3. The Buccaneers’ Banquet

When pirates speak of sardines, they don’t mean the sort that come in cans with tiny keys to wind open their lids. They mean fresh ones with gills and scales and fins and tails.

For lunch, Perry, Griffin and Layla dusted the fish’s silver skins with flour. Nell fried them quick and crunchy and golden, and served them with chunks of Annie’s crusty bread, squeezings of lemony oil, sprigs of dill, salad greens and sun-warmed cherry-cheeked tomatoes from her garden. There were tiny glass dishes, pinch-pots, piled high with flakes of soft white sea salt for scattering.

Perry Angel wondered if sardines grew up to be whales. He sometimes wished he could meet a whale. In dreams his wish came true. These dreams were always blue and filled with strangely beautiful music. Whale songs. In his dreams Perry could understand what the whales were singing about. They were singing to their children, telling them which way to go and calling them home. Sometimes when Nell was talking to him, Perry thought she sounded like the whales in his dreams.

Layla shut her eyes while she was eating and thought she heard the sea, though it was more than a hundred kilometres away. When she told the others, Nell said, ‘You see, that’s why pirates have such good hearing, because they eat a lot of sardines.’

Perry wondered if Nell had been a pirate before she became a grandmother because she seemed to know so much about them.

For dessert there were rum balls. Rum is a nasty-tasting drink which burns your throat and makes your legs wobbly. It is a pirate’s next favourite thing after treasure and sardines. But, like the black moustaches Griffin and Layla had worn and the tattoo on Perry’s arm, Auntie Ruby’s Rum Balls were fakes. They didn’t have even a splash of rum in them, on account of Nell’s plan to sing sea shanties and dance the sailor’s hornpipe when Ben got home.

‘Too much rum makes pirates forget the words and the tune and most other things as well,’ she explained, ‘and sometimes they get so wobbly they fall overboard.’

Auntie Ruby hadn’t made the rum balls. Nell had. Because Ruby was Nell’s auntie and she died when Nell was a young girl. It was only the recipe and the bluebird plate the rum balls were on that were Auntie Ruby’s. She’d written the recipe in pencil on the back of a used envelope, especially for Nell. The front of the envelope had a stamp with a picture of a queen on it. Not the Pirate Queen, the Queen of England, when she was very young. It was a blue stamp and it cost a shilling which is old money for ten cents. The apron Nell was wearing when she cooked the buccaneers’ banquet also had a picture of the Queen of England on it. Nell had a lot of aprons, but this one was her favourite, even though Her Majesty was slightly faded.

‘Long ago, before Her Majesty was born,’ said Nell, wiping a dribble of sardine juice off the queen’s nose, ‘pirates sailed the seas of England.’ Nell believed there were lessons to be learned in everything including buccaneers’ banquets, royal aprons and hand-me-down recipes.