It was not until they had passed through Aldeby Swing Bridge that she put her sketch-book away and began to talk a little as a returning exile should. There was a hill rising from the water’s edge, with fine old trees on it here and there, and patches of thick undergrowth, and steep slopes of fresh green grass.
“That’s Boater’s Hill,” she said, “where we used to go for picnics, just the right distance out of Beccles on a summer afternoon. My brother Richard caught a grass snake there and got beaten afterwards for taking it to school with him and letting it get loose in the middle of a lesson.”
“What did he feed it on?” asked Dick.
“Frogs, I believe,” said Mrs. Barrable.
“He wouldn’t mind being beaten for its sake,” said Dorothea.
Beccles was very near. They sailed past houseboats moored to the bank, with smoke blowing from their chimneys. A young man came tacking down the river in a little racing yacht like the Flash, and set them wondering if the twins and their A.P. had won their first race. And then, sweeping slowly round a bend, they came in sight of the tall Beccles mills, and the public staithe, and a dyke full of boats still at their winter moorings, and a road bridge, with a railway bridge beyond it. Under the bridges they could see the curving river, houses almost standing in the water, rowing boats tied to the walls, and a flock of white ducks swimming from one back door to the next.
“Brother Richard was quite right,” said the Admiral. “This is much the best way to see it again.”
The next moment they were rounding up by the staithe. Dick jumped ashore. Tom turned to the Admiral with a grin.
“We’ve got to Beccles,” he said. “Now for Oulton. And then we may have time to get right up to Norwich before we start back.”
“Oh, but Tom,” said Dorothea. “It’s the Admiral’s old home. She won’t want to start again at once.”
“I want to do a little shopping first,” said the Admiral.
“And we must send off post cards to the twins,” said Tom. “Just to let them know how far the Teasel’s got.”
Sails were lowered. The Teasel was moored fore and aft. Tom looked her over critically and decided that she was neat enough, and all five of them made ready to leave her and go up into the town.
“What’s that big boat?” asked Dick, looking at a brown topsail moving above the trees far away over the meadows.
“Thames barge,” said Tom. “You can see her sprit. She’ll be here by the time we get back, the way she’s moving.”
“I expect I shall hardly know the little place again,” said Mrs. Barrable. Dorothea looked at her hopefully, but romance died as Mrs. Barrable went on, “Better bring both shopping baskets, Dot. I don’t know what your mother would say if she knew how badly I’ve been feeding you. Fresh vegetables we want, and something not out of a tin. The butcher’s name used to be Hanger, but I suppose he’s gone long ago. What do you think about fried chops if we can get them?”
Romance came to life again as, after a last look at the Teasel and the distant barge, they left the staithe and walked up the long street into the town. After all, thought Dorothea, even if the Admiral was altogether too light-hearted for a returning exile, they had come a long way. They walked up the middle of the street like travellers in a strange country, come for to see and to admire. And, though the Admiral did seem to be mostly thinking about chops, she kept looking about her, remembering this and that. She delighted Dorothea by recognising between two houses the little alleyway through which, as children, she and her brother Richard used to slip down to the river. From the street they could see between the houses right down to the water, and tied at the foot of some steps was a boat that might have been the very boat they learned to row in, so the Admiral said.
They found the post office, with the mail van waiting outside it, so, to Tom’s delight, they were able to get their post cards off by the early post. They sent pictures of Beccles to the twins, to Mrs. Dudgeon, and to the three small Coots of the Death and Glory. “Burgh St. Peter last night. Beccles this morning, 8.45 a.m.,” wrote Tom triumphantly, on his post cards to the twins. “Wish you were here,” he added, finding there was a little room left on each card.
SHOPPING IN BECCLES
“And I must send one to Brother Richard,” said the Admiral.
Dorothea chose one for her, showing the river flowing close under the old houses.
“Tell him when we left and when we arrived,” said Tom, remembering the letter Brother Richard had sent warning the Admiral not to sail south with children. A long time ago it seemed now since she had read those bits aloud in Ranworth Broad.
