Coot Club

  “Here you are, A.P.,” said Starboard, handing into the car the despatch-case full of legal papers which her father had brought from Norwich yesterday and, as usual, was taking back unopened to the office.

  “Half the holidays gone,” said he, sitting in the car, gently pressing the pedal with his foot and warming up the engine before starting.

  “Two weeks more,” said Starboard.

  “Two more practice races,” he said, “and then, if we get Flash tuned up to her best, we’ll just show them.”

  Port used the brown gloves to give a last rub round to the hard hat, and put them in at the window. Mr. Farland set the hat on his head, took it off again to his daughters, tooted the horn and was gone.

  “Come on,” said Starboard. “We’ll know in a minute. Let’s go by the drawbridge.”

  But Mrs. McGinty was standing in the doorway. “Will you bairns be away to the village?” she asked. Precious minutes were wasted while she told them the things that were wanted at the village shop. Starboard scribbled them down on a bit of paper.

  “I’m wanting the caulifloors for your denner,” said Mrs. McGinty.

  “All right, Ginty,” said Starboard. And the two of them bolted across the garden and vanished into the osier bushes.

  *

  Tom, sleeping in the Titmouse, was waked very early by hearing a boat brushing through the reeds at the mouth of the dyke. He bobbed up at once to listen and hit his head against a thwart. Was it the enemy coming to look for him? But, of course, it was only the Death and Glories coming to ask what in the end Tom had done about No. 7. He told them and saw that, as boatbuilders’ sons, they were a good deal shocked.

  “Cast ’em adrift?” said Joe. “Did you oughter ’a done that?”

  “Couldn’t do anything else,” said Tom.

  “But how didn’t they cotch ye?”

  Tom told, briefly, how he had had to make a submarine of the Dreadnought. Of that they thoroughly approved.

  “Gee whizz!” said Joe.

  “That were a real good ’un,” said Bill.

  “Prime,” said Pete.

  They wanted there and then to go down the river to have another look at No. 7, but Tom thought better not, and they decided to look at a few upstream nests instead.

  “And look here,” said Tom, as the Death and Glory went off out of the dyke. “Try to find out, if you can, how long those people are going to have the Margoletta. I’ll have to keep out of the way till they’ve gone.”

  He went into the house for breakfast. What was the good of cooking in the Titmouse if he could not safely take her down the river? He went to look at the baby. It seemed a hundred years since yesterday when he had come back from Norwich with his hands smelling of tarred rope, planning all kinds of cruises. His father seemed to think the affair with the Hullabaloos was over. “They’ll have forgotten about it themselves this morning,” he said, “unless their livers are badly out of order.” But Tom thought otherwise. His father had not heard the anger in their voices when they were talking to the old lady of the Teasel. The only real hope was that those people would presently be giving up the Margoletta. A week was the usual time for which people hired a boat. He would have to keep out of sight until they were gone. It was hard to lose even a few days now that he could sleep aboard the Titmouse, but, at least, he could be finishing up those lockers. And as soon as breakfast was over Tom went back to his ship, and was hard at work in her when he heard two short blasts on a whistle and two longer ones, from among the bushes on the farther side of the dyke.

  The twins. They, too, would have to be told how desperately, in the saving of No. 7, he had got mixed up with foreigners. He scrambled ashore, took an old iron winding handle from its place just inside the shed, and went along the dyke to the drawbridge. The handle belonged to a windlass he had got last summer from a wherry that was being broken up. The windlass was the most important part of the drawbridge. Tom fitted the handle in place, pulled out a bar that locked the bridge in its framework, and then slowly unwinding, lowered the plank with its two handrails, until the end of the plank rested on the other side of the dyke. The plank was strong enough to bear even Dr. Dudgeon or Mr. Farland, both of whom had been known to use it instead of going round by road.

  “Hullo!” said Tom gravely.

  “What’s the matter?” said Port.

  “Couldn’t you get them to move?” said Starboard. “Is No. 7 done after all?”

