Ginger’s father and William’s father played golf together. Ginger’s mother and William’s mother looked at the shops and the sea together. William and Ginger went off together on secret expeditions. Though no cajoleries or coaxings would have persuaded William to admit that he was “enjoying his holiday,” still the presence of Ginger made it difficult for him to maintain his usual aspect of gloomy scorn. They hunted for smugglers in the caves, they slipped over sea-weedy rocks and fell into the pools left by the retreating tide. They carried on warfare from trenches which they made in the sand, dug mines and counter-mines and generally got damp sand so deeply ingrained in their clothes and hair that, as Mrs. Brown said almost tearfully, they “simply defied brushing.”
To-day they were engaged in the innocent pursuit of wandering along the front and sampling the various attractions which it offered. They stood through three performances of the Punch and Judy show, laughing uproariously each time. As they had taken possession of the best view and as it never seemed to occur to them to contribute towards the expenses, the showman finally ordered them off. They wandered off obligingly and bought two penny sticks of liquorice at the next stall. Then they bought two penny giant glasses of a biliousy-coloured green lemonade and quaffed them in front of the stall with intense enjoyment. Then they wandered away from the crowded part of the front to the empty space beyond the rocks. Ginger found a dead crab and William made a fire and tried to cook it, but the result was not encouraging. They ate what was left of their liquorice sticks to take away the taste, then went on to the caves. They reviewed the possibility of hunting for smugglers without enthusiasm. William was feeling disillusioned with smugglers. He seemed to have spent the greater part of his life hunting for smugglers. They seemed to be an unpleasantly secretive set of people. They might have let him catch just one....
They flung stones into the retreating tide and leapt into the little pools to see how high they could make the splashes go.
Then they saw the boat....
It was lying by itself high and dry on the shore. It was a nice little boat with two oars inside.
“Wonder how long it would take to get to France in it?” said William.
“Jus’ no time, I ’spect,” said Ginger. “Why, you can see France from my bedroom window. It must jus’be no distance—simply no distance.”
They looked at the boat in silence for a few minutes.
“It looks as if it would go quite easy,” said William.
“We’d have it back before whosever it is wanted it,” said Ginger.