The Admiral wrote her post card and held it out for Tom to see what she had written. “Left Horning yesterday. Beccles today. Look at the postmark. And not one scratch on her paint.”
They saw their cards stamped, put into a bag and carried out to the van. “Good,” said Tom, as the van drove off. “They ought to get those cards this afternoon.”
From the post office they went to a shop with a sign hanging out over the pavement, “Ye Olde Cake Shoppe.”
“Hmph!” said the Admiral, “it wasn’t ‘ye olde’ when I used to buy buns there, but I daresay the buns will be none the worse for it.”
Here they bought a large fruit cake and some buns. Then they found the butcher’s, and bought some chops that the butcher said would be very good ones. He had had one that morning for his own breakfast. They bought onions, a cauliflower and some oranges from the greengrocer. Dorothea wanted to see the house where the Admiral had been born, but it had long ago been pulled down, and where the old garden had been was a big new shop with enormous plate glass windows. Mrs. Barrable went in, quite heartlessly, Dorothea thought, and bought a new BB pencil. Then they went to have a look at the church, which is built, so to speak, in two bits, the tower in one bit and the rest of the church in another. They had a fine view out over the country from the wall of the churchyard. Then, tired with wandering round, they went back to “Ye Olde Cake Shoppe” and had coffee and biscuits, after which, with most of the morning gone, they set off back to the Teasel.
“Where shall we sail for next?” the Admiral was saying, as they turned the corner and came out on the green grass.
“But we’ve only just got here,” said Dorothea. “There must be heaps more things in Beccles that you want to see again.”
“That barge has got here all right,” said Tom, “and tied up at the mill just opposite the Teasel. Come on, Dick, let’s get a good look at her. You never see one of them in the North River. What a beauty.…” His face suddenly changed.… “Why! … There can’t be.… There is.… There’s somebody aboard the Teasel. Hi! You!” And he set off at a run to turn out the invader.
“Wait a minute,” called the Admiral, but he did not hear her.
They saw him take a flying leap into the Teasel’s well from the edge of the staithe.
“He didn’t wipe his shoes,” said Dick, who was always being reminded by Tom to wipe his before coming aboard.
“Something must really be wrong,” said Dorothea. “Hullabaloos, perhaps, lurking in the cabin. Come on, Dick.…”
All three of them hurried to the rescue as fast as they could, with William galloping among them and nearly sending them headlong by getting mixed up with their feet.
“Tom,” called Dorothea.
Just as they came to the edge of the staithe there was a burst of laughter from the Teasel’s cabin, and Port and Starboard and Tom came tumbling out together.
“But however did you get here?”
Port and Starboard, bursting with pride, pointed across the river at the Welcome of Rochester moored by the mill.
Everybody was talking at once. “But that’s a Thames barge.” “Not at Horning.” “Jim Wooddall took us in Sir Garnet.” “But the championship races.…” “The A.P. going off in a rush and Ginty packing.” “Awful when you weren’t at Stokesby or Yarmouth.” “Hullabaloos?” “Nosing into Fleet Dyke looking for you.”
“Needn’t be back for a week.” “Yes. In a cupboard bunk.” “Oh, three million cheers!”
And then the twins wanted to know all about the voyage of the Teasel.
“Those apprentices must have done jolly well.” “Should think they did.” “How was it at Yarmouth? Did you take a tug?” “Came through by ourselves.” “Good for you.” “And the bridges?” “Lowering the mast?” “Nobody could have done better.” “You won’t really want us as well.” “What rot!” “Of course we do.” “Ten times the fun with all of us together.” “And we were jolly lucky with weather.” “We couldn’t have managed without you if it had come properly blowy.”
“Well,” said the Admiral when the hubbub had subsided a little and not more than three people and William were talking at once, “with two spare skippers we can go almost anywhere. But we must at least have dinner. And somebody must go back into the town and buy another couple of good big chops.”
“We’ll all go,” said Starboard.
“I’ll stay in the Teasel,” said the Admiral, “and get the cooking started. I want to feed you properly for once. Specially if we’re sailing for Oulton this afternoon.…”
“The Admiral’s an explorer by nature,” Dorothea explained to Port as they went off with the others to see the butcher again. “She isn’t like a returning native, not really.… Coming home means nothing to her at all.”