  “Is that why you didn’t come and tell us last night?”

  “No. 7’s all right,” said Tom. “At least, it was when I came home. And it was pretty dark before I got back. But things went wrong a bit. I’ve gone and got most awfully mixed up with foreigners. It was the Margoletta on the top of No. 7, and I sent her adrift.…”

  “Good,” said Starboard.

  “I couldn’t think of anything else to do,” said Tom. “And the worst of it is they saw me. One chap had field-glasses. And then although I went down river, they thought I was one of the Death and Glories. So I’ve got the whole Coot Club in a mess.”

  “The Death and Glories’ll be all right,” said Starboard.

  “Anyway, it isn’t your fault,” said Port. “One of us would have had to do it.”

  “But how did you get away?” said Starboard.

  “I got mixed up with another lot,” said Tom. “I forgot to tell you about a couple of kids I met in the train. Well, they’re in the Teasel, you know, where that pug’s usually hanging about, and there’s an old lady in the Teasel with them.…” And then he told of how he had boarded the Teasel and used her mud-weight, and sunk the Dreadnought, and hid in the rushes, and how, somehow, after the Hullabaloos had been sent off down the river, he had gone back aboard the Teasel by invitation, and had forgotten about these people being foreigners too, and had even told them all about No. 7, and let out something about the Coot Club itself. “You know, she really had been most awfully sporting,” said Tom, trying to explain as much to himself as to the twins how it was that he had come to forget the first duty of a Norfolk Coot. “Her brother was a victim,” he added, “but I didn’t know that until afterwards.…”

  And at that moment he gave a sudden start and listened. There was the sharp, impatient bark of a small dog, close behind the house. It sounded almost as if it came from the river. Tom had too lately lain in the reeds face to face with William not to know that voice again.

  Without another word he crept round the side of the house and peered out through the willows. The others followed him on tiptoe. Yes. Tied to one of the small white mooring posts at the edge of the lawn was a dinghy, and in it, alone, a pug.

  “She must be here,” whispered Tom, and they slipped quietly back to the shed.

  “Come to complain?” said Starboard.

  “She was awfully decent yesterday,” said Tom.

  And then there was a noise of feet on the gravel walk at the river side of the house, and voices talking, and again an impatient bark.

  “No, William! You stay where you are. It would make all the difference to those two.…”

  “I don’t see why they shouldn’t. Tom would love to, and I do believe all three of them are as good in a boat as anybody on the river.”

  And then Mrs. Barrable and Mrs. Dudgeon came round the corner of the house together.

  “Well, Tom,” said his mother, “you seem to have made some friends last night as well as some enemies. Mrs. Barrable has a plan to suggest.”

  “How do you do?” said Tom, dusting the sawdust off before shaking hands.

  “And these,” said Mrs. Dudgeon, “are Nell and Bess.”

  “Port and Starboard,” said Mrs. Barrable. “We saw you racing yesterday and we all hoped you would win.”

  “It wasn’t daddy’s fault we didn’t,” said Starboard. “If the river’d been a wee bit wider nothing could have saved them.”

  At that moment there was a determined and rather indignant yelp from “our baby” somewhere upstairs in the hous
e.

  “Is he all right?” said Tom.

  “Perhaps you’d like to talk it over with them,” said Mrs. Dudgeon.

  “You run away, my dear,” said Mrs. Barrable, just as if Mrs. Dudgeon was herself only a little girl.

  Tom’s mother laughed. She did not seem to mind. She shook hands with Mrs. Barrable and was gone.

  “And is that the Titmouse?” asked Mrs. Barrable, looking along the dyke. “You do keep her smart.”

  “She wants another coat of paint, really,” said Tom. “I’ve got the paint, but I don’t want to put it on till the end of the hols. You see it won’t matter her being wet when I have to go to school.”

  “Does she sleep two?”

  “There’s room for two,” said Tom. “One each side of the centre-board. But I’ve only had her fitted for sleeping these last two nights. She isn’t really finished yet.” He turned back the awning to let Mrs. Barrable see inside. “Those lockers are all going to have doors.”

