Moominpappa at Sea (7 page)

‘Huh! Typical!’ said Little My. ‘Do you think the bald coot will know whether her nest has been moved immediately or only after a little while? You only say that so you can chuck her out with a clear conscience.’

‘Shall we really eat outdoors for the rest of our lives?’ Moominpappa asked in amazement. They all looked at Moominmamma.

‘Take it down,’ she said. ‘We can hang it out of the window. Sometimes trolls are more important than bald coots.’

Moominmamma pushed the dirty dishes under the bed to make the room tidier, and then she went out to look for soil.

She stopped by the lighthouse steps to throw a little sea-water on the rose-bush. It was still waiting in its box with the earth from home. The garden must be made on the leeward side and it must be as near the lighthouse as possible, where it would get the sun most of the day. But above all, it should have plenty of deep, rich soil.

Moominmamma looked and looked. She searched along the rock where the lighthouse stood, through the heather down towards the moss, she went into the aspen thicket, she wandered over the warm peaty ground, but there was still no soil anywhere.

She had never seen so many stones before. Behind the clump of aspen trees there was nothing but stones, a desert of round grey stones. In the middle of them someone had lifted some up, making a hole.
Moominmamma went and looked into the hole, but there was nothing but more stones in it, just as grey and just as round. She wondered what the lighthouse-keeper had been looking for. Nothing in particular, perhaps. Maybe he had done it just to amuse himself. He had picked up one stone after another, but they had rolled back and he had got tired of the whole thing and walked away.

Moominmamma went on towards the sandy beach. Down there she found soil at last. A dark belt of rich soil lay along the line of the beach under the alders. Tough green plants were growing between the stones, opening in bursts of gold and violet, a sudden jungle of richness.

Moominmamma dug her paws in the ground. She could feel that it was full of millions of growing roots that mustn’t be disturbed. But it didn’t matter, there was soil after all. Now for the first time she felt that the island was real.

She called to Moominpappa, who was collecting pieces of wood in the seaweed, ran towards him with her apron waving in the wind, and shouted: ‘I’ve found soil! I’ve found soil!’

Moominpappa looked up. ‘Hallo there!’ he said. ‘What do you think of my island?’

‘It’s not like anything else in the world!’ Moominmamma assured him enthusiastically. ‘The soil’s down on the beach instead of somewhere in the middle of the island!’

‘I’ll explain it for you,’ said Moominpappa. ‘You must always ask me if there’s anything you don’t understand – I know about everything connected with the sea. It’s like this: what you found was seaweed thrown up by the waves. After a time it becomes soil, real soil. Didn’t you know that?’ Moominpappa laughed, and with his paws out-stretched he seemed to be giving her all the seaweed in the sea.

Moominmamma started to gather seaweed. She carried it all day, laying it in a crevice in the rock. She would have a patch of garden there by and by. The seaweed had the same warm, dark colour as the soil back home, and its very own touch of purple and orange as well.

Moominmamma felt calm and happy. She dreamed of carrots, radishes and potatoes, and of how they grew fat and round in the warm soil. She could see green leaves appearing in strong, healthy clusters. She saw them waving in the wind against the blue sea, heavy with tomatoes, peas and beans for the family to eat. She
knew that none of this would come true until the following summer, but it didn’t matter. She had something to dream about. And deep down inside she dreamed most of all of having an apple tree.

The day was coming to a close. The sound of the hammer up in the lighthouse had stopped long ago, and the swallows were much quieter now. Moominmamma whistled to herself as she walked home through the heather, her arms full of driftwood. Moominpappa had built a hand-rail for her to hold on to, and there were two little beds made of wood in front of the doorway. There was a barrel he had found in the sea, too. It was quite whole, and looked as though it had been green once.

Somehow, the winding staircase was less frightening now. You just had to be careful not to look down, and it was best to think about something else. Moomintroll was sitting at the table, arranging small round pebbles in little heaps.

‘Hallo,’ said Moominmamma. ‘Where’s Pappa?’

‘He’s up above, lighting the lamp,’ Moomintroll answered. ‘I wasn’t allowed to go up with him. He’s been there an awful long time.’

The empty bird’s nest stood on top of the desk. Mamma went on whistling as she piled up the wood by the stove. The wind had died down and the sun was shining through the western window, throwing a warm light over the floor and the white wall.

When the fire was beginning to glow, Little My crept in through the door and jumped up on the window-sill like a cat. She pressed her nose against the window-pane and made ugly faces at the swallows.

