LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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