A NURSERY NAVY

Evening Star, Issue 18714, 16 August 1924, Page 20

A NURSERY NAVY

THE " CORKSCREW FLOTILLA.” Not only on the Isis and the Cam is “ bumping ” practised (writes Locksloy Hall in the ‘ Daily Chronicle ’). There is a little enclosed lake at Southend where there are more collisions to the square yard and more “ fouls ” a minute than in a League football match. Some of the boats are fitted with paddle wheels, others are propelled by hand paddles; but the boys and girls who do' the propelling have no more desire to look where they’re going or go whore they’re looking than a flight of gnats. I rather wonder it has not been chnstoned the Jazz Marino or the Corkscrew Navy. Its evolutions baffle the eye; all one’s consciousness registers is the continuity of harmless bumps. I fancy it is the accidents which these little mariners enjoy. They can live Honty and Marryat over again in a hectic half-hour of barging and hutting. Their youthful unenneero i? magnificent. Both sexes take the ‘‘nursery” cannons with perfect self-possession. Older girls would shriek and laugh; these youngsters are out to enjoy their half-hour's paddling with no foolish waste of time in hysterical mirth.

Each boat is conspicuously numbered, and presently the uniformed master calls out in a megaphone voice “ Forty-three ” or ‘‘ Twenty-seven,” and the paddler of that canoe knows that he is recalled; his part in the manoeuvres is over. One last exciting bump as he makes slowly back to the quay, and his piratical dreams are broken—for the wa.nt of another coin. His nervous aunt sighs with relief; she, too, holds in her inner consciousness a cen-turies-old sense of < adventure, tempered with her responsibility. Him has to take groat care of the little mariner who may one day be a clerk in a bank.