And then Mrs. Barrable saw the boatman waving to them. A minute or two later they were off themselves, in a little motor-launch, purring down Wroxham Reach. In the bows of the launch were the two small suit-cases, and the parcels that had been sent down to the river by the people at the village store. Dorothea looked happily at one large, awkward, bulging parcel. Mrs. Barrable had bought them cheap oilskins and sou’westers as well as sea-boots. There was no excuse for wearing such things on a fine spring day, with bright sunshine pouring down, but just to look at that bulging parcel made Dorothea feel she was something of a sailor already.
Once round the bend at the low end of the reach, they had left all the noise and bustle of Wroxham behind them. Tall trees were growing on either side of the river. There were quiet little houses among the trees, and green lawns at the water’s edge, with water-hens strutting about on the grass as if they were pigeons or peacocks. A man with long thigh boots and a yachting cap was busy with a lawn-mower.
“Look,” said Dorothea. “There’s a sailor mowing the grass.”
“Most people here have got at least one foot in the water,” said Mrs. Barrable, “and they do say a lot of the babies are born web-footed, like ducks.”
“Not really?” said Dick.
“I’m not so sure,” said Mrs. Barrable. “Every infant in this place seems able to sail a boat as soon as it can walk.”
“Were you born here?” asked Dorothea, glancing, in spite of herself, at Mrs. Barrable’s neat, rubber-soled shoes.
“At Beccles,” said Mrs. Barrable. “On another river. Not very far away.”
Not everybody, thought Dorothea, could be born on a river, but at least she and Dick would do their best to make up for lost time.
The houses came to an end. Here and there, looking through the trees, Dick and Dorothea caught the flash of water. Through a narrow opening they saw a wide lake with boats sailing in a breeze, although, in the shelter of the trees, the few sailing yachts they had passed had been drifting with hardly enough wind to give them steerage way. A little further down the river they caught a glimpse of another bit of open water. Then again they were moving between thickly wooded banks. Suddenly they heard a noise astern of them, and one of the big motor-cruisers that they had seen at Wroxham came roaring past them, leaving a high angry wash that sent the launch tossing.
“Just like real sea,” said Dorothea, holding on to the gunwale and determined not to be startled.
“They got no call to go so fast,” said the boatman. “Look at that now. Upset his dinner in the bilge likely.”
The boatman pointed ahead at a little white boat tied to a branch of a tree. It was very much smaller than any yacht they had seen, hardly bigger, in fact, than the dinghies most of the yachts were towing. It had a mast, and an awning had been rigged up over part of it, to make a little shelter for cooking. The wash of the big cruiser racing past sent the little boat leaping up against the overhanging boughs, and a great cloud of smoke poured suddenly out.
“It’s Tom Dudgeon,” said Dorothea.
“It’s the Titmouse,” said Dick. “There’s the name.”
The boatman slowed up the launch for a moment as they went by.
Tom Dudgeon, who had been kneeling on the floor to do his cooking, looked out with a very red face. They saw that he had a frying-pan in his hand.
He nodded to the boatman. “Bacon fat all over everywhere,” he said. “Oh, hullo!” he added, seeing Dick and Dorothea.
“Shame that is,” said the boatman as he put on speed again. “Proper young sailor is Tom Dudgeon. Keeps that little Titmouse of his like a new pin.”
“Ah,” said Mrs. Barrable. “Now I dare say you can tell us who are the Port and Starboard he was talking about to the Wroxham station-master.…”
“The station-master said they were queer names for girls,” added Dorothea.
The boatman laughed. “Port and Starboard,” he said. “We all call ’em that. Nobody call ’em anything else. Mr. Farland’s twins. All but sisters to young Tom, they are, what with Mrs. Farland dying when they was babies, and Mrs. Dudgeon, the doctor’s wife, pretty near bring them up with her boy. She’ll not have time for ’em all now, with a new young ’un of her own. Been as good as a mother to them two girls has Mrs. Dudgeon.… Steady now! … Did ever you see the like o’ that?” He swung his launch sharply aside to avoid a sailing yacht that was tacking to and fro and had suddenly gone about in mid-stream just after he had altered course to keep out of her way. “Probably never in a boat before,” said the boatman, “and in a week they’ll be laughing at the new-comers. A good nursery for sailing is the North River.”1
Dorothea looked happily at Dick, and Dick at Dorothea.
They left the trees. The river was beginning to be wider, flowing between reed-fringed banks with here and there a willow at the water’s edge. A fleet of five little yachts was sailing to meet them, tacking to and fro, like a cloud of butterflies.
“Racing,” said Mrs. Barrable.
The boatman looked over his shoulder. “If it’s no hurry, ma’am, I’ll pull into the side while they go by.”
“Of course.”
He shut off his engine and let the launch slide close along the bank until he caught hold of a willow branch to hold her steady. Dick caught another.
And then, as the first of the little racing boats flew towards them, spun round, and was off for the opposite bank, the boatman turned to Mrs. Barrable.
“There’s Port and Starboard, ma’am, if you want to see ’em. Fourth boat. Mr. Farland gener’lly do better’n that.”
The second boat shot by and the third. The fourth came sweeping across the river. “Ready about!” they heard the helmsman call, and the little boat shot up into the wind, with flapping sails, so close to the launch that Dorothea could have reached out and shaken hands with one of the two girls who were working the jib-sheets.
