The Exiles

aching legs out of bed. ‘Don’t your legs ache too?’
    ‘Nope,’ said Big Grandma complacently.
    ‘Didn’t they ache the first time you went up that mountain?’ persisted Naomi.
    ‘I don’t remember. I remember feeling rather tired the day I carried your mother up …’
    The girls stared at her in astonishment and disbelief.
    ‘When she was a baby of course.’
    ‘Oh,’ said everyone rather flatly.

    Big Grandma proved to be horribly talented in finding work for other people to do. She spent the morning inventing sitting-down jobs for her guests. Every time Ruth and Naomi settled down to read a few more recipes, or Rachel and Naomi began another quarrel over the colouring book, she appeared before them, bearing a new occupation. Potatoes were scraped and lettuces washed. Dandelions were extracted from the lawn. Kitchen drawers were hauled out of their sockets and carried outside for the victims to put in order.
    ‘Quick,’ said Rachel, when lunch had been eaten and washed up and they had all returned to the garden. ‘Let’s run away for a bit before she comes out with any more jobs.’
    ‘I couldn’t run anywhere,’ said Naomi, who was recovering from the previous day much more slowly than the others, ‘but I don’t mind if you go off without me. You could go to the village and see if that shop sells any books. Ruth could say she was going to buy more butter, that would be a good enough excuse.’
    ‘Better still just to go and not say anything at all,’ said Ruth. ‘I know where there’s a map, I found one this morning. Anyway, we couldn’t get lost, we can see the village from here, but what about you?’
    ‘I’ll be all right,’ said Naomi. ‘Buy books and magazines and comics, anything to read. And crisps and chocolate. And train timetables, just in case. And ask if there’s a library nearby. And see if they’ve got any good jigsaws. Some bananas would be nice …’
    Anticipating questions and objections and wishing to avoid them, the foraging party sneaked carefully round the side of the house and out into the road. Naomi watched them depart and then returned to her bedroom where she proceeded to arm herself with The Annotated Shakespeare. Tragedies and Romances, Histories and Poems and Comedies .
    ‘It’s gone strangely quiet,’ said Big Grandma, pouncing on her as she staggered down the stairs.
    ‘They’ve gone to the shop to buy that butter.’
    ‘Leaving you with nothing to do?’ questioned Big Grandma. ‘Or perhaps not,’ she continued, noticing Naomi’s burden. ‘Hoist with my own petard am I?’
    ‘Probably,’ agreed Naomi, with no idea of what she was talking about. ‘Well, I’ve got all these books to read. I thought I’d take them outside.’
    ‘I suppose it will take you quite a time to get through them?’ asked Big Grandma, with, Naomi thought, a wistful note in her voice.
    ‘Hours, probably,’ said Naomi firmly.

    Big Grandma’s garden was large and cheerful, usefully equipped with seats and lurking places, and edged with borders of bright flowers. The grass was very long and lumpy, not at all like the smooth green square in the Lincolnshire garden. There were daisies and buttercups and docks growing in it, and it was difficult to tell where the actual flowerbeds began because the lawn seemed to run right in to them, strangling all but the most vigorous plants.
    ‘A Big Grandma-ish sort of place,’ thought Naomi, who long before she had finished her volumes, or indeed the first book, or in fact the first play, or, in melancholy truth, the first page, had had as much as she could bear of Shakespeare.
    After Shakespeare had been discarded, and the flowers and weeds admired and dismissed, Naomi, vaguely bored and fearing that her legs would seize up again if she sat still very long, wandered off to explore the rest of the garden.
    Behind the beech hedge she found fruit trees and a greenhouse containing tomato plants and shallow boxes of seedlings waiting to be planted out. Behind the greenhouse was a vegetable patch, and Naomi shuffled stiffly over to it. Peas were growing there, attached, as Naomi rightly guessed, to real pea plants (a sight she had never seen before). There were many other things too that Naomi did not recognise. The patch was not as weedy as the rest of the garden, and all the plants were in nice straight rows, like writing on a page. At the strawberry bed Naomi halted in amazement, for dozens of them sparkled there, bright