This book is Swallows and Amazons, Book #5, but it contains none of the original Swallows or the Amazons. So, if you’re looking for Swallows John, Susan, Titty, and Roger or for Amazons Nancy and Peggy Blackett, you’ll have to skip this book. But don’t.

In Coot Club, The D’s, Dick and Dot learn to sail. In Winter Holiday the D’s were introduced, and they were able to have some grand adventures on the ice, but no sailing. In this book, Dick and Dot go to visit a family friend, Mrs. Barrable, on her boat in the north of England, downriver from Wroxham on the River Bure.

“Arthur Ransome visited Wroxham in the 1930s. In his book Coot Club (1934) he describes the busy scene on the river at Wroxham Bridge with numerous boats – a wherry, punts, motor cruisers and sailing yachts – jostling for a mooring.” ~Wikipedia, Wroxham.

When they arrive at Mrs. Barrable’s boat, the Teasel, the D’s, who were expecting to spend their visit sailing up and down the river, find out that Mrs. Barrable has invited them strictly to keep her company, not enough crew for sailing a boat the size of the Teasel. The disappointment is crushing, especially since Dorothy and Dick were hoping to return to the Lake District and the Swallows and Amazons as seasoned sailors. Nevertheless, Dick and Dot determine to make the best of their visit, and DIck is particularly interested in bird-watching. At the beginning of the story, on the train, they meet a local boy, Tom Dudgeon, and they soon find that he is the key to all sorts of adventures. Tom has a small boat of his own, the Titmouse, and even more importantly, Tom is a member of the Bird Protection Society aka the Coot Club, and he and his friends Port and Starboard, along with three boys nicknamed “The Death and Glories”, are particularly concerned with the birds called coots who are nesting along the river.

When Tom and the twins Port and Starboard and the Death and Glories all get together with Dick and Dot and Mrs. Barrable, sailing becomes not only possible but absolutely necessary since Tom has gotten into trouble while protecting the coots nest from a bunch of Hullabaloos, rude and careless holiday boaters, reminiscent of characters out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. The Hullabaloos are searching for the boy who cast their boat adrift in the night. Tom is in hiding from the Hullabloos and their noisy boat with its incessant phonograph playing pop hits of the 1930’s. Dick and Dot simply want to learn to sail. And Mrs. Barrable turns out to have an adventurous spirit, too, despite her age.

If you’ve read other Swallows and Amazons adventures and if what appeals is the sailing and the “simply messing about in boats”, then Coot Club has that aspect in spades. It’s also got Port and Starboard to stand in for the Blackett girls, Dick with his knack for coming up with inventive ideas, Dot and her stories, and a new hero, Tom, who’s the classic plucky English schoolboy adventurer.

I’ve already read number six in this series of books, Pigeon Post, which features Dick and Dot together again with the Swallows and Amazons, but again no sailing. So, my next book is #7, We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea.