by Julia Jones
Mr McMullen looked again at Donny – who wondered guiltily whether his tutor guessed that he’d used one of those sessions as a cover for a trip to Pin Mill. Then the teacher stepped forward to shake Gold Dragon’s hand.
“I’m delighted to meet you, Miss Lee. Did a bit of sailing myself years ago. Down channel – nothing to match your exploits. Ho hum. Registration usual time, usual place, Wednesday morning, Donny and I’ll see you tomorrow, Anna. Is there anything you’d like me to say to my colleagues in the textile department?”
Anna, who was inconspicuously as near Donny as she could be, shut her lips and shook her head violently. Mr McMullen laughed and left. Sandra went too and so did the police officers – once they’d been repeatedly assured by June Ribiero that Donny had her husband’s written permission to use their dinghy and therefore no conceivable offence had taken place. Clearly Rev. Wendy hadn’t counted her stamps ...
“The other party has decided not to press charges about the vandalism, ma’am,” said the male officer.
“I’m relieved to hear it,” June said, with a severe glance at Xanthe and Maggi. “Nevertheless my husband and I have no intention of withdrawing our formal complaint against Inspector Flint.”
A customs officer arrived to ask Polly Lee if she had anything to declare and then left after getting her to sign a photograph of Strong Winds for his collection.
At last they were all gone and Gold Dragon turned back into Granny’s sister and invited everyone to come on board, whilst apologising for only having tea to offer them. “With no milk either. I’ve been out East too long.”
She looked round at the darkening marina. “This was a playing field when I was last in England. It was part of the naval training college, HMS Ganges. My mother used to walk me down here when we were waiting for Father to come home. Or waiting for the older ones when they were off sailing. We were always waiting for someone ...”
“Is that why you wanted me and Skye to meet you here?”
“Yes. I thought that might make it easier. To have someone waiting for me. Perhaps I was wrong. Do come below. I’ve plenty of space even if there’s nothing to eat.”
“May I help?” This was June. “I had time on my hands today so I’ve made enough supper for everyone. Perhaps the older children could bring it over?”
She nodded to Xanthe and Maggi who turned back towards Snow Goose as if this had all been pre-arranged. Anna and Donny went with them. This gave Donny the chance he needed to ask Xanthe the burning question.“What did you do to Flint’s boat?”
“Me?” Outraged innocence. “You accuse me, Donny-man? It was sweet little sis. She decided that her sewing efforts might not be enough to get the message across, so she daubed a big shark’s mouth and plenty of teeth on the fat man’s bling.”
“You’d said his boat reminded you of Jaws,” said Maggi who didn’t seem at all ashamed of what she’d done.
“I take it back. Totally. The comparison’s insulting to sharks. We were at the club on Sunday morning, after we got back from Rutland Water, and he made some of his gross comments. Mum thinks that’s what upset us. But it wasn’t that at all. We didn’t care what he said. Mags was simply doing her bit for the Alliance.”
“You’ve all been amazing,” said Donny. “And Gold Dragon’s amazing too. I just wish my mum was here.”
“Ah,” said Anna.
“Hmm,” said Maggi.
“Mum’s the word,” said Xanthe, loading him with two extraordinarily heavy cool bags.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The Word is Mum
Monday, September 25th, later
Supper on board Strong Winds was plentiful and increasingly riotous. Rev. Wendy wasn’t there and Gerald seemed happy to revert to hearty Boy Scout once again. He made one feeble protest about Vicky’s bedtime but was instantly squashed by Luke who declared that they were on an Adventure and Vicky was their Treasure and they couldn’t leave her behind Ever because the pirates might come and dig her up.
Great Aunt Ellen seemed immensely pleased by this and invited him and Liam to sit next to her and feel her hook. Then she promised to tell them tremendous tales of villainy from far away in the South China Sea.
“When you all come sailing on board Strong Winds,” she said, looking round at her cabin-full of children.
“You’re a twenty-two gong Tai-coon!” chanted Xanthe and Maggi at once. This was still incomprehensible to Donny and Anna but not to Gold Dragon.
