The Exiles

Instead the salt-scorched grass sloped down to the shore and ended in an expanse of rough stone and shingle. When the tide was up you could not see any sand at all, but when it was down it left a shining flatness of golden beach, stranded shells and rock pools.
    ‘Gosh!’ said Naomi, gazing in delight over the rim of her bucket, ‘why didn’t you tell me it was this good?’
    The tide was out, and in the far distance the sea sparkled along the edge of the sand. Except for a few groups of people sitting on the stones just in front of where the road ended, the beach was empty.
    ‘Let’s get away from them,’ said Ruth, looking at the people. ‘We’ll go where no one can see what we’re doing if anything goes wrong.’
    They trudged a long way before Ruth and Naomi were satisfied with the distance between themselves and the rest of the world.
    ‘My feet are bleeding,’ said Rachel sadly. ‘My socks are full of blood. I can feel it squidging in-between my toes. Can’t we stop?’
    Heartlessly Ruth and Naomi hurried on, until the people on the beach disappeared into the blur of the heat haze.
    ‘Should be safe here,’ said Ruth at last, dumping her burdens to the ground. ‘It’ll be lighter going back when we’ve eaten all the food,’ she added thankfully, for the pile on the shore looked even bigger than it had done on the kitchen floor.
    ‘I can’t walk,’ said Rachel, collapsing on the wet sand. ‘You’ll have to carry me down to the sea.’
    Already her sisters were pulling on their swimming costumes.
    ‘Come on,’ said Ruth to Rachel, ‘you’ll feel better when you’ve got your shoes off.’
    ‘I’m sure my socks are full of blood.’
    ‘Let’s see then,’ said Naomi.
    Rachel slowly pulled off her socks while her sisters stared at her bare feet in silence.
    ‘It’s disgusting!’
    ‘Get them away from the food!’
    ‘Blood?’ asked Phoebe in amazement. ‘That’s not blood! Blood’s not black! That’s …’
    ‘Shut up,’ Ruth told her. ‘We all know what it is.’
    ‘Aren’t you sorry for me?’ asked Rachel, shamelessly regarding her feet, but instead of answering her the same thought struck all her sisters at once, and they rushed to get into the sea before Rachel, as Naomi put it, mucked it up.
    Ruth and Naomi had read between them a fair number of books describing how to make a campfire, and they had noticed that most of them seemed concerned to point out the enormous problems of the business, laying great stress on the need to identify the sorts of wood that burned best, the troubles that could arise when the wind blew in the wrong direction, the special skills required to build a fire-proof circle of stones, and the best (and only) way to sharpen a stick on which to spear your food.
    ‘I’m sure they write like that to put people off trying,’ decided Naomi, who regarded these accounts as pure fiction. Cooking on a sharpened stick she unsportingly dismissed as impossible, and as for the building of the fireplace, well, any fool could make a circle of stones, especially if they were lucky enough to have someone else to do the carrying for them. In this respect Ruth and Naomi were very lucky, since they had Rachel and Phoebe.
    ‘We need two more,’ dictated Naomi, ‘long, flattish ones to balance the saucepan and the frying pan on.’
    ‘Big Grandma said we weren’t to go near the fire,’ Phoebe pointed out.
    ‘She meant when it was alight, not now,’ said Ruth, who was arranging the stones. ‘Anyway, you don’t usually do what she tells you. Go and get some dried seaweed, there’s heaps of it piled further up.’
    The stones were arranged in a neat circle in the sand, with screwed up newspaper in the middle and sticks and seaweed on top. With immense care they lit the newspaper, and the campfire burned with flames that were almost invisible in the bright sunlight.
    ‘One match,’ said Ruth proudly, ‘and Big Grandma made me bring two boxes!’
    Rachel and Phoebe were sent off to the sea with the bucket to wash the potatoes, which were then cut up (unpeeled) and put in the saucepan.
    ‘We forgot the salt,’ said Naomi.
    ‘The sea is salty,’ answered Ruth. ‘And boiling will kill the germs. Go and rinse the bucket, Rachel, and get us a bit of sea. A clean bit. Don’t get it from where you were paddling!’
    ‘Stand on the edge and get it,’ said Ruth. ‘Don’t put your feet in.’
    While the potatoes boiled in a mixture of salt and fresh