Coot Club

by Arthur Ransome

  Tom lowered his sail, and tied up the Titmouse. Then he went round the house towards the river, and in at the garden door, listening carefully. Asleep, or awake? Awake. He heard a chuckle, and his mother’s laugh in the room that these holidays had become the nursery once again.

  “Hullo, Mother,” he called, racing upstairs from the hall. “How’s our baby?”

  “Our baby?” laughed his mother. “Whose baby is he, I should like to know? The twins were in at lunch-time, and they seemed to think he was theirs. And your father calls him his. And you call him yours. And he’s his mother’s own baby all the time. Well, and how was it last night? Very cold? Very uncomfortable? You look all right.…”

  “It just couldn’t have been better,” said Tom. “It wasn’t cold a bit in that sleeping-bag. And it wasn’t uncomfortable really except for one bone.” He gave a bit of a rub to his right hip bone which still felt rather bruised. “Anyway,” he said, “nobody expects floor-boards to be like spring mattresses. And there was a snipe bleating long after dark. The awning works splendidly. Any chance of seeing Dad? I’d like to tell him how well it worked. That dodge he thought of for lacing it down was just what was wanted.”

  “He’s awfully busy. Half a dozen still waiting.”

  “I saw some of the victims hanging about as I came upstairs.”

  “You really must stop calling them that,” said his mother. “And he may have to run into Norwich about some man with a stomach-ache who thinks appendicitis would sound better. Don’t you go and be a doctor when you grow up.”

  “I’m going to be a bird watcher,” said Tom. “I say, Mother, our baby’s going to be a sailor. Look at him. He simply loves the smell of tar.”

  “Don’t let him suck that dirty finger,” said his mother.

  “It’s all right to let him smell it, isn’t it?” said Tom, who was holding his hand close to the baby’s face, while the baby, opening his mouth and laughing, was trying to put a tarry finger in.

  “Don’t let him get it in his mouth. Go on. You haven’t told me anything yet. Where did you sleep?”

  “In Wroxham Hall dyke.”

  “And you went to Norwich this morning?”

  “I got rope and paint and hinges and blocks, and there’s about half a crown left, and they gave me the screws for nothing.”

  “River pretty crowded coming down? Hardly yet, I suppose, though the visitors do seem to begin coming earlier every year.”

  “Not an awful lot,” said Tom. “There was one beast of a motor-cruiser made me slosh the bacon fat all over the place when I was cooking my dinner.”

  TOM CAME SAILING HOME

  “There was one yesterday,” said his mother, “going up late in the evening, upset half Miss Millett’s china in her little houseboat. She was talking of seeing the Bure Commissioners about it.”

  “Probably the same beasts coming down again,” said Tom. “Most of them are pretty decent nowadays, but these beasts swooshed by with a stern wave as if they wanted to wash the banks down. I’ve got to get some hot water and clean those bottom-boards at once before the twins come.”

  “Coot Club meeting?” asked his mother. “Like a jug of tea in the shed?”

  “Very much,” said Tom. “That’ll save boiling two lots of water. It’ll take a good deal to get that grease off. Hullo! There they are! All in a bunch, too. There’s Flash.” He had caught a glimpse of the white sails of the racing boats coming up the river.

  Tom’s mother held the new baby up at the nursery window to see the white sails go by. She and Tom stood listening at the window after the sails had disappeared. Higher up the river they heard two sharp reports, “Bang! Bang!” almost at the same moment.

  “Pretty close finish, anyhow,” said Tom. “I’ll dash down now, if you don’t mind. They’ll be along in a minute or two, and there’s that water to boil, and I want to get the hinges on one of the locker doors just to show what they’ll be like.”

  “Important meeting?” asked his mother.

  “Very,” said Tom. “It’s to plan what we’re going to do with the last two weeks of the holidays.”

  He took the first short flight of stairs at a jump, but remembering the victims in the doctor’s waiting-room, took the next more soberly, and then, after a word in the kitchen about that promised jug of tea, hurried round by the garden to make ready for the gathering of the Coots.

  *

  The twins had never yet seen the Titmouse with her awning up, for the awning had only yesterday been given its finishing touches by old Jonas the sailmaker, and Tom had sailed away above Wroxham Bridge for the night, partly because he had laughed so often at the struggles of visitors with the awnings of the hired yachts that he did not want even the twins to be present when he was experimenting for the first time with his own. Now, of course, he was bursting to show it them. He was sure that once they saw how well it worked they would manage something of the sort for their own rowing boat. Then anything would be possible, and they could spend the last weeks of the holidays in going for a real voyage. But it was no good having the awning up with the bottom-boards still so greasy that if the twins were to sit on them there would only be trouble with Mrs. McGinty later on. And if they were to see just how good those lockers were, he must manage to fix a door on at least one of them.