Suddenly the trap-door opened with a loud noise and Moominpappa climbed down the iron ladder.

‘Is it burning well?’ asked Moominmamma. ‘You’ve made some lovely beds for us. And I thought that barrel would be just the thing for salt fish. It seems a pity to use it only for rain-water…’

Moominpappa went to the window facing south and peered out. Moominmamma looked up quickly and noticed that his tail was quite stiff and the end of it was wagging with irritation. She put some more wood on the fire and opened a tin of herrings. Moominpappa drank his tea without saying a word. When Moominmamma had cleared away, she put the hurricane lamp on the table and said: ‘I remember hearing once that some lighthouses use gas. When the gas is finished it’s quite impossible to light them.’

Moominpappa got up from the table crying: ‘But you don’t understand, I’m the lighthouse-keeper now! The
lamp must be alight! It’s the whole point. Do you think one can live in a lighthouse without keeping the lamp alight? What would happen to all the boats out there in the dark? They could go aground and sink in front of our very eyes at any moment…’

‘He’s right,’ said Little My. ‘And in the morning the beach would be full of drowned Fillyjonks, Mymbles and Whompses, all pale in the face and green with seaweed…’

‘Don’t be silly,’ said Moominmamma. She turned to Moominpappa and said, ‘If you can’t get it to light this evening, you will tomorrow, or some other day. And if it won’t work at all, we’ll hang the hurricane lamp in the window if the weather’s bad. Somebody’s bound to see it and understand that if they sail in this direction they’ll go aground. From one thing to another, don’t you think it would be a good idea to carry the beds up before it gets dark? I don’t trust those rickety stairs.’

‘I’ll carry them up on my own,’ said Moominpappa, taking his hat off its nail.

Out on the rock it was almost dark. Moominpappa stood watching the sea. ‘Now she’s lighting the hurricane lamp,’ he thought. ‘She’s turning up the flame and standing there looking at it as she always does. We’ve got plenty of paraffin…’

All the birds had gone to sleep. The rocks at the western end of the island looked black against the sky where the sun had gone down. One of them had a beacon on it, or perhaps it was a cairn of stones.
Moominpappa lifted up the first bed, then stopped and listened.

Far away he could hear a faint wailing sound, a strange, lonely shriek unlike anything he had heard before. It seemed to come to him across the water, a vast desolate waste. For a moment, Moominpappa thought he felt the rock trembling under him, but then everything was quiet again.

‘It must have been a bird,’ he thought. ‘They have very strange cries.’ He lifted the bed on to his shoulders. It was a good firm bed, and there wasn’t anything wrong with it. But the lighthouse-keeper’s bed up in the tower was his, and none of the others would use it.

Moominpappa dreamed that he was running up some stairs that never seemed to come to an end. The darkness surrounding him was full of the flapping of birds’ wings, birds that escaped silently. The staircase creaked with every step he made, and groaned loudly.
He was in a terrible hurry. He had to get to the top to light the lamp before it was too late, it seemed desperately important that he should get it to work. The stairs got narrower and narrower. Now he was conscious of the sound of iron under his paws, he was up where the lamp was waiting for him in its round house of glass. The dream got slower as Moominpappa groped round the walls looking for matches. Great pieces of curved coloured glass were in his way, reflecting the sea outside. The red glass made the waves as red as fire, and through the green glass the sea suddenly turned emerald-green, a sea that seemed cold and remote as though it were miles away on the moon, or perhaps nowhere at all. There was no time to lose, but the more he hurried, the slower things seemed to become. He stumbled over the cylinders of gas which rolled away across the floor, more and more of them, like waves. Then the birds returned and beat their wings against the glass. Everything prevented him from lighting the lamp. Moominpappa shouted loudly with fright. The glass broke and fell round him in a thousand shining splinters, and the sea rose high above the roof of the lighthouse, and he started to fall, deeper and deeper – and woke up in the middle of the floor with his blanket round his head.

‘What’s the matter?’ said Moominmamma.

The room was still and blue, with its four windows outlining the night.

‘I was dreaming,’ said Moominpappa. ‘It was awful.’

Moominmamma got up and put a few dry sticks on the glowing ashes of the fire. It burst into flame, and a warm golden light flickered in the darkness.

‘I’ll make you a sandwich,’ she said. ‘It’s because you’re sleeping in a strange place.’

Moominpappa sat on the edge of the bed and ate his sandwich and his frightening dream began to disappear.

‘I don’t think it’s the room,’ he said. ‘It’s this bed that makes one have such nightmares. I’ll make myself a new one.’