“I’m honoured,” she replied. “But that was the real Miss Lee. The Ransome one. The one who owned Shining Moon. Strong Winds is a sister ship, built slightly later on the same island. I took Miss Lee’s name as a tribute. And Polly after my sister Eirene’s parrot – for the same reason.”
“I’m quite muddled,” said Donny. “I didn’t really know
Granny had another sister. Apart from you. And I only knew about you when Granny was dead.”
“Didn’t know about Eirene ...? But didn’t your mother ...? Where is your mother, Donny? Didn’t she want to meet me?”
“I told you in my letter. She’s in Avalon. It’s a closed ward in a mental hospital. I need you to get her out.”
“No,” said a voice from the companion way. It was Joshua Ribiero. “You would need more than that. To obtain the release of a patient for whom compulsory certification papers are in the process of being filed, you need forms abc to xyz as prescribed by the Mental Health Act. You also need a qualified doctor and a Care Plan. Oh, and in addition you need Accommodation that has been checked to the Appropriate Standard by a representative of the local Social Services Directorate. A barrack-room lawyer helps too.”
He smiled at June who smiled at all three of the new arrivals.
All three ...
It was true. There she was. Skye, his mum, looking terrible – pale, flabby and bewildered – and clinging improbably to Rev. Wendy.
“MUM!!” Donny signed. And he was in her arms.
“Doh ... doh.” But it wasn’t Vicky, it was Skye. And she did mean him. “Your birthday. I missed you. Love you so much.”
“Love you too, Mum,” he signed back, twining her hand with his.
No one else spoke. Anna had turned away and was sobbing helplessly. Maggi had her arms round her and was trying to comfort her without understanding what the trouble was.
“We should go now,” said Joshua. “Can you accommodate your niece tonight, Miss Walker? June and I will be sleeping on our own yacht with the girls. We won’t be far away. I signed her release papers. I am a doctor.”
Great Aunt Ellen was looking stunned. “What was that you said about Appropriate Accommodation ...?” she managed.
Rev. Wendy spoke for the first time. “I’m afraid I may have uttered a falsehood,” she said. “The vicarage where John has been looked after is regularly inspected by Social Services because of the children. I allowed the mental health authorities to assume that his mother would be staying there.”
Donny gasped. Rev. Wendy bucking procedures?
She heard him. “Yes, John ... I mean ... Donny, I owe you an apology. I didn’t listen when I should have listened. I believed other people when I should have believed you. Can you forgive me?”
She held out her hand. This was unbelievable. Donny shook it rather nervously and did his best to smile. “I nicked your stamps,” he said.
Then they were all gone.
Donny had asked whether Anna wanted to stay but she’d shaken her head. Her face was blotched with emotion.
“Thanks, Donny. I’ll stick with my lot tonight. You need to be with your mum.” She looked hesitantly at Skye. “We’ll be round after school tomorrow though. If that’s okay?”
Great Aunt Ellen didn’t seem so happy now.
Maybe she was tired.
It was dark outside and quiet, though the cranes kept up their ceaseless rattle in the distance. Maybe they should all just go to bed. But they were still sitting in Strong Wind’s cabin, looking at each other, no
t saying much.
“You have to understand why I stayed away,” she began at last. She’d lit a single oil lamp, which hung above the varnished table. Its light faded softly into dimness round the cabin’s edge.
Donny and Skye were propped together like rescued castaways. Skye was filled with medication and Ellen was finding it hard to get used to her niece’s deafness and her few inarticulate noises. Although Donny was signing to Skye as he always did, he didn’t think his mum understood anything of where they were or what had happened.
“Edith and I had never got on very well.” Ellen didn’t look in the least like a marauding Dakotah: she looked elderly now and rather sad. “People used to say we were too alike. I couldn’t see it. But we felt the same about the one important thing. We both wanted the baby. Your mother, Skye Walker. The boys were dead and Eirene was gone and we were each desperate to have her.”
“But ...” said Donny.
“You would have thought we could have shared, wouldn’t you? Two childless women, both bereft ... But we couldn’t.”