  He began by unloading the Titmouse, bringing rope and blocks and paint and screws and hinges into the shed. Then he brought in the little oil-stove that he had got from a boy at school in exchange for a pair of rabbits that were really not well fitted for voyaging in a small boat. He filled a kettle at a tap in the back kitchen, brought it round to the shed and put it on the oil-stove to boil. Then he took one of the locker doors, lying unfinished on the bench, and set to work chiselling out beds for a pair of hinges and making the holes for the screws, listening as he worked for the voices of the twins coming down the river.

  Presently he heard them. Well, he had known he could not get much done before they came. One door, and that not fixed.

  “Now then. Hop out, you two, and give her a push off. I’ll put her to bed.” That was Uncle Frank (Mr. Farland), who must for a moment have brought the Flash alongside the foot of the doctor’s lawn.

  “All right now?”

  “All right.”

  “Push her off then. And don’t be late for supper. Mrs. McGinty’ll be asking what I’ve done with you as it is.”

  “Eh, mon, dinna tell me ye’ve droon’t the puir wee bairrns.” That was Port’s voice, talking Ginty language.

  “Tell her we won’t be late. Macaroni cheese tonight. Specially for you, A.P.” That was Starboard talking to her Aged Parent.

  “Tell her the bairrns’ll be hame in a bittock.” That was Port again.

  “I’ll tell her to lock you both out,” laughed Mr. Farland.

  Tom heard the running footsteps of the twins, and, in another moment the two of them were at the door of the shed.

  “Hullo, Tom!”

  “Hullo! Who won?”

  “We were second,” said Starboard, “but it wasn’t Daddy’s fault. We had to go about and give them room just as we were getting level.”

  “What about No. 7? Hatched yet?”

  “Still sitting. At least I think so. She was when we went down. Coming up we were in the thick of things just there and we’d passed her before I could see.”

  No. 7 was for two reasons the nest that mattered most of all those that the Coot Club had under its care. It belonged to a pair of coots, one of which was distinguished from all other coots by having a white feather on its wing in such a place that it could be seen from right across the river. Coots are common enough on the Norfolk Broads, but coots with white feathers where there ought to be none are not common at all, and ever since it had first been seen, this particular coot had been counted the club’s sacred bird. Then, too, it had nested unusually early. It had begun sitting on its eggs long before any other coot on the reaches that the Coot Club (when not busy with something else)
patrolled. Any day now its chicks might hatch out, and every member of the Coot Club was looking forward to seeing the sacred coot as the successful mother of a family, and to putting down the date of the hatching against nest No. 7 on the map they had made of their reaches of the river.

  “The Death and Glories’ll have seen all right,” said Port. “They’ve been on patrol down there.”

  “They do know there’s a meeting, don’t they?” said Tom. “It’s no good having one for plans with only half the club.”

  “We told them, anyhow,” said Starboard. “They ought to be here by now. They were well past Ranworth when we passed them last.”

  “We won’t wait tea for them,” said Tom. “And it’s pretty late already. Mother says we can have it here. You just jig round to the kitchen.…”

  “What about the Coot Club mugs?”

  “I took one in Titmouse,” said Tom. “The others are all here.”

  “Pretty clean, too,” said Port, looking into them as she unhooked them from a row of nails. “Considering the hurry there was in washing up last time.”

  “What do we want from the kitchen? Just grub?”

  “Jug of tea,” said Tom, who was having a hard task to get a screw in straight.

  “Aren’t you boiling the kettle here?”

  “That’s for something else.”

  At last he got rid of them. Port and Starboard went off to the kitchen, and were back again in a few minutes with a huge jug of hot tea (sugar and milk already mixed in it), a loaf and a pot of marmalade. They were not gone long, but the moment they were out of the shed Tom was hurrying down to the Titmouse with the first of the doors, and, by the time they came back with the tea, he was able to call them to the side of the dyke, to show them a closed locker, and, when he opened it, a spoon, a knife, a fork, and a plate stowed away inside.

  “Fine,” said Starboard.

  “You just wait till they’re all done,” said Tom. “There’ll be a partition here, to keep the stove from dirtying the awning. Then there’ll be two lockers on each side here, and one on each side of the mast under the bow thwart. Can’t have them under the rowing thwart, because of sleeping.”

  “Let’s put the awning up now.… What’s all that mess on the bottom-boards?”

  “That’s what I’m hotting up water for,” said Tom. “We’ll get it off with soap and soda.” He unfastened the bottom-boards and hove them ashore. “One of those beasts of motor-cruisers joggled things up and sent the bacon fat all over the place. Margoletta, it was, one of Rodley’s. A new lot of people in her, of course. The last lot were quite decent.”

  “We saw them this afternoon, too,” said Port. “Real Hullabaloos. They crashed right through the middle of the race, calmly hooting to clear us all out of the way.”

  “Narrow bit of river, too. Lucky nobody got run down.”

  “Real beasts,” said Tom. “Look here, it’s no good putting the awning up till we’ve got the grease off those boards. We’ll have tea first while the kettle boils.”