  And then suddenly Mrs. Barrable turned to the business that had brought her to the doctor’s house. She told them how her brother had been coming to the Broads for some years and how this year he had chartered the Teasel, meaning to take his sister for a cruise right through Yarmouth and up to Beccles, where they had been children together, and round to Oulton and up the Norwich river.1 She told them how, after a week on the Bure and at Hickling, he had suddenly had to go off, and how she had invited Dick and Dorothea to come and keep her company in the Teasel. “But what I didn’t know,” she said, “was that the two of them had set their hearts on learning to sail ever since they made friends with some nautical children in the winter holidays. And, of course, they’re dreadfully disappointed.… No, no. They don’t say so. If they did I shouldn’t feel so bad about it. I’m rather disappointed, too. I’d been looking forward to seeing Breydon again, and sailing in to Waveney and the Yare.… Now, how would the three of you care to come and sail the Teasel for us? I know Tom knows how to sink a boat.”

  “Sail her?” said Tom.

  “Take her down to the southern rivers and back,” said Mrs. Barrable. “Just to let those two children feel they’d seen something of the Broads. And you’d have to teach them a little first, so that they wouldn’t feel they were only passengers.”

  Tom looked down at the Titmouse, at the new awning, and the lockers. Black treachery it would be, to leave her for the Teasel.

  “I’ve thought it all out,” said Mrs. Barrable. “You’d have to bring the Titmouse or we shouldn’t have enough sleeping room at night. If you could do with Dick in the Titmouse, we four will have the Teasel to ourselves … two cabins, one for the twins, and Dorothea will share the other with me. Two or three days’ practice first in the easy waters up here, I thought, and then away for a cruise so as to be back in time to send them home before the end of the holidays.”

  “The Teasel’s a splendid boat,” said Tom.

  For one moment the twins’ eyes lit like his at the thought of such a voyage in charge, in actual command, of such a vessel. Then they remembered.

  “We’d simply love to,” said Starboard, “but we can’t … really can’t. You see there’s a race tomorrow, and then another one, and father’s entered Flash for five races the last week of the holidays, and he’s arranging to get back early each day on purpose.”

  “You try to persuade them, Tom,” said Mrs. Barrable.

  But Tom knew the twins too well. “It’s no use,” he said. “They won’t be able to come.… And I can’t either, after last night. At least not so long as those people are about.”

  But Mrs. Barrable was not to be refused. She had seen the light in Tom’s eye and in the eyes of the twins. She knew that all three of them wanted to come.

  “They won’t know you except in your punt,” she said. “And we can always hide you, besides, they’ll have forgotten about it by now.… Anyhow, come along the three of you this afternoon and see what sort of a crew you think you could make of my visitors. I’ll expect you soon after lunch.”

  “Dick’s pretty keen on birds,” said Tom. “And he doesn’t collect eggs. And I could hop ashore if we heard those people coming.”

  It was a queer way of accepting an invitation for the afternoon, but what it meant was clear enough.

  “We’d love it,” said the twins, and then Mrs. Barrable said that she had a few more things to do, was welcomed into her dinghy by a barking William, and rowed away towards the village.

  The three Coots stood at the edge of the lawn and watched her rowing up the river, a wrinkled old lady in a little brown dinghy.

  “I don’t count that getting mixed up with foreigners,” said Port.

  “She jolly well knows how to row,” said Starboard.

  “Born in Beccles,” said Port.

  “Norfolk Coot really,” said Starboard. “But, of course, those two children don’t sound like Coots at all.”

  “It’s not their fault,” said Tom. “Poor little beasts. They’ve never had a chance of a boat.”

  “No harm in going to look at them, anyway.”

  Mrs. Barrable, rowing steadily, with William sitting up in the stern of the dinghy, was almost out of sight beyond the boat-building yards when, suddenly, all three Coots turned and listened.

  “The Margoletta,” whispered Tom.

