The Exiles

her feet.
    ‘I’m looking to see if that dog food’s still there,’ whispered Rachel, glancing apprehensively at the window where Big Grandma, outside, was painting the window-frame around the new pane of glass. ‘What if we’ve eaten it?’
    ‘I’d rather not know, so you needn’t bother telling me.’
    Fearing the worst, Rachel raked around the bottom of the cupboard until she rediscovered the rusty tins. There were still three of them, so she was safe, and very relieved she scrambled to her feet.
    ‘Well?’ asked Naomi, as Rachel headed back to her diary, ‘go on, say it, we’ve eaten them, haven’t we?’
    ‘You said not to tell you!’ remarked Rachel in surprise.
    ‘How many? All of them? You might as well say, now you’ve made me think of them. Are they all gone?’
    ‘None of them are gone.’
    ‘Oh,’ said Naomi, feeling strangely disappointed, and she began counting drops of Baby Bio into her gallon of water. Five drops to a pint the bottle said, so forty drops to a gallon. Big Grandma watched her through the window.
    ‘What’s it for?’ she called through the glass.
    ‘My lettuces,’ replied Naomi. ‘Their leaves look a bit pale so I thought I’d give them some food.’ She stirred her bucket carefully with the wooden cake spoon and staggered, lopsided, down the garden path with it. A few moments later she returned for the milk jug.
    ‘There’s a little watering can in the greenhouse,’ Big Grandma told her.
    ‘It’s important not to splash the leaves,’ replied Naomi a bit patronisingly. ‘A milk jug will be more accurate!’
    ‘Oh,’ said Big Grandma humbly, and she thought of a whole gallon of Baby Bio being poured on to one short row of lettuces and hoped it would not drown them.

    Ruth, having spent most of the afternoon trying to teach herself to read upside down from a Reader’s Digest magazine, now sat on the fellside above an unsuspecting badger’s sett, waiting for dusk. According to her natural history book, that was the time when the badgers would emerge to tidy up their homes, play with their cubs, and generally provide a pleasant and amusing spectacle.
    From her position on the hillside Ruth could see right down into Big Grandma’s garden. Naomi was there, hunched like a snail over her lettuces, willing them to grow. The white spot on the path beside her must be her letter. Ruth, who had been allowed to read the letter, rather wished Naomi had minded her own business about the boat money for coming back from the Isle of Man. Certainly her mother would send it; Ruth was sure that swimming to the Isle of Man was just the sort of fresh air, interesting, outdoor pastime that Mrs Conroy would approve of.
    ‘That will be a nice, healthy way for Ruth to spend the afternoon,’ she could imagine her mother saying as she pushed the return fare into an envelope, leaving Ruth with no choice in the matter. Half of Ruth wanted to swim to the Isle of Man very much, but the other half did not.
    Ruth sighed, and stopped looking at the horrible letter. There was Phoebe, polishing the kitchen window with Big Grandma pointing to the places she had missed. There was Rachel, lurking behind the compost heap, surreptitiously fishing in Phoebe’s bucket. Beyond Big Grandma’s house was the village, and after that there was just one farmhouse between the village and the sea. Graham’s house. Graham no longer thought they were mad, not dangerously mad anyway, but he still thought they were soft in the head. You could tell.
    ‘Do you know where there are any badger setts around here?’ Ruth had asked him when he came up with the books.
    ‘Badger holes?’ asked Graham, grinning. ‘Haven’t you had enough of holes?’
    ‘Oh stop gloating!’ said Ruth crossly. ‘I just wanted to see some badgers, that’s all.’
    ‘You can always spot a badger hole,’ went on Graham, undeterred, ‘by the great heap of saucepans and frying pans lying around outside!’
    ‘He keeps them,’ went on Graham, ignoring Ruth’s expression, ‘to throw at the ghosts and spooks that are always hanging about outside his hole …
    ‘Trying to borrow his books!’ ended Graham in triumph.
    So Ruth had gone hunting for badger setts alone, unguided by anything except her book, which she had decided was not as useful as she had thought it would be in Lincolnshire. It said that badger setts were often occupied by rabbits or foxes, but it did not go on to say how you could tell if you were sitting