  In a few minutes the three elders of the Coot Club were busy in the shed, with the jug of tea and the loaf. Tom sat on an old empty paint-drum. The other two swung their legs, sitting on the edge of the high carpenter’s bench, talking about the afternoon’s racing.

  “What about these plans?” said Starboard at last.

  “Wait till you’ve been inside the Titmouse with her awning up,” said Tom.

  “Was it jolly cold last night?” asked Port.

  “Just right,” said Tom. “As good as any cabin.”

  “Oh,” said Starboard. “I wish it was the summer holidays and the A.P. was taking us cruising again, like all these lucky beasts of visitors.”

  “Just you wait till we’ve cleaned those bottom-boards,” said Tom, gulping down his tea in a hurry to get those boards clean, set up the awning, and let Port and Starboard see what they thought of it. Sitting in there, afloat, in a tent as good as a cabin, he was sure that they, too, would be stirred to action. After all there were two weeks of the holidays left. And you can do a lot in two weeks.

  But Port and Starboard were not hurrying. The Coot Club had met to discuss plans often enough. No doubt Tom had something in his head. There had been the building of the drawbridge last summer. That had been pretty good fun while it lasted and the drawbridge was still useful. Then there had been bird protection, which was still going very strong. Piracy had been a good plan once, but it had had its day except among the younger Coots, who refused to be weaned from it. Whatever the plan was, Tom would spit it out sooner or later, and the twins, tired and hungry after their race, drank their tea and ate bread and marmalade until Tom could hardly bear it, and was glad when the kettle boiled over and made them think of something else.

  There was a rush for it, and Starboard, using an old towel for a kettle-holder, picked it up and carried it outside, spluttering under its lid. All three of them set to work on those bottom-boards, and with hot water, soap, and hard scrubbing they soon had them free from grease, clean and dry enough to sit upon, if one didn’t sit too long.

  Tom fitted the boards in the Titmouse, and then, with the others watching, went carefully about the rigging of the awning. First there was the crutch, a thin bar of iron with a fork at the top of it, fitting into two rings in the transom. Then boom and sail, neatly rolled up, rested in the fork at one end and were hoisted a foot or two up the mast at the other. The folded awning was laid across the boom close by the mast and partly unrolled. The front part was neatly laced round the bows. Then, fold by fold, the awning was unrolled from the mast towards the stern, each fold being laced down at the edges to very small rings just outside the boat. The last two folds were left unlaced, to make it easy for getting in and out, and the twins were asked to step aboard.

  “Jolly good,” said Starboard.

  They wriggled down under the middle thwart, one each side of the centre-board case that cut the boat in half down the middle. Tom rocked the Titmouse, just a little, to make them realise what it would be like to be asleep in her and afloat.

  “Now do you see the idea?” he said. “It works with the Titmouse. It would work just as well with your rowing boat. The Death and Glories could manage it, too. Let’s make more awnings at once and really go somewhere.… What about that for a plan?”

  “Let’s,” said Starboard, and then stopped. Of course they couldn’t. Why that very afternoon.… “We can’t though. Anyway not the last week of the hols. They’ve fixed up a private championship. The usual five boats.… They’re going to have five races, counting points for Firsts, Seconds, and Thirds. That last week the A.P.’ll be racing Flash practically every day.”

  “Oh bother racing!” said Tom.

  “And he’s racing the day after tomorrow. Ordinary practice race, and again another day, I forget which,” said Port. “It’s a jolly good plan, but it’s no good just now. We must think of a plan that we can manage without having to go off anywhere.…”

  Tom’s face fell. That plan had been glowing brighter and brighter ever since first his awning had been ordered from old Jonas. But it was no use struggling. The twins, because they had no mother, felt that they had to look after their A.P. It had always been like that, ever since they had been babies. Tom had long ago given up trying to persuade them. There it was. Nothing would stir them. If their A.P. had fixed up a lot of races for his little Flash, never for a single moment would they think of letting him get some other crew.

  “We’ll do it next hols,” said Starboard. “There’ll be masses of time then. We’ll only have a fortnight properly cruising. The A.P. can’t get away for more. That’s the worst of his being a solicitor. Think of some other plan for now. Quick, before the Death and Glories come along.”

  But Tom had no other plans.

  “Perhaps the Death and Glories’ll have something in their heads,” he said.

  “Not they,” said Port. “We must think of something and think of it quick.”

  “Where
are the little brutes?” said Starboard. “They ought to have been here ages ago.”

  They went ashore from the Titmouse, and back to the shed.

  “There isn’t going to be much tea left for the Death and Glories if they don’t buck up,” said Port, looking deep into the jug as she filled the mugs again.

  “It’s not much good having a meeting,” said Tom, “with no plans to propose.”

  *

  “Here they are,” said Port.

  There was a splash of oars, a rustling of reeds, and the old black ship’s boat came pushing her way into the dyke. Under their gaudy handkerchiefs the faces of her crew looked much more worried than ever pirates’ faces ought to be.