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usual flopping limply over the edge of the bed. Pippa also knew that it was important that she should wake up, that if she didn’t the house would drift out to sea. The house should have been tied up to the pier, but Julie had untied the rope and couldn’t tie it up again.
    Pippa felt dizzy and hot and bone-weary, unable to pull herself together. After a while she realized that she was sitting up in bed and that the hands of the little clock on her dressing-table showed twenty minutes past five. Her mouth was dry and there was a dull ache in her head. She felt as if she had been baked in an oven. Yet, strangely, she could hear water. It sounded like the bubbling of a mountain stream. Then Julie’s voice came back to her from far away: ‘Pippa, Pippa, I can’t turn the tap off.’
    Pippa stumbled from her bed. The carpet was wet and made a squelching sound under her feet. ‘Oh,’ she cried. ‘Mum! Dad!’
    She floundered into the passage. Water was everywhere. She could hear it pouring from the bath on to the floor, and she could see it coursing down the passage into her own room, into Stevie’s room, even into the kitchen.
    â€˜Oh golly...Dad,’ she shouted. ‘Dad!’
    She turned the tap off over the bath and stood helplessly, with water over her toes, wondering what to do. She felt limp and useless and completely disheartened. It seemed that the whole day was ruined, that it was all part of a plot to prevent them from leaving on time for their holidays at the beach. She heard the voices of her mother and father and Stevie calling from his bedroom, ‘What’s the matter?’
    â€˜Water,’ she cried. ‘Water everywhere.’
    Her father poked his head in through the bathroom door. He looked unshaven and tired. ‘Godfathers,’ he said. ‘Whose work is this?’
    â€˜Julie’s, I guess,’ sighed Pippa.
    â€˜The little devil. I’ll skin her. Bet your life as soon as you’re short of water something like this’ll happen.’ He looked around the flooded room and scratched his head. ‘We can’t go away and leave the tanks empty. Not at this time of the year.’
    Pippa wilted further. This was a complication she hadn’t thought of. ‘Golly,’ she said, ‘I hope it doesn’t mean we’ve got to cart well water from Grandpa Tanner’s again, in buckets, like last year.’
    â€˜Of that, young lady, there’s every possibility.’
    The carting had been dreadful. Trudging up and down the hill with buckets was such hard work, such drudgery, and it took so long. Pippa felt absolutely miserable. ‘Well, I guess I’d better not pull the plug out of the bath?’
    â€˜That’s right,’ her father said. ‘Every drop wasted is another drop to be carted. Throw me the towels. We’d better start mopping it up.’
    Mrs Buckingham, in the background, was mourning for her carpets. ‘We’ll have to get them outside. I hope they don’t take too long to dry. Thank heaven it’s a hot day. That’s the only good thing you can say for it. Isn’t it a
pest?
’
    â€˜It’s a confounded nuisance,’ agreed Mr Buckingham. It was rather too early in the morning—that morning in particular—for anyone to take the incident lightly. ‘I don’t know. Maybe I can put creek water into the tanks, if the blessed pump will work for me. Fool of a thing it is...Where’s Julie?
Julie!
’
    Stevie came out of his room, rubbing his eyes and stepping gingerly. ‘What’s up?’ he said. ‘What’s all the water? Is it raining or something?’
    â€˜Stevie,’ said his mother, ‘call Julie, will you. I suppose she’s outside somewhere. And bring a couple of buckets back with you. Oh, isn’t it a crying shame. And it’s
so
hot. I just don’t feel up to dealing with a mess like