The Exiles

water on one side of the fire Naomi fried bacon on the other, holding the pan as far away from herself as possible because the flames were so hot.
    ‘Shall we fry the tomatoes too?’ asked Ruth, feeding the fire with the bits of driftwood Rachel and Phoebe were collecting.
    ‘They’d be much cooler raw,’ decided Naomi, feeling she had quite enough to manage with the bacon alone.
    ‘This cooking is dead easy.’ Ruth prodded the potatoes. ‘I knew it would be. These are soft enough to eat now. What about the bacon?’
    ‘I’ve cooked it all. Smell it. I wish you could get perfume that smelt that way.’
    ‘What way?’
    ‘Fried bacon. Call Rachel and Phoebe and let’s get started. I’m starving!’

    ‘Good job there isn’t any gravy,’ commented Ruth, looking across at Rachel. Rachel was holding a slice of bacon in one hand and a large potato speared on a fork in the other. Tomato juice ran unconfined along her forearm and dripped off her elbow.
    ‘It’s jolly good,’ said Rachel happily. ‘I didn’t know we could cook.’
    ‘You didn’t cook,’ Naomi pointed out. ‘Ruth and I cooked. You did all the work, but we were the brains. Chuck me another tomato someone! Someone not everyone !’
    ‘Is it The One who Eats Least Washes Up?’ asked Phoebe, ‘or The One Who Finishes Last?’
    ‘Neither,’ said Ruth indignantly, reaching over to pick another slice of bacon from the frying pan and spitting out potato skins. ‘We’re not at Big Grandma’s now! This is civilisation! Have you forgotten what it’s like?’

    There was a happy feeling in the air, a feeling of slowly regained control. It seemed a very long time since they had felt so peaceful. Lincolnshire, school, the monotonous struggle to retain their flawed, familiar, and uncompromising characters in a blandly civilising world, even the fortunes they had gained and lost so quickly all seemed very far away. Here they were, not starving or food poisoned, doing what they had set out to do and doing it well.
    Fate, in the form of a stocky, sheepskin-jacketed individual, was already scurrying towards them, but of that they were happily unaware.

    Graham, looking across the fields of his father’s farm to the sea, saw that some daft holiday-maker had lit a fire, and being the son, grandson, and great grandson of Cumbrian farmers, he had been brought up to regard all holiday-makers with great suspicion. Very early in his life he had been taught the holiday-maker rules. He knew, for instance, that if they walked through a field you should go after them and check the gates. That their picnic spots must be constantly patrolled and their dangerous rubbish removed. It was to be expected that they would park their cars in gateways, feed your horse with sandwiches, and lose their dogs in fields of sheep. And although they rarely meant any harm – the majority of them treasuring the countryside as much as any farmer (but Graham could never have believed that) – they must always be watched. In case.
    It was not the remains of a successful dinner party that Graham saw on the beach. He saw smoke, and a great heap of goodness knew what, and reckless people mucking about poking the fire with long sticks. He heard wild and awful singing and he did not know that it was only Ruth, teaching her sisters the words of ‘Lili Marlene’. He drew closer, slightly shocked, and realised that it was not any old mad holiday-makers, but those grandchildren of Mrs Sayers on the hill, and he knew for a fact that they were weak in the head, because she had told him so herself.
    Remembering this he lost no time in running across the field, hauling himself over the wall that kept the sheep from straying onto the beach, scrambling over the rocks, and completely spoiling the campfire by emptying the orange plastic bucket of sea water right in the middle of it.
    ‘You shouldn’t be mucking about with fires!’ he told his flabbergasted audience through the thick smoke that was now billowing around them. ‘Not unless you’ve got someone responsible with you! I’d have thought your gran would have had more sense than to let you!’
    ‘It’s that boy,’ said Ruth, as she struggled to hold Phoebe back, ‘that boy we saw the other day. Don’t you dare, Phoebe!’
    ‘The one that said it would rain,’ added Rachel, as if the rain had been all his fault.
    ‘The one that I said smelled and you hit me,’ supplemented Phoebe, wriggling free from Ruth’s grip.