“Jim! Jim Wooddall. Sir Garnet! Ahoy! Jim. JIM!”
The wherryman waved a hand to her. He was already laying his quant down, and going aft to the tiller. Sir Garnet would be sailing in a moment.
“Jim!” shouted Port.
They both waved their arms at him, until Jim Wooddall, in a hurry as he was, saw that there was something urgently needed.
“Half a minute, Simon!” he called. The clanking of the winch pawl stopped. The gaff had been lifted not more than a couple of feet. Sir Garnet was hardly moving, except with the stream. But she had steerage way, and Jim brought her round close by the staithe. The twins, picking up their knapsacks, ran along the staithe to meet him, and then walked with the wherry, explaining as she drifted down.
“Can’t wait,” said Jim. “Simon’s lost us a tide down to Gorleston.”
“But we want to get to Stokesby,” said Starboard. “Tom’s taken the Teasel down there, and they’re going on tomorrow.”
“We’re going too,” said Port. “Only we missed them.”
“You see, we didn’t know till this morning we could go.”
All this time the wherry was moving. Another few yards and they would be at the end of the staithe, so that they could walk no further.
“Ah,” said Jim. “So Tom don’t know he left you.”
“That’s just it,” said Port.
“Ain’t supposed to take passengers,” said Jim Wooddall. “Let’s have them bags.…” The knapsacks and rugs were swung aboard. “Now then!” Port and Starboard leapt from the staithe after their knapsacks. “Pierhead jump,” said Jim Wooddall. “I’ll take you down to Stokesby. But you’ll have to work your passages. Peelin’ potatoes. Now then, Sim!”
The winch clanked again. The huge black sail climbed up and spread above them, and the wherry, Sir Garnet, late with her tide, gathered speed and stood away down the middle of the river.
CHAPTER XVIII
THROUGH YARMOUTH
A LITTLE brown heron flew low over the reeds on the Upton side of the river.
“Isn’t it a bittern?” asked Dick. Dorothea was steering and Dick was free to look at birds.
“It’s a bittern all right,” said Tom, but just then he was not interested in bitterns. As he himself had once said of the Death and Glories, “You can’t expect them to be bird protecting all the time.” The Teasel was sweeping down towards Acle, and at Acle, he knew, would come the first real test of her crew. Never before had they lowered the mast and raised it again without the help of Port and Starboard. And at Acle Bridge there are always lookers-on, waiting to enjoy the misfortunes of the unskilled. Tom could give none of his mind to birds. But Admiral Barrable pleased Dick a good deal, by reaching into the cabin for the log of the Teasel and writing in it: “Sighted bittern over Upton Marshes.” The Admiral, after that one nervous moment at Horning, seemed to have no worries at all. It seemed to Tom that she must have forgotten that every minute’s sailing was bringing them nearer not only to Acle but to Yarmouth and Breydon, racing tides and every kind of possible disaster. Tom felt like the newly appointed captain of a liner on his first voyage in a new ship approaching a coast long noted for its dangerous shoals.
But the passing of Acle Bridge was a most comforting success. True, in rounding up to the northern bank, to lower sail, the Teasel hit the bank a little harder than Tom intended, but the bank is soft mud, and a great many people hit it harder still. And Dick, on the foredeck, was not flurried by the bump, but jumped ashore and stamped the rond anchor well in, as if he had been doing it for years. Dorothea fished the crutches up out of the Titmouse before he had had time to tell her. The sails came down without any trouble. Tom put a tyer round the jib so that it would be all ready for hoisting again. He untied the parrels1 and laid the gaff on the cabin roof beside the boom.
“Sure you can manage?” asked the Admiral.
“I’m taking the heel rope,” said Tom, “and Dick’s going to pay out the forestay tackle. It’ll be all right.” And it was. Even with Port and Starboard instead of Dick it could not have been done better. The mast swayed slowly down and rested in the crutch.
Tom looked down towards the bridge, much narrower than usual, because of a lighter moored under it to serve as a platform for workmen.