*
But there was no getting away from Beccles that day. The morning had gone in shopping and cooking, and when dinner had been eaten and the things washed up, the Admiral had to be ferried across in the Titmouse by the twins to thank the Welcome of Rochester for giving a passage to the Teasel’s missing skippers. Mrs. Whittle was very pleased to have a visitor, and for a long time she and Mrs. Barrable sat talking of foreign parts, such as Antwerp and Rotterdam. Then, as the Welcome was not to begin discharging her cargo until next morning, Port was sent back in the Titmouse to bring the rest of the ship’s company, who had been sitting on the Teasel’s cabin roof looking at the barge. They all crossed the river together. William liked the barge very well, and liked the mill staithe even better, and rummaged in the straw there as if he were interested in rats like any ordinary worldly dog. Dick, Dorothea and Tom were shown all over the Welcome by the twins, who felt, after spending a night aboard her, that they were members of her crew. Mr. Whittle smoked his pipe and listened. And when Dick explained that the others were teaching him and Dorothea to be sailors, Mr. Hawkins, the mate, asked him if they had shown him how to throw a bowline on a bight. The instructors in seamanship said that they did not know themselves, and he got some rope and did it for them like a conjuring trick, so quickly that they could not see his hands working. And then he settled down on a hatch and showed them all kinds of knots and other things that can be made with rope, Bowlines and Fisherman’s and Carrick bends, Rolling, Blackwall, Timber and Handspike hitches. Cat’s Paws and Sheepshanks, Eye splices and Long splices, Grommets and a Selvagee strop. They had not heard half the names, and long after Mr. Hawkins had made four Grommets for them, and had shown them how to play deck quoits, the ones who were not actually playing were still wrestling with bits of rope, trying to remember what they had been taught. And old Mr. Whittle sat by, smoking his pipe and thinking of new things for Mr. Hawkins to show them. “What about a Turk’s ’Ead, ’Awk?” he would say, and “’Awk, you ain’t showed ’em ’ow to use toggles.” Then, as the afternoon was wearing on, Mrs. Barrable invited Mrs. Whittle and Mr. Whittle and Mr. Hawkins to come across the river and have a cup of tea in the Teasel.
“Do come,” said Starboard. “We’ve seen your ship, and you ought to come and see ours.”
And Mrs. Whittle came, but her husband and the mate said they didn’t really like to leave the ship in port, even if the port was as quiet a place as the quay by Beccles Mill.
Mrs. Whittle brought her knitting with her, and very much admired the electric light in the cabin which Dick turned on so that she could see better. She told how once going down Channel to Falmouth she had been knitting on deck and her ball of wool had dropped overboard, and how the faster she tried to pull it in again the faster the ball unrolled, and all the time her husband was telling her to go below because it was so rough. And at last, just when she came to the end of the wool, hauling it hand over hand till she had it all aboard, a sea came rolling along the decks, and another on the top of it, and she had to grab something not to go overboard herself. “And what ’urt me was to think ’ow I’d pulled in miles and miles of good green wool just to see it picked up and carried away and ’alf a knitted tea-cosy with it and a set of knitting needles. ‘Now, Mrs. Whittle,’ says my ’usband, ‘you go below.’ ‘But my knitting,’ says I. ‘We can’t go about to pick it up,’ says ’e. ‘It’ll fetch to France some time next week.’ ‘And my tea-cosy?’ says I, for it was a real ’andsome cosy. ‘One o’ them Frenchy fishermen’ll wear it for a berry,’ e’ says. They’ll know what to do with it.’”