She was silent for a moment, as if she found her younger self almost too difficult to explain. “It must have been because of what had happened. Our brothers dying like that. Both together. Two official telegrams on the same day. Ned’s ship had been torpedoed and Greg had gone after him. Into the Arctic Ocean! Abandoned his ship. He must have been out of his mind. It sent Edith temporarily out of hers. Then there was the Enquiry. Our parents were already dead. Which was probably a mercy.”
The lines on her face deepened into waves of old grief. “You don’t know what it’s like when someone’s lost at sea. You have nothing. Nothing to bury, nothing to touch, nothing to weep over. ‘No roses on a sailor’s grave.’”
Donny began to try to put all this together but Ellen couldn’t be stopped. “And then when Eirene went ... Eirene of all people; the one with the dreams, the words – the middle child – when Eirene went, it was probably inevitable that Edith and I would split apart. Too much pain does that to people, you know. It can hold you together but it more likely breaks you.
“The publicity made it so much worse. Greg was quite well known, you see. One of the youngest officers ever to be promoted Captain. His use of asdic technology had been innovative. Possibly the key factor in our struggle against the U-boats. Which made the loss of Ned’s ship – excruciating. Though everyone knew sonar was unreliable in the Arctic. Different water densities. Greg must have blamed himself – though no-one at the Enquiry did.”
“I’m really sorry, Great Aunt Ellen, but I don’t know what you’re talking about. At least I’m almost sure I don’t ...”
Maggi had fetched his rucksack from the dinghy earlier. He started digging into it. The two plastic bags crackled underneath his hand.
“The only clue Granny gave me after she was dead was this.” He pulled out the paperback Swallows and Amazons. “But I didn’t manage to solve it.”
She laughed when she saw it. Not a joyful laugh.
“That book! Of course she would. Did you never wonder how you got your name? Did you never ... ask your mother?”
“My mum gave me lots of names – little owlet, Hiawatha, small He-Bear, Doh-Doh – she sort of makes shapes with words. Granny called me John but she never explained why and most people call me Donny. I was quite glad she did, though. Donny Walker works much better in school than Mum’s names would have done.”
This made her laugh more easily.
“I’d say! Well I’m glad some good came out of it. Walker isn’t
our name at all. We’re called Palmer – which I like much better. It feels more like a traveller’s name – a far-flung traveller. Edith made us all change, by deed poll, after the publicity . . . and after the deaths. We copied from Swallows and Amazons because the book had meant so much to them as children. Not to me, particularly.”
She misunderstood his gasp.
“I did what Edith wanted. She was my older sister. And Reeni said Edith was the person most in need of comfort. She and Greg had been so close. Such a happy childhood. All that sailing. I was too young for most of it but I loved it too. More than Edith ever understood. That was what caused our final quarrel. Eirene had gone and I wanted to take the baby – your mother – to visit a lake. Greg’s first dinghy was still there somewhere and I was planning to try to find her. I didn’t want to do much: show Skye the water, maybe sit with her in the dinghy. Let her feel the motion.
“But Edith wouldn’t have it. She couldn’t bear to be near water herself and she couldn’t bear for the baby to be there either. She said we were never to take that risk. Skye was never, ever, to be taken on a boat ... for as long as she lived.”
Ellen glanced across at Skye, as if bewildered by the presence of this big sick woman in her cabin.
“I didn’t manage it too well. Edith was having a bad day – a North Wind day – and I knew looking after the baby was difficult; it was amazing that she’d survived at all. I wouldn’t have let her get chilled. I just thought she’d like the breeze on her face, maybe the rocking. Then I lost my temper. I said we would be betraying the others if we brought Skye up as a landlubber. We would betray everything that Edith herself had loved: that Greg and Ned had died for. Skye was our only descendant. I said I wouldn’t do it. After that, I left.”
“Granny must have known best,” said Donny, loyally, though in his heart he agreed with Ellen. Baby Skye would have loved those things. “Granny was her mum. She had to make the decisions.”
“Edith? Her mother? No, no, no!” said Ellen. “Edith wasn’t her mother. She was her aunt. The same as me. Skye was Eirene’s baby. Not Edith’s.”
Donny gaped at her. Somehow he knew that she was right.
