Coot Club. Arthur Ransome

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      Mrs. Barrable was making little drawings in the margin of her letter and on her blotting-pad. This was a habit of hers and, when she was writing to the mother of Dick and Dorothea, it did not matter. Writing to strangers, she often had to copy her letters out all over again, because of the illustrations that had somehow crept in. Once she had had to pretend she had lost her butcher’s bill and ask him to send her another because, without thinking what she was doing, she had decorated it with a row of three cats with black mourning bows, weeping large tears at the sight of a string of sausages. But writing to her old pupil, Mrs. Callum, Mrs. Barrable could send her letters just as they were, no matter what drawings she had scribbled in the margins. Today the margins were full of small sailing boats, because Mrs. Barrable was still seeing those little white-sailed racers, and because she was still thinking of the disappointment of Dick and Dorothea. They had been very good about it. Dick was busy making a list of birds seen, and Dorothea, on hearing how Mrs. Barrable and her brother had had to give up their plan of sailing round to the southern rivers where they had spent their childhood, had almost seemed to forget her own disappointment as she saw scene after scene in the woeful story of the returning exile wrecked almost within sight of the ancient home he had hoped to see once more before he died….

      “Very nice children they are, my dear,” Mrs. Barrable had written, “and Dorothea is very like the little girl you used to be, but, you know, I should have been afraid to ask them here if I had known they both had such a passion for sailing…. They have told me now about those children they met in the north, those mumpy children” (here was a picture of a child with mumps) “who seem to have got it into their heads that sailing is … what it really is, my dear, as no one knows better than I. And, of course, they want to learn and I fear they will find it very dull to be cooped up in a yacht that is moored to the bank and really no better than a houseboat with only an old woman like me to keep them company.” (Here she had let her pen run away with itself and there was a picture of a pair of lambs and an old woman in a poke bonnet all frisking together.) “Now, if only my brother were here instead of painting his Begums and Ranees, we should be sailing all over the place, though then, of course, there would be no room for Dick and Dot. I really had not thought how tempting it would be for them to see the other boats going by. There was one they saw today with two little girls…. Poor Dot! I ought to have remembered that windmills and reeds and slow rivers plaiting reflections and just asking to be painted may be enough for me but not for the ambitious young. But there’s no one to come with us and sail the Teasel and tell them the names of the strings…. I know them myself, my dear, but she’s a hired boat, and I don’t know what brother Richard would say if I were to go sailing away without some expert hand to pull me out of scrapes. No, my dear, it’s a pity, but Dick and Dorothea will have to be content …”

      Mrs. Barrable drummed on her teeth with the end of her penholder and glanced through the cabin door into the canvas-roofed well, to see Dick earnestly wiping plates, and Dorothea, with a hand luckily small enough to get inside, scooping the tea-leaves out of a little tea-pot. What fun it would have been to take them round the old haunts, away down to Yarmouth and through Breydon Water and up the Waveney to Beccles, where she had been a child herself…. And then she looked out of the opposite port-holes, and forward through the children’s cabin. There was a port-hole right forward, beside the mast, through which she could see a charming circular picture of the bend of the river upstream. Interesting, she thought, to paint just such a picture…. Her mind wandered from Mrs. Callum and her two guests busy in the well, and she thought of canvas and paints, and of what her brother would say to such a subject…. And just then, into that picture seen through the port-hole, there came a boy in an old tarred punt, shooting round the bend of the river and paddling as if in a race. Instantly Mrs. Barrable forgot everything else.

      People in a hurry always interested her. She was always ready to take sides with anybody running to catch a train, and had been known to clap her hands when she saw somebody make a really good dash for an omnibus. “Good boy,” she murmured to herself, and waited to see him again when he should come paddling past the port-holes on the opposite side of the cabin.