  In a moment there was no one to be seen on the green lawn in front of the doctor’s house. The three Coots, crouching among the willows, were looking out through the tall reeds.

  A big motor-cruiser had turned the corner above the Ferry and was thundering up the river with a huge gramophone open and playing on the roof of the fore-cabin. Two gaudily dressed women were lying beside it, and three men were standing in the well between the cabins. All three were wearing yachting-caps. One was steering and the other two were using binoculars and seemed to be searching the banks as the cruiser came upstream at a tremendous pace.

  “They’re looking for the Dreadnought,” whispered Tom.

  The big cruiser roared past them, and from their hiding-place they saw the wash of her swirling along the farther bank and bringing lumps of earth splashing down into the river.

  “Beasts, simply beasts, that’s what they are,” said Tom.

  “They’ll have Mrs. Barrable over if they don’t slow up,” said Port.

  “They’ll probably run right into the Death and Glories up there,” said Tom. “Look here, I’d better go along in case.”

  “You’ve got to stay hid,” said Starboard. “It’ll make things ten times worse if they see you.”

  “You can’t do any good,” said Port. “Wait and see what happens.”

  “Yes, but what’s happening now?” said Tom. “Their engine’s stopped.”

  “Come on, Twin,” said Starboard. “They’ve never seen us. We’ll go and find out. Where’s that list of Ginty’s? She wants some washing soda and some lump sugar.…”

  “And a pair o’ braw wee caulifloors,” said Port. “Come on. Nobody can kill us for going to the grocer’s shop.”

  The two of them raced off round the house and out by the garden gate into the road that led to Horning village and the public staithe.

  1 The River Yare.

  CHAPTER VIII

  THE INNOCENTS

  MRS BARRABLE had seen the big cruiser coming and had made ready for it, but she was nearly swamped when it swept by her, the people in it turning round to laugh at the sight of the little dinghy tossing like a cork in the swirling water. She comforted William, who had not liked being thrown about, and rowed on to the staithe. The Margoletta was already tied up there when Mrs. Barrable, looking over her shoulder, saw the Death and Glory, the old black ship’s boat with its crew of three small boys, coming round the bend by the Swan Inn. There was no chance of warning them. She saw the two rowers turn to look at the Margoletta. She saw them hesitate, and then, as if they had nothing whatsoever to fear, row calmly on and moor at the staithe a little above the cruiser. The three men from the cruiser
leapt ashore, and before the small Coots had time to change their minds and bolt for it, were already within reach.

  “That’s the one. The biggest of them. We’ll teach you to come casting off other people’s ropes and anchors,” said a big, red-haired man, suddenly shooting out an arm and catching Joe by the collar of his coat.

  “That’s him.”

  Mrs. Barrable tied up her dinghy and walked quietly towards them. But Joe seemed well able to look after himself. He flung his arms suddenly upward and, with a single wriggle, left his coat in the hands of the enemy.

  “Catch him, one of you,” shouted the red-haired man. “Don’t let him go. Grab him, James!”

  “Catch him yourself, Ronald!” said one of the others.

  “Look out for my coat,” urged Joe, skipping backwards a few yards out of reach. “It’s got my rat in it.”

  The red-haired man dropped the coat and reached again at Joe, who dodged.

  “Rat!” shrieked a woman in orange pyjamas who had come ashore to see what was to be done to Joe.

  There was a sudden interruption.

  “What’s all this?” a deep voice asked, pausing between the words. Mr. Tedder, the policeman, had been digging in his little garden by the staithe, and hearing the noise had thrust his spade into the ground and hurried out, putting his coat on as he came.

  “It’s this boy,” said the red-haired man, setting his yachting-cap at a jauntier angle to impress Mr. Tedder, who had seen too many yachting-caps to be impressed. “The biggest of these three. He came along yesterday evening when we were all in our cabins, and unfastened our anchors and set us adrift. Wanton mischief, nothing else.”

  “Set you adrift?” said Mr. Tedder judicially. “That won’t do.”