“I wish we lived in a boat all the year round,” said Susan.
“I shall some day,” said John, “and so will Roger. Father does.”
“Yes, but that’s different. A destroyer isn’t a houseboat.”
“You live in it just the same.”
“Yes, but you don’t stay in one place. A houseboat sticks in one place like a boathouse. I remember the houseboat at Falmouth too,” said Susan. “There was a whole family living in it, and we used to see them rowing ashore for milk in the mornings. The butcher and the baker used to call there, just as if it was a house. They used to come to the shore and shout ‘Houseboat ahoy!’ and then the man or the woman used to row ashore to buy meat and bread from them. Look out what you’re doing, John!”
Captain John, with his mind on the houseboat, had not been thinking about his steering, and the little white flag with the blue swallow on it was fluttering on the side of the mast away from the sail. The boom was just going to swing over when Susan called, but John, putting the helm down instantly, just saved a jibe. After that he looked at the houseboat only out of the corner of his eye. The wind was so light that a jibe would not have mattered much, except perhaps to bumped heads, but it would hardly have done for the captain of the ship to have set an example of such bad steering to his crew.
Able-seaman Titty had wedged herself in the bottom of the boat between the tent bundles with a basket of small crockery in her arms for safety’s sake. She could just see over the gunwale.
“I wonder,” she said, “if the man on the houseboat has his family with him.”
“He’s all alone,” said Roger.
“The others may be cooking in the cabin,” said Susan.