy sweater, and a black woollen pea jacket, he was often thought to be a truck driver or seaman. But the people of Harwich are evidently used to minding their own business. Once, the story goes, a hapless journalist turned up uninvited and, finding Stow not at home at 28 Kings Head Street, enquired after him at his favourite pub. The publican glanced over to where Stow sat in his customary corner, reading a book with his tankard of ale and, when Mick kept his head down, told the intruder that he hadn't seen him for days.

Bob the barman in The Stingray tells me that 'Michael' (as he was generally called here; there was already a regular named Mick who drank there when he arrived) was also known variously as 'Mick the Book', 'the Professor', and 'the Prof' – not because he was known to be a writer, but because he could answer any question thrown up by the pub trivia quiz (unless it concerned popular music or sport). If he couldn't, he would go home and look it up in his books and come back next day with the answer neatly typed up on a slip of paper. He always drank Adnams real ale – a tap beer – hand-pulled, in a glass tankard, and he liked to sit in the pub reading Scandinavian crime novels, or books with maps in them, and do the Times crossword. Generally he would come in the morning, but once he started coming in the afternoons as well, because he got addicted to watching EastEnders on the pub's television.

'Joseph Conrad – with whom Stow felt a particular psychological affinity – would have felt at home here when he passed through in 1896'

Ron Mitchell, one of the regulars, tells me he couldn't face the Times crossword himself, but Mick would do the one in the Telegraph with him and always got the answers 'in a second'. In his last years, when Stow became seriously ill, Ron tried to get him to go to a doctor, but he wouldn't – it would only confirm it, he said. But they all knew Mick was really sick when he stopped drinking beer and started drinking lemon tea, a couple of weeks before he died in May 2010.

In The New Bell Inn near the docks, another of Mick's regular haunts, landlords Richard and Sue Watts tell me that Mick was already here when they arrived in 1992. The pubs he used over the years, as venues closed and landlords shifted, were the Billy, early on; The Haywain, near Manningtree; perhaps The Welly – The Duke of Wellington, now closed – and maybe The Globe, both on King's Quay Street. Later it was always The Angel (now part of The Pier Hotel on the Quay), The Alma, the New Bell, and The Stingray.

Mick had always approved that the 'Billy' – christened The William IV in 1870 – was, despite a name change to the Duke of Edinburgh in the 1892, still always known as such. It was in the Billy, in 1986, that the Ladies' Darts Team gave him a lost kitten, his companion for fourteen years, which he named Billie after the pub – apposite, Mick thought, as 'Billi' was the Hindi word for a female cat.

Randolph Stow, photograph by Alec Bolton, 1985 (National Library of Australia)

The Alma, which Sue and Richard had also run for some years, was the pub where Mick would always bring visiting relatives and friends for lunch: he'd walk around the various pubs, but generally he was a private person, quiet and shy. He would sit with his glasses on, deep in a book, or read the paper, but he didn't want to get into conversation unless you had something specific you wanted to talk to him about, or to ask about, and then he would be helpful. But he was a bit of a one for quiz game shows, and one time he was even on the daytime telly.

He had given Sue a copy of his last book, The Suburbs of Hell (1984), with a ghoulish cover. Mick had always said he didn't really want to write The Suburbs of Hell, but was worn down by a local bloke he knew – ex-seaman, name of Charlie Mower, a chatty character who liked a drink – who had been on at Mick to put him in a book. It was in a different vein from the others: you could recognise all the local people and places; some of the pubs well gone by now. He was a very nice man, Mick; people liked him and respected him, but they knew to leave him alone in his corner.

Dave, a widower who sits in the back of The New Bell with his small dog to keep him company, also lived in Kings Head Street, and remembered that while it was rare to see it, Mick had a temper. Once Dave had made a careless remark about Australian Aborigines, and Mick went right off. His anger was startling. He had also got pretty fired up over the proposed container terminal expansion scheme. Not that you never saw him drunk, of course – or not noticeably.

Roy Fisher, a retired postman, tells me that Mick had so many parcels of books delivered that when Mick was out at the pub he would leave them with neighbours so as not to have to carry them back to the post office. Peter Hadley, at the second hand bookshop, confirms the detail about the crime novels – Mick was always coming in and exchanging crime books, he says.

