The Exiles

while I clear this mess up.’
    ‘Who – me?’ asked Ruth, enraged. ‘I ate two eggs!’
    ‘You said I could,’ Phoebe complained, disappointed at not being praised for her achievement.
    ‘Can you glue it together with see-through glue?’ asked Rachel, without much hope.
    ‘Are you still locking us out all day?’ asked Naomi, wondering if brute force had caused Big Grandma to change her mind.
    ‘I certainly am,’ said Big Grandma crossly, ‘and you’ll be lucky if I don’t leave you outside all night as well.’
    ‘Can we have some food if you do?’ asked Rachel, who wisely believed her Big Grandma to be capable of anything. ‘And sheets and blankets and pillows and candles and our pyjamas, and umbrellas in case it rains?’
    ‘I’ll see how I feel,’ replied Big Grandma as she wrapped up pieces of broken glass in newspaper. ‘You might not even survive till night. What are you going to do all day? Have you an idea between you?’
    ‘If we’re going to be out all day,’ suggested Ruth, ‘we could make a fire and cook our dinner on it. We don’t like sandwiches.’
    ‘Do you know how?’ asked Big Grandma. ‘Have you ever done it before?’
    ‘You learn it in the Guides,’ replied Ruth cautiously, and none of her sisters gave her away by pointing out that she had been thrown out of that noble institution after only two weeks’ membership, on a charge of non-cooperation.
    ‘It’s perfectly easy,’ added Naomi. ‘Dozens of books tell you how to do it, and anyway, we’ve been reading cookery books all week.’
    ‘I suppose I could let you do it if you did it on the beach,’ Big Grandma said. ‘There’s nothing to set fire to down there. I don’t see why you shouldn’t manage. Keep Phoebe and Rachel away from the flames though, and don’t forget everything you need you’ll have to carry down yourselves, and you can thank Phoebe for that. I haven’t time to take you as well as get this window patched up.’
    ‘Oh, there won’t be much to carry,’ said Ruth.

    An hour later they set off for the beach completely bowed down under the weight of their equipment. Not only had they food, in vast and bulky quantities, but also a saucepan, a frying pan, half a gallon of fresh water, and a bucket to be filled with sea water and stood near the fire, just in case.
    ‘Don’t you trust us?’ asked Naomi, when Big Grandma produced this.
    ‘Not entirely,’ said Big Grandma.
    As well as all this they took newspaper to help get the fire started, swimming things in case they went swimming, and an assorted bundle of knives and forks. Ruth, very alarmed already at the size of the heap on the kitchen floor, said she thought they could do without plates.
    ‘What about a table and a few chairs?’ asked Big Grandma when she saw the stack of essential equipment, ‘or perhaps you could choke down sandwiches just this once?’
    This was exactly what they had been thinking themselves, but nobody had any intention of saying so. Between them they shouldered the load and headed off for the shore, trying to walk as if their backs and arms were not breaking because Big Grandma was standing at the front door, gleefully watching and waving goodbye.
    All through the village people stared at them.
    ‘Haven’t they ever seen anyone carrying a frying pan before?’ muttered Naomi.
    ‘It’s Phoebe’s bucket,’ grumbled Ruth. Phoebe was carrying (among other things) an orange plastic bucket half full of fruit. Unable to lift it properly, she was trailing it along the ground behind her, the apples and tomatoes bumping and rattling about inside. At the village shop they stopped to buy fizzy pop, and they put that in the bucket as well.
    ‘It’s too heavy,’ complained Phoebe.
    ‘I’ll take it then,’ said Naomi, ‘and you take this blasted awful frying pan.’
    Phoebe, already burdened by a small sack of potatoes held strained to her chest by her aching arms, found that the addition of a frying pan obscured her vision completely.
    ‘Stop dragging it,’ ordered Ruth, a few minutes later, when Phoebe had resorted to towing the frying pan along the road behind her. ‘It’ll get scratched. Carry it properly. You’ve destroyed enough for one day.’
    The road led through the village, past fields of sheep on either side, and down to the very edge of the beach. Few people visited this part of the coast, mainly because there was nowhere to park a car, and none of the usual seaside rubbish shops.