“There’s that provision boat,” said Dorothea, as a small motor-boat with a roof fixed over it came up through the bridge and tied up in a little opening in the bank. The motor-boat was a regular floating shop.
“We’ll do our shopping after we get through,” said the Admiral.
“It’s only a few yards to quant,” said Tom, and Dorothea looked doubtfully at Dick. Tom laughed. “I’ll do it,” he said, “if the Admiral will steer close down this side. Shove the anchor aboard, Dick, and skip along the banks to meet us under the bridge. Dot had better go forrard and be ready with a fender.”
Dick gave the Teasel a good push off. Tom, with the quant, managed to get her moving just enough to let the Admiral steer her as she drifted down with the stream. Dick ran along the bank, round the provision boat’s little bay, and waited for the Teasel on the narrow tow-path under the bridge, ready to take the anchor.
“Nearer in,” said Tom, hurriedly stowing his quant. He went forward, stepping carefully among the shrouds that lay along the side-decks. “Stand clear, Dick!” He threw the anchor ashore. Dick had hold of it in a moment, and walked along with it, waiting the word.
“Hang on, now!”
Dick hung on, and the Teasel swung slowly round. Tom took his chance and jumped ashore. Dorothea was ready with her fender. The anchor was forced into the ground. The Teasel was safe below the bridge, and the first of their difficulties was already behind them.
“Now then,” said Tom, stepping aboard again. “Come on, Dick. Up with the mast. Everything the other way round. You haul on the forestay. I’ll haul on the heel. Dot’ll watch to see the shrouds don’t catch on corners of the cabin roof. Ready? Haul away!”
The balanced mast lifted easily, foot after foot, as the two of them hauled away on the foredeck. Dot was in time to free the only shroud that looked like getting itself caught. The very flagstaff at the masthead stood up as if it had been newly hoisted, as the weighted heel of the mast swung into place.
“That were well done,” said an old sailor, looking down at them from the bridge, when, at last, all was ready for making sail once more. Tom with a cheerful smile wiped the sweat from his forehead. Dick sat on the cabin roof cleaning his spectacles.
“Seven minutes,” said Admiral Barrable. “I’ve put the times down in the log.”
“Nearly half an hour,” said Tom, “from the time we moored above the bridge.”
“What about dinner here?”
“Let’s have it under way,” said Tom.
“Very well,” said the Admiral, “you can be making sail, while Dot and I slip back along the towpath and see what they’ve got in that provision boat. Yes. You, too, William. Come along.”
The man in the provision boat was selling almost everything anybody could want, fresh vegetables, tinned foods, chocolates and toffees, oranges and apples and bananas, and milk out of a huge milk-can with a brass tap. Mrs. Barrable bought milk for tea.… “My dear Dot,” she said, “I’m dying for some as soon as the skipper will let us stop for long enough to boil a kettle.…” She also bought four bottles of lemonade, a dozen bananas, of the smaller and more tasty kind, four pork pies, four apple pies, and a large slab of the chocolate cream of which William was particularly fond. A small boy was hanging about on the bank, looking greedily at the provision boat. Dot pulled Mrs. Barrable gently by the sleeve.
“Admiral,” she whispered. “I wonder if that’s the sentinel, you know, the boy who ought to have sent word about the Hullabaloos.”
“The boy who got a fourpenny stomach-ache,” said Mrs. Barrable, and turned to the boy.
“Is your name Robin?” she asked.
“Yes,” said the boy.
Mrs. Barrable bought
another big slab of chocolate cream and gave it to him. “I should not think,” she said, “that you could get a stomach-ache from eating this. But you might like to try.”
They hurried back to the boat leaving the boy taking his first bite and looking, wondering, after them.
Tom and Dick between them, going slowly and carefully about it, had hoisted the sails.
“We saw the sentinel,” said Dorothea. “Joe’s friend; the Admiral gave him some chocolate.”
“He jolly well deserves another stomach-ache,” said Tom, “and I expect he’ll get one as soon as he meets Joe. Greedy little beast.”
In another minute they were off again, sailing down the river and feasting as they sailed.