The Reverend Peter Mann, who had conducted his funeral, tells me that it was not held at St Nicholas's, the church he had attended occasionally, because it was scaffolded up at the time. Mick had not made himself known to him, and so he did not know him personally. A parishioner, Margaret Griffith, confirms that he came about once a month, often in Holy week, and sometimes took communion. He would also come into the Hospice shop, but if you did not speak to him, he did not speak.

Mick Stow's house at 28 Kings Head Street, with its putty-coloured outer walls and 'Green Man' knocker carved in jarrah wood by his sister Helen still on the door, has a frontage of about three metres and rises to three storeys, two pairs of tiny rooms stacked on top of each other, joined by a steep staircase barely wide enough for a man, and then another single room on top. Beyond the kitchen is a small backyard, brick-lined, barely big enough to hang out a sheet. Mick had had an inside bathroom built, but even after he acquired a washing machine he would still be seen carrying his weekly laundry to the laundrette on High Street in Dovercourt. A bit further along is the vacant lot where the car that he and his neighbour Dick Foreman co-owned was parked, but which he famously never drove. When Dick died in his mid-fifties, he left his house to Mick, who knocked doorways through a few walls and doubled his living space. At that time he also installed a small circular window, or porthole, in the top room, his writing room, so he could watch the ships pass at the end of the street.

'They all knew Mick was really sick when he stopped drinking beer and started drinking lemon tea, a couple of weeks before he died in May 2010'

At the time I visit, No. 28 has a 'For Let' sign on it (the two houses had since been bought as an investment property, and re-divided), and the walls inside are painted a de-naturing white, ready for a fresh tenant. All Mick's treasures – the sketches by Sidney Nolan, the photographs of friends pinned on the wall next to the telephone, the curios and clocks and bric-a-brac gleaned from local antique and charity shops, the shelves of books, the carefully nurtured Australian wildflowers in hanging baskets in the courtyard – are gone. The friendly Dovercourt real estate agent who lets me in to have a look around is amenable to my suggestion that one day the house should have a plaque on it.

When Mick knew he was ill, he left his sister Helen's address with Rodney Sillitoe, his neighbour on the right. When I knock on his door to ask if I can come and talk to him at some time convenient for him, he welcomes me into his little front room immediately. Rodney, a neat bachelor, had been in charge of the railway siding at Wrabness and, as befits a similarly tiny house, he has decorated it with a small collection of whiskey miniatures, half a dozen fine hand-painted plates showing sailing ships and local landmarks, various other marine and railway memorabilia, and a set of miniatures of Constable's paintings of East Anglia. Prominently displayed is a ship in a bottle that had once belonged to Mick. He shows me a clear glass paperweight, given to him by Helen when she was clearing out the house. Mick always kept it on his front window sill.

Randolph Stow's house at 28 Kings Head Street, Harwich (photograph by Suzanne Falkiner)

Rodney had moved to Harwich on 11 December 1976, he tells me, and Dick Foreman had arrived soon afterwards, 'a couple-three years' before Mick – or Mike, as Rodney calls him – came to No. 28. Before that, Charlie Mower was living in Mick's house. Next door to Rodney on the other side is a ship's chandler, Richard Bunn, whose father had run the business before him. On Mick's other side there had once been a Salvation Army lady, but now it is the house of a younger couple, Hugh and Deborah, a designer and a nurse, who had tried to look after Mick in his last days.

Mick knew Dick Foreman from his local pub in East Bergholt, Rodney thought, and then, when Dick bought in Kings Head Street, he had persuaded Mick to buy the house next door to him from Charlie Mower. Foreman had been a merchant seaman, then a railway signalman, before he was transferred to Parkstone station, keeping his rank and rate of pay, and then he worked for BX Plastics until he was made redundant. Not a bad chap, Rodney thought, but a bit of a rough diamond. He and Mick must have been on the same wavelength because they would do the Times crossword together, which was a wonder to him – he had a job with the quickie in the paper he got.

When Dick died of cancer in 1997, Mick joined up the houses and installed a kitchenette, but he still didn't use the washing machine – 'even though he always complained it cost him about eight quid to get his lot done'. Billie the cat could sit on her new bit of roof and look down on Rodney's yard.

'Mick kept Dick's ashes in his wardrobe,' Rodney tells me. 'I said why keep 'em in the wardrobe? Why not get them to scatter the ashes off the lifeboat into the river, seeing he left all his money to the Lifeboat people, it's the least they could do, I told him. After that I didn't hear any more about it. Next thing I know, he knocks on my door and shows me this piece of paper with what's written on that plaque.'

                Near this spot lie the ashes
                                        of
                   Richard Harry Foreman
                               (1944–97)
       A Benefactor of the Harwich Lifeboat
'Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
           And out of the swing of the sea.'

'He was having this plaque made, he said, the ashes would be interred below the plaque, and if I wanted to come, he'd let me know. So I went around with them; there were four or five people there, me and Mick, the Harwich Society people and the chap from the Lifeboat, the box was put in a hole below the wall and covered up.

'Mick didn't look after himself and that's how he went down. He didn't feed himself properly at all; he was forever going round the Stingray, drinkin': he wasn't an alcoholic, and he weren't drunk, I never saw him get drunk, or anything. If he disapproved of something, he just jerked his head and said "huh". But Mick wouldn't accept help. He took a taxi to the shop, even though it was only a few hundred yards. Both Richard and he were reticent men about their illnesses ... Next thing Mick was dead, and I didn't even know he was going in for treatment. He'd left me a piece of paper with Helen's contact details: "My sister would be relieved if you'd file away these details in case of emergency", he wrote, something like that. I don't remember the date. He just came to my door one day and said he was going up to the hospital; I asked if there was a problem, he patted his stomach and said, "Just a spot ..."'

Rodney does not know that I know, from Stow's correspondence now kept in the National Library in Canberra, that in idle moments over his years as station master at Wrabness he would saw up and split good wood for Mick's fireplace in winter, and bring his neighbour the occasional rabbit, or a splendidly-feathered cock pheasant from the forest for Christmas.

'Still very mild here, but cold enough to enjoy a fire at night,' wrote Mick to Helen, the wood carver, in December 1984, describing Rodney's bounty:

A couple of days ago it was a lovely lot of sweet chestnut, and today it was smaller logs of greengage and (something I wouldn't have thought of as firewood) buddleia. I imagine that the greengage, which has turned orange where it's been cut, is going to smell rather interesting. And I also get solid bits of oak with antique iron nails in it from the beach close by. I can't think where they've been before I pick them up. They look like bits of the Armada.

It was close to these woods at Wrabness that Stow chose to be buried.

The porthole window in Stow’s third floor writing room at 28 Kings Head Street, Harwich (photograph by Suzanne Falkiner)

Rodney goes upstairs and, after a struggle with his scanner and printer, makes me a copy of Mick's funeral service leaflet. When he comes back he looks worried. Mick never took to email or the internet, he says. Once when he was going on holiday to Portugal, Mick had given him a typed slip and asked him to find out, if he could, the name of a flower for him. He shows me the piece of paper.

On it, Mick has copied out (and carefully footnoted) a paragraph from a book, giving the information that in 1433, when the now-forgotten Portuguese navigator Gil Eannes passed Cape Bojador and made a landing on the Western Sahara coast, he collected the only living thing he could see, a little wildflower now known as St Mary's Roses – 'rosas da Santa Maria' – and took them back to his prince. Planted in Portugal, they became an emblem and trademark of Portuguese explorers in the centuries to come. On the sea front at Lagos there still stands a statue of Gil Eannes, holding his little bucket of wildflowers. While he was on the Algarve, asked Stow, could Rodney find out the botanical name?

Rodney had drawn a blank in Portugal, and had tried to find out about it on the web, but never could. It is, it seems, still a matter of regret that he could not do this small favour for his friend.

When I leave, Rodney gives me as a keepsake the spherical glass paperweight, from his top shelf. It is like a crystal ball.

'I never really liked it,' he says. 'I seen it shining in Mick's front window. I always worried it would set his house on fire.'