The Twins of Emu Plains

by Mary Grant Bruce

“And didn’t he tell you he hated his lessons?”

“Well, he did. But then so had you and Wilfred and Arthur before him,” Mrs. Forester had said, twinkling. Helen had laughed.

“I suppose poor old Rex has paid the penalty of our grumbles—although I know the other boys and I never had books like that. Well, you’ll let me send up all the things he ought to have, won’t you, Mother?”—and Mrs. Forester had thankfully consented.

So Rex found his new lessons taken from books that were easy to read and pleasant to look at and to handle—books that made history a succession of fascinating stories, and Geography something more than a weary catalogue of place-names and products; and there was something new called Literature, so like story-telling that it seemed impossible that it should be really a lesson. He found new peep-holes into learning that were extraordinarily interesting. Punctuation, under Miss Green, had meant a collection of horrible things called “stops,” traps to catch the unwary, for which there was neither rhyme nor reason. With the twins, they became kind little bridges over which you stepped into understanding just how a sentence should go: some places required big bridges, like a full-stop, or lesser bridges, like a semi-colon, and others only tiny foot-bridges, which were commas: but always when you crossed them, the sense of what you read was waiting meekly for you, instead of being a will-o’-the-wisp thing that dodged away from you and hid itself in the mazes of a paragraph. Once you had mastered them it was impossible to read poetry badly, and the lines sang to you as they were meant to sing. Maps, with Miss Green, had been the dreariest species of jigsaw puzzles; now they became pictures that helped you to make stories wonderfully alive. When you had a twin reading you the story of how Hawke chased the French fleet into Quiberon Bay, the full thrill of the story came home if you followed his course on the map, tracing his rush through the quicksands and shallows and roaring breakers, his only pilot-light the flash of the enemy guns. “It would seem just any old bay, if you didn’t see it,” Rex said. “But when the map makes you understand what an awful passage it was—and he did it at night, and in a howling gale!—well, it just makes you squiggle down the back!”

And that is an amount of success which does not fall to all teachers—perhaps not to many.

Lessons ended at twelve, and there was an interval to recruit exhausted nature before the dinner-gong sounded at half-past twelve. At half-past two came bathing-parade, an institution for which the boys were never late. They mustered in the verandah, with light coats flung on over infinitesimal swimming-suits; and being joined by the twins, went, helter-skelter, down the hill to the river. The stream was lower than the twins ever remembered to have seen it, and in most places very little current ran; but the bathing-pool was still good. It was formed by a wide bend in the river; on the far side the bank rose high and steep, but the bank near the house shelved gently down to the water’s edge, in a little beach of fine sand. Mr. Weston had the pool always kept clear of snags, and it was fenced in, so that the cattle could not drink there. Trees overhung part of it: there were always shade and coolness there, even in the hottest days. A hut, built in bush-fashion of interlaced tea-tree poles, and overgrown with clematis and sarsaparilla, formed a dressing-room, if needed.

The Weston children had learned to swim almost as babies. They could scarcely remember a time when they had not rolled in and out of the water as they chose. But Rex could not swim, and, to handicap him further, he had an instinctive dread of the water. When a tiny boy he had fallen into a creek, and had been nearly drowned; and now, even to enter running water meant a rather painful effort for him. The twins had been warned of this, and they took him very gently.

“You’re not going to learn to swim at all just yet,” they told him, on his first day, as the small boy stood on the sand, looking as if he would have shivered but for the heat of the day.

“But I want to learn to swim,” Rex protested. “I’ve got to. I can’t go to school with other fellows if I can’t swim.”

“No, of course you can’t,” Jean said. “Don’t you worry, old chap; we’ll make a regular Annette Kellermann of you before we’ve done with you. But we won’t be in a hurry. You’ve got to learn this old pool first. Rule I is that you don’t go beyond that rope.”