By the time tea was over, it seemed too late to start. Nobody was very sorry. Tom, privately, had a sort of feeling that it was hardly loyal to the Titmouse after she had pretended all the way from Horning to Beccles to be nothing but a dinghy, not to let her do a little sailing for herself. So, during the short spring evening, while the Admiral was painting a picture of the Welcome of Rochester (which now hangs in Mrs. Whittle’s stateroom), Tom, Port, Starboard, Dick and Dorothea all crowded into the Titmouse, rowed through the bridges, stepped the mast and sailed away. They sailed through the fleets of ducks, close by the houses that climb the hill beside the river, close under the walls below the church, which look like castle bastions. Up there, of course, the returning native ought to have leaned on the stone parapet and looked out with dim eyes over the country from which he (or she) had been absent for so long. But it could not be helped that the Admiral was not like that, and Dorothea regretted it only for a moment. There was a rickety old houseboat moored down there, and on the open deck at the stern an old man was sitting with a big bucket at his side fishing with a stout bamboo rod. Dorothea forgot returning natives when she saw him lift his rod and bring two eels at once hanging from a big reddish lump at the end of his line. He held them over his bucket. The eels dropped in and he lowered his red lump over the side again.
“Babbing,” said Tom.
“That red thing’s nothing but worms,” said Port.
“Made like a cowslip ball,” said Starboard, and Dorothea was very nearly sick.
“But how do the eels get hooked?” asked Dick.
They were close by the houseboat, and the old man heard that question. “Bless you,” he said, “they don’t get hooked. You feel ’em, nuzzling the worrams, an’ then when they’ve properly fanged ’em, you lifts ’em gently, so,” and as he spoke up came another eel biting hard into the lump of worms, and letting go when he found himself in the air only to drop into the eel-babber’s big bucket.
They sailed on until they had left the town behind them, and they had meadows and grazing cattle on either hand. Then with hardly wind enough to move them they turned back. It was dusk when Tom paddled the Titmouse through the bridges to the staithe, and they had only just time to rig the Teasel’s awning before dark and to do the same for the little Titmouse, where Dick was sleeping once more.
That night everybody was ready to go early to bed. Nobody asked to have the light for another minute or two. From across the river came the cheerful little noise of Mr. Hawkins, sitting on the Welcome’s forehatch and playing his mouth organ as quietly as he could. But they did not hear it long.
CHAPTER XXIII
STORM OVER OULTON
THE twins had joined the Teasel none too soon. All the way from Horning to Beccles there had been nothing too difficult to be managed by Tom with no one to help him but the Admiral and a most inexperienced crew. But when they were waked in Beccles by a milkman bringing the morning milk down to the staithe, they saw, as soon as they put their heads out, that the weather did
not look so kind as it had been. There was a sulky feeling in the air, and the sky was dark in the east.
“Thunder coming,” said Tom, when he and Dick went aboard the Teasel for breakfast.
“Looks as if it’s going to blow,” said Starboard.
“Rain, too,” said Port.
“Let’s get away quick,” said the hopeful Admiral, “and we’ll be in Oulton before it starts.”
The moment breakfast was over they were off. With a full crew once more, two to a halyard and one to spare, not counting the Admiral and William, the Teasel set sail in record time, while Mr. Whittle and Mr. Hawkins, smoking their pipes, watched from the deck of the Welcome at the other side of the river.
“You’ve got a smart ship, you ’ave,” said Mr. Whittle as the Teasel headed towards the big barge, swung round close by her and was off, racing down the river with the wind abeam.
Mrs. Whittle came up the companion to shake a duster just in time to use it to wave farewell.
“You’ll be wanting a reef later,” called Mr. Hawkins, pointing at the dark clouds in the eastern sky.
No one was on the staithe when they sailed, but just before they lost sight of it, Dorothea looking back at the town the returned native was leaving once more, saw a boy on a red post office bicycle ride across the staithe to the water’s edge. No one else saw him. The Admiral was tidying the cabin and filling in the time of sailing in the ship’s log, which, as usual, everybody else forgot in the bustle of getting away. Tom and Dick were busy with main-sheet and tiller. Port was swabbing the decks round with a mop, to clear off any mud brought aboard from the shore. Starboard was washing a muddy anchor over the side. The boy jumped off his bicycle and stood on the edge of the staithe, waving. Dorothea, thinking it was rather nice of him, waved back. The next moment they were round a bend in the river and could see the staithe no more.
Coot Club Page 23