Coot Club. Arthur Ransome

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      *This is another name for the River Bure.

      *A staithe in Norfolk is a place where boats moor to take in or discharge cargo: much what a quay is elsewhere.

CHAPTER III

      WHAT’S THE GOOD OF PLANNING?

      LATE IN THE AFTERNOON Tom Dudgeon came sailing home. He was later than he had meant to be. He had spent some time at Wroxham, talking to Jim Wooddall, the skipper of Sir Garnet, the business wherry that was loading by Wroxham Bridge. Jim Wooddall had kept an eye on the Titmouse while her skipper was shopping in Norwich. Then, there had been that trouble when he was cooking his dinner. After that he had been watching a kingfisher until he had found where it was nesting, in a hole in one of the few bits of really hard bank. There had been a good many other nests to inspect, and by the time he came to the Swan at Horning, people were waiting there expecting to see the finish of the race. He had seen the little racers earlier in the afternoon and knew that Port and Starboard were sailing. They would be finishing any time now, and he had a lot to do before they came.

      He sailed past the staithe and the boathouse till he came to a little old house with a roof thatched with reeds, and a golden bream swimming merrily into the wind high above one of the gables. A narrow strip of lawn ran down to the river between the willow bushes. Just below the lawn was the entrance to a dyke hardly to be noticed by anyone who did not know it was there. Tom turned in there between reeds and willows that brushed the peak of the Titmouse’s sail. This was the Titmouse’s home. Once inside it, she could not be seen from the river.

      On the south side of the dyke was a row of willows, and beyond them the house in which the twins, Port and Starboard, lived with their father and an old housekeeper, Mrs. McGinty, the widow of an Irishman, though born in Glasgow herself. On the north side, leaning against the doctor’s house, was a low wooden shed. Here the doctor kept his fishing tackle, bait-cans and mooring poles, and the old fishing boat that lived under a low roof at the end of the dyke by the road. Here Tom did his carpentering work. Here were the doors for the lockers that were being fixed under the bow thwart and stern-sheets of the Titmouse, waiting for the screws and hinges Tom had brought from Norwich. Here the Coot Club held its meetings, and Tom and the twins met on most days whether engaged in Coot Club business or not. Tied up to the bank just beyond the shed was the first boat Tom had owned, a long flat-bottomed punt that had been made by Tom himself. Its name was Dreadnought, and unkind people said that it was well named because, whatever happened to it, it could not be worse than it was. It carried no sail, of course, but it was an old friend, and Tom still found it useful for slipping along by the reeds on a windless evening in the summer, watching grebes have swimming lessons. Tom drove it along with a single paddle, like a Canadian canoe, and he took some pride in being able to keep the Dreadnought moving at a good pace without making the slightest sound. The tall framework in the bushes beyond the Dreadnought was a drawbridge, the work of the last summer holidays. This made it possible for Port and Starboard to slip across to join Tom in the shed without taking their rowing boat from the Farland boathouse in the main river, and without having to go into the road and in at the front gate as if they were patients coming to see Doctor Dudgeon.

      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?”