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‘What do you think?’ she asked Harry, rather pleased with the homely bedroom she’d created in the tent.
‘’S alright,’ he replied. ‘Bit smelly. Like hot water bottles smell.’ He dropped his sponge bag onto his bed and she tidied it away.
‘That’s just the air beds. They’re meant to smell like that.’
‘Oh.’ He sat down cross-legged on his own bed and wrapped himself in the blanket. ‘Story time now? So what’s this book?’
‘It’s a story my mam used to read to me when I was little. When we used to stay here.’
‘Yack. A girl’s story!’
‘It’s not. It can be for boys or girls. It’s called Swallows and Amazons.’
‘Are there monsters?’
‘No. They go camping, like we’re doing. The children are on an island in the middle of a lake, and they have adventures. They sail in boats, and their boats are called the Swallow and the Amazon, you see. That’s where the book gets its name.’
She pulled out the battered old green hardback which had been her mother’s as a child, and then hers. It had long ago lost the green-and-white paper slip covers she remembered, but there were the simple, almost childlike illustrations, to which she’d added her own scribbles at some point, and even the smell was the same. If she sniffed very carefully, she could detect a whiff of the woodsmoke from the fire in the old cottage beside which they’d sat to read this book long ago.
‘So, in the beginning, they’re not on the island. The Walker family are staying in a farmhouse like the one over there, and the children want to go camping on their own, but their mum isn’t sure whether she should let them …’
She started to read aloud. She would have liked to tell James Harry was enjoying his quality time with her and listening in enraptured silence, but he was slurping his hot chocolate nosily and asking questions that didn’t always have anything to do with the story.
Amy was about to mention one of the main characters for the first time, when she suddenly realised there was going to be a large problem. She couldn’t possibly read a story to Harry in which one of the characters was called “Titty”; they’d be able to hear him laughing in Penrith. She would have to change the name. The most recent film version of the story had called her Tatty, and that would have to be what she would do too. So very carefully, every time Titty made an appearance, she altered the name. Tatty wrote a letter, Tatty talked to her family and Tatty looked for the island where they could go camping.
Harry began to ask fewer questions and listen more intently, and as she read on, Amy began to feel her eyelids drooping even if Harry’s weren’t. He was still wide awake. It had been a long day… suddenly Harry jerked her awake again.
‘Don’t stop reading, Mam!’
‘Where was I … oh yes, Titty has said she’s going to make the flag —’
There was a giggle from beside her. ‘You said Titty!’
‘So I did, isn’t that silly of me? I meant Tatty.’
Only half a page further on, she did it again.
‘You said it again. I want to see the book, Mam!’
‘I don’t think —’
‘You’re not reading it right. Her name’s not Tatty, stupid, it’s Titty! Look, it’s an “I”!’
‘But that means something different these days, doesn’t it? So I thought —’
‘Titty, Titty, Titty!’ He laughed. ‘Titty, Titty, Titty!’
‘Please don’t shout, Harry.’
‘Titty, Titty, Titty!’
‘Please stop shouting, Harry.’
‘You said Titty!’
‘I know I did. I won’t say it again. I’ll stick to Tatty.’
‘No way! Read it properly. I want some more now, tell me some more. What happens to Titty?’