Tom, with his eye always on the time and the tide, felt better now. He was steering because, alone of his crew, he could manage the tiller with one hand and a pork pie in the other without danger of running the Teasel into the reeds. Sitting on the coaming that ran round the well, he could even manage to hold a bottle of lemonade between his knees. Acle Bridge was left astern. The tide had still a couple of hours to run down, and already they were nearing Stokesby where, at first, they had planned to spend the night. They were going to be able to do much better than that.
The Admiral, however, would have been content to stop.
“What about it, Tom?” she asked, as Stokesby windmill came in sight, and then the houses of the little village. “Have we done enough for the first day?”
“We’ll be down at Yarmouth in time for low water,” said Tom, “with the wind holding like this. We could get right through Breydon.…”
“Wouldn’t it be lovely if we got to Beccles,” said Dorothea.
“It would certainly be very pleasant,” said the Admiral, “to know that we were through Yarmouth.”
“Well,” said Tom, “of course it is much the worst bit. It’d be jolly nice to get it over.”
And just then they saw something that made them decide at once that wherever they might stop for the night it would certainly not be at Stokesby.
Dorothea went suddenly quite white. She stammered. “L-l-look!… T-t-tom!.…”
“What’s the matter, Dot?” said the Admiral.
“We must turn back,” gasped Dorothea.
“I can steer her,” said Dick quickly.
“Take the tiller somebody,” said Tom, and dived head first into the cabin.
A big motor-cruiser was lying moored to the quay by the inn at the lower end of the village.
“You’d better let me have her,” said the Admiral. “But are you sure that’s the one? There are lots of them about, and they are very much alike.”
“I can read the name,” said Dick, who was looking at it through the glasses.
All three of them could read it now, and Tom, lurking in the cabin, could read it, too, looking through a port-hole. There it was, “MARGOLETTA,” in big brass letters on the cruiser’s bows. They drove past with wind and tide and read the name again, across the stern of the cruiser, as Tom and Dick had read it at Potter Heigham by the light of a pocket torch. The gramophone and loud-speaker were silent and there was no sign of anyone aboard.
“Probably in the inn,” said Mrs. Barrable.
And as they watched, the door of the inn opened, and the whole party of the Hullabaloos came out and sauntered across the grass to the Margoletta. They took no notice of the little white yacht with the rather large dinghy sailing down the river. There are plenty of such little yachts on the Broads, and if George Owdon or anyone else had told them Tom was sailing in the Teasel with Mrs. Barrable and those two children, the very last place they would have expected to meet them was below Acle Bridge in the strong tides of the lower reaches.
“It’s all right now,” said Dorothea when the Teasel had rounded the next bend and left Stokesby out of sight.
“Well, we can’t possibly stop here,” said Tom, coming back into the well.
“All right, skipper,” said the Admiral, “but I do count on being able to make some tea before very much longer.”
“I wonder if they’re coming down, too,” said Tom. “Oh well, we’ll hear them coming. But I shan’t be able to hide while we’re going through Yarmouth bridges.”
He took the tiller again, and soon forgot the Hullabaloos in the excitement of steering the Teasel. With this good wind, and the tide under her, she seemed to be going faster every minute, and he could almost see the river narrowing as the tide ebbed. This was not at all like steering in the gentle streams and easy tides that run above Acle Bridge.
“Deepest water round the outer side of the bends,” Tom murmured to himself, after cutting a corner too fine, and feeling the Teasel suddenly hesitate and then leap forward again as her keel cut through the top of a mudbank.
Dick, who, now that he was not steering had his mind free, was looking at some birds taking flight with drooping pink legs and splashes of white on wings and tail.
“Redshanks, aren’t they?” he asked.
“Plenty of them,” said Tom. “I say, if we do get stuck we’ll stay stuck, with the tide racing out like this.”
Mile after mile the Teasel and the Titmouse flew down those dreary lower reaches of the Bure. Windmills slipped by one after another, and the rare houses called by their distance out of Yarmouth, “Six-Mile House,” “Five-Mile House,” and so on. And still the ebb was pouring down, and the mud was widening on either side of the channel. Were they going to reach Yarmouth too soon? Tom knew well enough that many a boat had been carried down and smashed against the bridges after getting there too soon and not being able to stop in the rush of the outflowing tide.
Chimneys and church spires were in sight. Already, across Scare Gap, they had caught a glimpse of Breydon Water. Now, right ahead of them, they could see a row of houses.
“What’s that moving above the roofs?” asked Dick.
It was a triangle of brown topsail. The next moment, through a gap between the roofs they saw the peaks of a mainsail and mizen.
“Trawler,” said Tom.
“The sea must be just the other side of those houses,” said Dorothea.
“It is,” said the Admiral. “That trawler must be running up the coast close to the shore.”
On the left bank now was a low wall of cement shutting in the river.
“It wouldn’t do to bump into that,” said Dick, remembering the harmless reeds and mud of the upper waters.
Tom did not answer. The Teasel was sweeping round the bend, heading down for Yarmouth and its bridges, and he could see by the way the flecks of foam were being swept along that there was a lot of the ebb to run out yet before low water. “A dolphin on the right bank going down.…” Jim Wooddall had told him exactly what to look for, and he had been down here before with Mr. Farland and the twins. Tom looked anxiously down the river for the group of heavy piles standing out into the channel, so that boats can tie up to them and wait in safety. With wind and tide together, the Teasel was moving dreadfully fast.
“Too early,” he said quietly to the Admiral. “We’ll have to turn round and hang about a bit … if we can. We’re going too fast to make sure of catching the dolphin. Ready about!”
There was a sudden bustle in the well of the Teasel. Nobody had expected this, and even Dick could feel that Tom was worried. Dick and Dorothea fumbled together at the jib sheet.
“No. No,” said Tom, “just be ready to harden in when she’s round.”
The Teasel, still being carried down by the tide, swung round into the wind.
“Main-sheet,” said Tom.
Hand over hand the Admiral hauled it in. The Teasel was sailing again, but heading up the river the way she had come. She could point her course and was moving fast through the water, but Tom was looking not at the water but at a little stump on the bank. Would she do it or not?
“She’s going backwards,” said Dorothea, almost in panic.
“Give her a little more main-sheet,” said Tom.
Slowly, s
lowly, inch by inch, though the water was foaming under her bows, she began to move up the river. The stump on the bank was level with her mast, was level with Tom at her tiller, was left astern.
“She can do it,” said Tom exultantly. As long as the wind held like that they were safe.
And then a man appeared on the bank.
“Take you through Yarmouth, sir?” he said.
Tom glanced at him.
“Fetch her in here and I’ll come aboard,” said the man.
But Tom was no visiting stranger but a Norfolk Coot. He had heard about the wreckers of Yarmouth who are always ready to lend a hand and, a little later, to do a bit of salvage work. He knew that the Yarmouth Corporation itself warns visitors to apply for help at the Yacht Station and nowhere else. And the Admiral had not forgotten the tales of years ago, when she had been a little girl. She gave one look at Tom.
“No thank you,” said Tom, “we’re in no hurry.”
“You just throw me a warp then,” said the man, “I’ll make you fast.”
“We don’t mind sailing till the ebb slackens,” said Tom.
All this time the Teasel was slowly creeping up the river again, and the man was keeping pace with her, moving foot by foot along the cement wall.
“Bit o’ soft mud just here,” said the man. “You head her in for me, and you’ll be all right.”
“I’ll try it next year,” said Tom.
The man threw out his hands as if to signal that he had failed. Instantly three other men bobbed up from behind the wall and joined him, and all four of them settled down to play cards while waiting for an easier victim.
“Those were the ones who were going to save us when he had got us into a mess,” said Tom.
“Real wreckers,” said Dorothea. “How lovely.”
“Not for us,” said Tom, “if we’d let them get a foot aboard.”
At last the tide began to slacken and the Teasel moved faster past the stumps and stones Tom noticed on the banks.
“We can do it now,” he said. “Ready about!”
Coot Club Page 18