The Exiles

Rachel’s clothes because Big Grandma has started taking them off her when they are terrible. Phoebe wears clean ones all the time, anybody’s, not just hers so you don’t need to encourage her.
    It is quite good on the beach. We’ve been swimming a lot and you know how well Ruth can swim, well yesterday she swam right out so far we could not see her. We waited quite a long time until we thought she wasn’t coming back and we were just packing up to go home when we suddenly saw her. She wasn’t tired but she couldn’t walk really, and when she could breathe she said: I swam half way to the Isle of Man. England was on one side and the Isle of Man was on the other and they looked both the same size so it must have been half way. We told Big Grandma who was cross (as usual) (about some bones) and she said: Why Did You Come Back? Ruth said next time she wouldn’t. But it would be lovely if she could swim all the way, only it is too far to swim there and back (she says). If you sent the money she could do it and get a boat back.
    We have met a boy called Graham. He says he’s never read a book except at school. He’s going to teach me to drive a tractor.
    It was awful here when it was raining but it’s a lot better now. But Big G. is still a slave driver. Rachel and Phoebe are chopping off each other’s heads with the firewood axe.
    Love Naomi.

    Naomi finished this well intentioned but extremely alarming letter to her parents and turned to see what her sisters were doing.
    ‘Are we having a nice time?’ asked Rachel, looking up from the diary which she had recently begun to keep, the general booklessness of Big Grandma’s house having forced her to begin writing one of her own.
    ‘You’re supposed to write your own ideas in a diary,’ Ruth told her, ‘not everyone else’s. I wish you’d let me see it. Why don’t you?’
    ‘It’s secret.’
    ‘It’s going to be yours and Naomi’s shared Christmas present,’ explained Phoebe who had heard. ‘I’m having a nice time. You can put that in if you like.’
    All by herself Phoebe had acquired a new hobby. It was her own invention, nobody had helped her, nobody but Phoebe would even have thought of it. You filled a bucket with water, tied a bit of string on the end of a stick, held the stick over the water, and there you were. Fishing in a bucket. The total hopelessness of the activity was very soothing. It was the perfect sport. The emotional stresses of success and failure being eliminated left one entirely free to enjoy the pleasures of the moment. The fisher in the bucket can take liberties that conventional fishermen only dream of. He can stir the water vigorously with his rod and produce no ill effects. He can carry his water to any more convenient site. As a last resort he can chuck the whole lot away, in favour of another bucketful. It is a good hobby, and cheap, and if more people did it more often …
    Rachel was writing a diary of the summer holiday. At first she had considered the idea of going back to January, when most diaries begin, but she had decided not to bother. Anyway (owing, no doubt, to the fact that she had not kept a diary), she could not remember anything that had happened in January.
    ‘The First Day’, she wrote at the top of page one, and carefully underlined it. Her pencil, toothmarked right down to its point, bit into her fingers as she thought backwards in time until she reached the tins of dogfood she had discovered under the kitchen sink. Were they still there? And what if they weren’t? There had been more than one meat pie served in the house since they’d arrived, and Rachel had always eaten her fair share, more if she could get it. What if they had been dog food pies after all? Shoving her diary under the hedge, Rachel hastened to the kitchen to check.
    ‘What are you doing?’ asked Naomi who had followed Rachel into the house.
    ‘What are you doing yourself ?’ questioned Rachel, watching as Naomi carefully ran the hot tap over the corner of her mother’s envelope.
    ‘Nothing.’ Naomi peeled off the stamp, positioned it carefully on her own envelope, and hammered it firmly with her fist.
    ‘Looks a bit smudgy,’ commented Rachel, inspecting the result.
    ‘Postman won’t notice.’ Naomi moved to the kitchen sink and began measuring out a gallon of water, eight milk bottles full, very splashily into a bucket. ‘What’s up with you anyway?’ she questioned, watching Rachel grovelling worriedly at