“Well ... wh ... what had happened to Eirene then?”
“Oh,” said Ellen, “Eirene had gone. She went as soon as the baby was born and named. She knew she could trust us to take care of her. Always. That’s why I came as soon as Edith wrote. I wish it had been sooner.”
Skye had fallen asleep now, still leaning against Donny and he was leaning against her. The rucksack was underneath: it was difficult to reach his second book. He’d need to tell Joshua that he wouldn’t be returning Sailing to the club library.
The rich mahogany of Strong Winds’s cabin glowed deep and warm. The berths on either side were covered in dark crimson leather. They were hard but there were embroidered cushions and soft colourful blankets which Gold Dragon was tucking round his mother.
She looked peaceful now. In the half-light around the edges of the cabin Donny glimpsed curios – beads and carvings and bamboo scrolls. Though the marina was calm, Strong Winds was never entirely still. There was something in the action of the water on the wood that made the boat feel as if she were alive, a large quiet creature holding all of them safe.
Donny noticed bookshelves in the shadows. Tomorrow he’d ask Great Aunt Ellen to explain what she’d meant about Eirene ‘going’. But this was the moment to give back her brother Gregory’s most treasured possession, salt-stained as it was. He’d have to winkle out that rucksack.
And after that there would be absolutely nothing more that he needed to say or do.
From the Cabin Bookshelf
I’ve always loved books – and that was how this story began. On board our boat, Peter Duck, we have two bookshelves. One has books which almost never change – many of them have been there since my parents owned the boat: the other has newer books. Sailing, the book which fell from Gregory Palmer’s pocket and which Donny is about to give to Great Aunt Ellen at the end of this story, has been on Peter Duck’s shelf ever since I can remember. I didn’t take much notice of it as a child but as an adult I realised that Nancy Blackett, another boat once owned by the writer Arthur Ransome, also had a copy in her cabin. Then I noticed that in Ransome’s story We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea the hero, John Walker, consults this same book when he is caught in fog in Harwich Harbour. It seemed to cross from the actual world to the world
of imagination.
I like the way that books (and boats) can link people together. I never met Arthur Ransome but my parents did and Ransome also knew my uncle who gave me my first copy of the book Peter Duck. Reading the book, Peter Duck, on board the boat Peter Duck led me to read all Ransome’s other sailing adventures, beginning with Swallows and Amazons. Then, much later, I read some of them to my own children.The stories that were particularly in my mind when I was writing The Salt- Stained Bookwere We Didn’t Mean to Go To Sea and Missee Lee. Both of them feed into Donny’s dreams – as Peter Duck does in chapter twenty.
I hope that you don’t feel that you have to have read Swallows and Amazons to enjoy The Salt-Stained Book. Think of it as any story that has meant a lot to different people in the same family. In the same way you don’t have to have read Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island yourself in order to enjoy Swallows and Amazons or Peter Duck. It’s just a book that the characters have read and which gives them exciting ideas or names – as it does to Donny and Xanthe when they are alongside the mysterious schooner.
Not so many people read Hiawatha nowadays though Ransome and Stevenson probably did. Its author, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, was the most popular American poet of the 19th century and based the poem on actual research. I knew nothing about Native American culture and history when I read Hiawatha as a child. I simply loved the words.
There are plenty of modern adventure stories on the cabin bookshelf. A.J.MacKinnon, an Australian teacher had been teaching in Shropshire when he decided to enjoy a couple of weeks sailing in the school’s Mirror dinghy. Four thousand miles later he and the dinghy arrived in Romania … He’s the person June Ribiero mentions in chapter nine. You can read his true story in The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow.
With no disrespect to any of the intrepid adventurers above, Richard Woodman has travelled more sea-miles than any of them – and very likely written more words as well. The detailed research that went into Arctic Convoys 1941-1945 (the book that gave me the idea for my first scene) would be achievement enough for most people, but that, and the fivevolume history of the merchant navy, and the fourteen volume ‘Nathaniel Drinkwater’ series and a host of other titles are merely the second career after thirty seven years at sea. And he still finds time to go scudding around Harwich harbour and off to the Northern seas in his cutter Andromeda.
