Scarab Ahoy! A Tale of Adventure by Dorothea Callum

Thanks to Antiques Trade Gazette

Title: Scarab Ahoy! A Tale of Adventure 

Author: Dorothea Callum

Publisher: Not known 

Source book: The Picts and The Martyrs by Arthur Ransome 

Dick and Dorothea Callum are invited to stay with Nancy and Peggy Blackett at Beckfoot to pick up their new boat, Scarab (their father is an archaeologist), and learn to sail on the lake. Dick and Dot have already served an apprenticeship on the Norfolk Broads with the members of the Coot Club (in Coot Club) but for the first time they will have their own boat. Mrs Blackett has had a nasty attack of flu and has been taken on a cruise up the Norwegian coast by her brother, Jim Turner (Captain Flint), to help her recuperate. Mrs Blackett trusts her daughters to behave sensibly while she is away and not have any wild adventures. They have promised not to camp out until she comes home.

However, some unknown meddling person tells Nancy and Peggy’s Great Aunt Maria Turner that the girls have been left on their own (obviously Cook doesn’t count), and she arrives at very short notice to take charge of the household. Everyone is terrified of the Great Aunt. Nancy and Peggy are worried that she will make their mother ill again if they are not on their best behaviour and she absolutely must not hear about their guests. But Dick and Dorothea have already arrived.

Dorothea has arrived at Beckfoot with a notebook already inscribed with the title of her new book: Scarab Ahoy! But when she and her brother are suddenly moved out of the house and into the somewhat tumbledown Dogs Home in the woods (almost camping but not quite), she finds she needs her notebook to keep track of her stores.

Several times in The Picts and The Martyrs Dorothea almost begins a book: Alone in the Forest perhaps, or Ten Thousand Years Ago.... a romance of the past. But she restrains herself. And then she and Dick begin to have their own adventures; learning to sail Scarab by themselves, and oh horrors! rescuing Great Aunt Maria (who they must on no account meet) from Captain Flint’s houseboat, and ferrying her all the way from Houseboat Bay to Beckfoot.

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