Coot Club. Arthur Ransome
are your sandshoes,” said Dorothea. “Mother said we were to wear them on board. I ought to have got them out in the launch.”
Putting on sandshoes instead of their walking shoes was itself enough to make them feel that their sailing had all but begun.
“There’ll be much more room when we’ve got rid of the parcels,” said Mrs. Barrable. “All the stores go into the lockers you’re sitting on. Come in now, and bring those suit-cases. No. You won’t have to duck your heads if you keep in the middle. This is the main cabin, and through here is yours.”
They wriggled round the table, and through the little folding door into the cabin that was to be their own. On each side was a bunk spread with thick red blankets.
“May we lie down, just to try?” said Dorothea.
“Of course.”
“There’s lots of room,” said Dick.
“And if you joggle you can feel the boat move,” said Dorothea.
“And electric light,” said Dick, turning the switch on and off. “How do they manage it in such a little boat?”
“Batteries,” said Mrs. Barrable. “We get them charged once a week or so, and they last out very well unless someone does too much reading in bed.”
They unpacked the suit-cases and stowed most of their things in the drawers under their bunks. They looked out at a world of reeds and water that seemed somehow different when seen through a port-hole. They went back into the main cabin and tried what it felt like to be sitting on bunks at each side of a table. After that, of course, they climbed out through the flaps of the awning, and worked their way unsteadily along the narrow side-decks, leaning against the awning to feel less insecure. They took hold of the shrouds and looked up at the masthead and tried to believe that it would not take them very long to learn the names of all those ropes.
Presently Mrs. Barrable lit a Primus stove in the cooking locker in the well and put a kettle on to boil. Dick and Dorothea were watching the kettle, and Mrs. Barrable was in the cabin, putting some paint brushes to soak, when the noise of water creaming under the forefoot of a boat made them look out just in time to get a second view of the yacht race, as the five little racers sailed by. Port and Starboard and their father were now third.
“They’ve got time to win yet,” said Mrs. Barrable.
Twenty minutes later they saw them again, on their way back up the river. The folding table had been moved into the well, tea had been poured out, and Dick had been sent into the cabin to get William’s chocolate-box from the little sideboard, when Dorothea, peeping out from the stern, saw the white sails moving above the reeds. In another moment the boats themselves were in sight, and Dorothea, Mrs. Barrable and Dick hurried out on deck.
“They’ve done it,” cried Dorothea.
“Very nearly,” said Mrs. Barrable.
“Flash, their boat’s called,” said Dick, and Flash was second, and the steerman of the leading boat kept looking anxiously over his shoulder.
“Go it, go it!” cried Dorothea, and almost fancied that Port … or was it Starboard? … one or other of them, anyway … smiled at her as the Flash foamed by. All five boats were out of sight in no time round the bend of the river above where the Teasel was moored.
And then, just after Dick and Dorothea had settled down to enjoy their first tea afloat, suddenly and altogether unexpectedly, the blow fell.
“When are we going to start?” said Dick, asking the question that had been for some time in both their minds. “I suppose it’s too late to do anything tonight.”
“Start?” said Mrs. Barrable, puzzled. “Start what?”
“Sailing,” said Dick.
“But, my dears, we aren’t going to sail…. Didn’t I explain to your mother? We can’t sail the Teasel with Brother Richard away…. I can’t sail the Teasel by myself…. And you can’t, either…. We’re only going to use her as a houseboat….”
There was a moment’s dreadful silence. Castles in Spain came tumbling down. It was all a mistake. They were not going to learn sailing after all.
Dorothea made a tremendous effort.
“She’ll be a very splendid houseboat,” she said.
“And there are lots of birds to look at,” said Dick.
“My dear children,” said Mrs. Barrable. “I am most dreadfully sorry.”
*This is another name for the River Bure.
*A staithe in Norfolk is a place where boats moor to take in or discharge cargo: much what a quay is elsewhere.
CHAPTER III
WHAT’S THE GOOD OF PLANNING?
LATE IN THE AFTERNOON Tom Dudgeon came sailing home. He was later than he had meant to be. He had spent some time at Wroxham, talking to Jim Wooddall, the skipper of Sir Garnet, the business wherry that was loading by Wroxham Bridge. Jim Wooddall had kept an eye on the Titmouse while her skipper was shopping in Norwich. Then, there had been that trouble when he was cooking his dinner. After that he had been watching a kingfisher until he had found where it was nesting, in a hole in one of the few bits of really hard bank. There had been a good many other nests to inspect, and by the time he came to the Swan at Horning, people were waiting there expecting to see the finish of the race. He had seen the little racers earlier in the afternoon and knew that Port and Starboard were sailing. They would be finishing any time now, and he had a lot to do before they came.
He sailed past the staithe and the boathouse till he came to a little old house with a roof thatched with reeds, and a golden bream swimming merrily into the wind high above one of the gables. A narrow strip of lawn ran down to the river between the willow bushes. Just below the lawn was the entrance to a dyke hardly to be noticed by anyone who did not know it was there. Tom turned in there between reeds and willows that brushed the peak of the Titmouse’s sail. This was the Titmouse’s home. Once inside it, she could not be seen from the river.
On the south side of the dyke was a row of willows, and beyond them the house in which the twins, Port and Starboard, lived with their father and an old housekeeper, Mrs. McGinty, the widow of an Irishman, though born in Glasgow herself. On the north side, leaning against the doctor’s house, was a low wooden shed. Here the doctor kept his fishing tackle, bait-cans and mooring poles, and the old fishing boat that lived under a low roof at the end of the dyke by the road. Here Tom did his carpentering work. Here were the doors for the lockers that were being fixed under the bow thwart and stern-sheets of the Titmouse, waiting for the screws and hinges Tom had brought from Norwich. Here the Coot Club held its meetings, and Tom and the twins met on most days whether engaged in Coot Club business or not. Tied up to the bank just beyond the shed was the first boat Tom had owned, a long flat-bottomed punt that had been made by Tom himself. Its name was Dreadnought, and unkind people said that it was well named because, whatever happened to it, it could not be worse than it was. It carried no sail, of course, but it was an old friend, and Tom still found it useful for slipping along by the reeds on a windless evening in the summer, watching grebes have swimming lessons. Tom drove it along with a single paddle, like a Canadian canoe, and he took some pride in being able to keep the Dreadnought moving at a good pace without making the slightest sound. The tall framework in the bushes beyond the Dreadnought was a drawbridge, the work of the last summer holidays. This made it possible for Port and Starboard to slip across to join Tom in the shed without taking their rowing boat from the Farland boathouse in the main river, and without having to go into the road and in at the front gate as if they were patients coming to see Doctor Dudgeon.
Tom lowered his sail, and tied up the Titmouse. Then he went