by John Conroy Hutcheson
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Bob Strong and his sister Nellie are the children of a busy
barrister, too busy to take them on holiday, and they are sent
by train down to Portsmouth to spend the summer holidays with
their aunt. The dog Rover travels in the guard's van, and in
the same compartment of the train there is an elderly gentleman
who turns out to be a retired sea-captain.
The train is moving out of Guildford when a grubby boy's face
appears at the window. They let the boy in, and the Captain
decides to pay the fare for the boy, who is a runaway from a
dreadfully cruel stepfather. They all spend the holiday
together, doing various things with boats, fish, seaweed, and
visiting various interesting places, some of which they find to
be a con! They travel to the Isle of Wight, just a few miles
across the Solent, and even visit Seaview where I, the reviewer,
was brought up. Many of the interesting things they did were
what we as boys fifty years later also did.
They get involved in a couple of disasters, including the wreck
of a brand-new excursion steamer. As in my day, the engines of
these ships were most interesting, being triple expansion
horizontal steam engines driving paddle-wheels, and, like Bob, I
used to spend the journeys to and from the Isle of Wight
hovering at the engine-room door, admiring these amazingly
beautiful artefacts.
But the other disaster I will not tell you about save only to
say that Alderney and the Casquets Rock, over fifty miles from
the Isle of Wight, are mentioned, and these too are places with
which I am very familiar.
You may wonder what happened to the runaway boy, Dick, and here
again a very suitable arrangement was made for him, for he was
accepted for training as a boy seaman. N.H.
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