Arthur Ransome - Swallows and Amazons (Complete Series)

Susan, feeling their clothes carefully, pulled them down from the clothes-line and said they were dry enough to put on.

“It’s a jolly good thing,” said Nancy, “that you chose the tropics to be wrecked in. The stones themselves are almost too hot to touch to-day, and things dry at once. But just think what it would have been like if you had had to swim ashore in the Arctic, in winter, with no sun and no wood to make a fire, and nothing but snow and seals and polar bears. There’d have been some proper shivering of timbers. You’d never have got dry at all.”

“That wouldn’t have mattered to the bears,” said Roger. “They’d have liked us better wet.”

Mate Susan gave them the milk-can and in this way got rid of everybody except Captain Nancy and the ship’s parrot. That was better. After all, she could ask Captain Nancy to take the telescope and go out on one of the headlands to see if Captain Flint’s rowing boat was in sight. And the parrot was in his cage, and the cage, at least, could be counted on to stay where she put it. She settled down now, while the kettle was boiling, to see that all the right things were in the right tents, that each sleeping-bag was properly unrolled in the tent to which it belonged, that the flaps of the tent doors were neatly tied back, and that everything else was exactly as it ought to be.

Mate Peggy took the boy and the able-seaman a little way up the beck and then struck across to the left by a fallen tree to a green cart-track through the wood, the same cart-track that Titty and Roger had found when they were exploring. They followed the cart-track till they came to the road, and then, crossing the road (for going to get milk was a sort of native business, not at all like exploring), they went through a gap in the stone wall on the other side. The cart-track did the same. It climbed away to the left and came out of the wood by an old white-washed farmhouse with a spring beside it and a stone trough, and a lot of ducks noisily enjoying the overflow from the trough. They could hear someone singing in a creaky, small voice an old hunting song that young folks sing in a great shout:

“One morning last winter to Holmbank there came

A brave, noble sportsman, Squire Sandys was his name.

Came a-hunting the fox. Bold reynard must die.

And he flung out his train and began for to cry,

‘Tally-ho! Tally-ho! Hark, forward away! Tally-ho!’ ”

“That’s old Mr. Swainson,” said Peggy Blackett. “He’s ninety years old.”

“What’s that other noise?” said Roger.

“Someone’s making butter,” said Peggy.

She went into the cool white porch and knocked at the open door.

The song stopped suddenly.

“Come in, then,” said two voices at once.

Peggy and Titty and Roger went in. There was a fire burning in the low-beamed farm kitchen, though it was such a hot day outside. On each side of the fire were two old people, an old man leaning forward on his stick, sitting in a high-backed chair doing nothing, except that he had been singing, and an old woman in a chair on rockers, working at a patchwork quilt which was spread over her knees and over a good deal of the floor. Close beside her on the floor was a big shallow apple-basket full of scraps and rags of all colours, which were some day going to be part of the quilt.

“Why, my dear,” said Mrs. Swainson, looking at them over her spectacles, “it’s one of Mrs. Blackett’s lasses. And who are these others? I thought there were only two of you. My word, and you are coming on. Why it seems no time since your mother’s mother came in at that door no bigger than you are now, and I was a grown woman then and married, too.”

“Sixty years. Sixty-five,” said old Mr. Swainson. “It’ll be nearer seventy since I brought her up here from the church down by Bigland, and she sat her down in that chair for the first time.”

“But who are the others, my dear?” said Mrs. Swainson. “They don’t look to me like Blacketts, nor yet like Turners.”

“They’re friends,” said Peggy, “and they’ve been shipwrecked.”

“Shipwrecked?” said old Mr. Swainson. “Now that reminds me of a song . . .”

“Now then, Neddy,” said Mrs. Swainson, “keep your song a minute or two, and let me be hearing. . . . What was it you said, my dear?”

“Shipwrecked,” said Peggy. “And we want some milk if you can let us have any. We’ve brought our can.”

“We had plenty of milk,” said Roger, “only it went down with the ship and got away in the water.”

Titty said nothing. She was looking all round the low-beamed farm kitchen. There was a grandfather clock in the corner with a moon showing in a circle at the top, and a wreath of flowers all round the clock face. Then there was a curled hunting horn on the black chimney shelf, and above that, on pegs jutting out from the wall, an old gun, and a very long coach horn, nearly as long as a man. There were white lace curtains to the low windows, and in the deep window-seats there were fuchsias in pots, and big spotted shells. Each shell had its own thick knitted mat, and the pots were in saucers, and each saucer had its knitted mat, just as if it were a spotted shell. Titty looked back to the chimney-shelf to see if the curly hunting horn was standing on a knitted mat. But it was too high for her to see. Close beside it on the chimney-shelf were some pewter mugs, and china candlesticks, and a copper kettle that Titty thought would be just the thing to please Susan.

As soon as old Mrs. Swainson understood that they wanted milk, she shouted in a much louder voice than anyone would have thought possible:

“Mary. Mareee. Mareee.”

The noise of the butter-churn stopped, and clogs clattered on a stone floor, and through the passage leading from the dairy came a tall young woman, with her sleeves rolled to her elbows, and her cheeks very pink from turning the handle of the churn.

“And how are you, Miss Peggy?” she said.

“Very well, thank you,” said Peggy. “These are our friends. This is Titty. This is Roger. They’ve both been shipwrecked.”

“In the same ship,” said Roger. “We swam ashore.”

“Well, my dear,” said Mrs. Swainson to Titty, “what do you think of my youngest grandchild?”

Mary Swainson laughed.

“That’s the question she always asks,” she said.

“I think she’s very nice,” said Titty.

“That shows you’ve got good taste,” said old Mr. Swainson. “And that reminds me. There’s a rare good song about that. . . .”

“Never mind the song,” said Mrs. Swainson. “Have you got any of this morning’s milk, Mary? The cows won’t be in for a while yet.”

“You come along with me,” said Mary, “while I get you some. Nothing’ll stop grandad from singing if there’s strangers about.”

“But I liked his song,” said Roger.

The old man slapped his knee and laughed till there were tears on his red cheeks.

“You and me would get on champion together,” he said, and laughed and laughed again.

But Mary Swainson swept them all out of the kitchen, across the passage and into the dairy.

“One of you keep turning that handle,” she said, “while I rinse the can out for you. You mustn’t stop the churn when the butter’s in the way of coming. If we were to stay and let grandad start singing it would be black night and the milk would be sour before ever you got away.”

So they took turns at the butter churn while Mary Swainson washed out the can and filled it from a huge brown earthenware bowl.

“You come and see us again, my dears,” said old Mrs. Swainson, as Mary hurried them through the kitchen on the way out.

“We’d like to, very much,” said Titty.

“And you and me’ll sing songs,” said the old man, winking at Roger, and screwing up one eye so that it disappeared altogether under his white bushy eyebrow.