“He’ve a good crew, have Mr. Farland,” said the boatman, “though they don’t weigh as much as a man, the two of ’em together.”
“I don’t believe they’re much bigger than us,” said Dorothea delightedly.
“You’ll be seeing ’em again,” said the boatman starting up his engine. “They’ll be going down river past your boat and back again before they finish by the Swan at Horning.”
“Your boat,” he had said. How long now before she and Dick were pulling ropes like those two girls, and listening for the word from Mrs. Barrable at the tiller? Dorothea was planning a story. Why, if only she and Dick could sail like that, almost anything might happen. She looked at Dick. But Dick was busy with his pocket-book. In the winter holidays it had been full of stars, but with the year going on and nights getting shorter, birds had taken the place of stars. Heron, kestrel, coot, water-hen, he had already added to his list of birds seen, and just before meeting those racing boats he had seen a bird with two tufts sticking out from the top of its head, and only its slim neck showing above the water. He had known it at once for a crested grebe.
*
On and on they went down the river. They were coming now to another village. The launch slowed up. They were passing wooden bungalows and a row of houseboats. The river bent sharply round a corner. There was an old inn at the bend, the Swan. Then there was a staithe2 with a couple of yachts tied up to it. Beyond the staithe were big boat-sheds, like those they had seen at Wroxham.
“This is Horning,” said Mrs. Barrable.
“Our boat’s not far now, is it?” said Dick.
“This is where Tom Dudgeon lives,” said Dorothea, “and those two girls.”
The launch stopped for a moment at one of the boat-sheds, and Dick and Dorothea looked eagerly at the yachts tied up there, wondering which of them was the Teasel. But they had stopped only to pick up the dinghy in which Mrs. Barrable had rowed up to the village that morning. They were off again, down a reach of the river that was almost like a street, with little old houses on one side and boats moored on the other.
&nb
sp; “That’s the doctor’s house, isn’t it?” Mrs. Barrable asked the boatman. “The one we’re just coming to, with the thatched roof. I remember my brother pointing it out to me.”
“The one with a fish for a weather cock?” asked Dick.
“He’s a fisherman, Dr. Dudgeon,” said the boatman, with a chuckle. “Put up that old bream himself. No much time for sailin’, I s’pose, bein’ a doctor, but you often see him fishin’ off his garden end when the season come on. And Mr. Farland live in the house next to it, t’other side of the dyke.”
Mr. Farland’s house was further from the river, and Dick and Dorothea could see only the upper windows above the trees. But they saw his boat-house, and caught just a glimpse of the dyke between the two houses, a glint of water behind reeds and willows. There were more houses, some of them quite new, a windmill that had lost its sails, a ferry where a horse and cart were being ferried across, and an old inn close by the ferry with a boat or two moored beside it. Dorothea pointed to one of these, but Mrs. Barrable shook her head. That was the end of the village, and the launch put on speed once more. They passed a little church and a big house on the slope of a hill, with crowds of water-hens and black sheep feeding together by the waterside. Here, too, was a boat tied up in a dyke. But it was not that boat either.
“THE LAUNCH WAS SWINGING ROUND”
“It can’t be much further,” said Dick.
“Mother said it was at Horning,” said Dorothea.
“Keep a good look-out,” said Mrs. Barrable.
And the river went on bending and curling and twisting, and every other moment they thought they would be seeing their boat.
They came in sight of her at last and did not know her, a neat, white yacht, moored against the bank, with an awning spread over cabin and well, as if she were all ready for the night.
“Oh, look, look!” cried Dorothea. But it was not at the yacht that she was looking. Working up the river was an old black ship’s boat, with a stumpy little mast and a black flag at the masthead. Two small boys were rowing, each with one oar. A third, standing by the tiller, was looking through an enormous ancient telescope at something on the bank. The three small boys had bright coloured handkerchiefs round their heads and middles as turbans and belts. The launch was racing down the river to meet them, and in a moment or two, Dick and Dorothea were reading the name of the boat, Death and Glory, not very well painted, in big white letters, on her bows.
“You hardly expected to meet pirates on the Bure, did you?” said Mrs. Barrable.
The boatman laughed. The steersman of the Death and Glory waved his big telescope as the launch went by, and the boatman waved back. “Horning boys,” he said over his shoulder. “Boat-builders’ sons, all three of ’em. Friends o’ Port and Starboard an’ young Tom Dudgeon.”
But what was happening? The noise of the engine had changed. The launch was swinging round in the river towards that moored yacht. The loose flaps of the yacht’s white awning stirred. A fat fawn pug clambered out on the counter and ran, barking, up and down the narrow side-deck.
“It’s William!” cried Dorothea.
“Hullo, William!” said Dick.
“Here we are,” said Mrs. Barrable. “Poor old William must be tired of taking care of the Teasel all by himself.”
*
“She’s ever so much bigger than she looks,” said Dick.
The parcels and suit-cases had all been put aboard, the little dinghy had been tied up astern, the launch had gone, and Dick, who had been standing rather unsteadily on the counter of the yacht, had climbed down into the well to find himself in a comfortable sort of tent, full of light which poured through the white canvas of the awning.
“Here 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 dr
eadfully sorry.”
1 This is another name for the River Bure.
2 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.
Coot Club Page 2