The Exiles

mouths already hanging open with admiration.
    ‘Looks about forty miles,’ she heard Naomi say cheerfully. ‘But the tide’s going out. That’ll help a lot.’
    ‘Yes,’ agreed Ruth dolefully.
    ‘You’ve already swum half way without even trying.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘You are lucky. I wish I was going. Just my luck to break my arm.’
    Ruth thought she would much rather have a broken arm but did not say so.
    ‘But anyway,’ said Naomi generously, ‘you can swim much better than me. I don’t really think I could do it even if it wasn’t broken.’
    Ruth thought that even with two perfect unbroken arms she was going to find the journey extremely unpleasant, but obviously it was far too late to protest.
    ‘Could it be,’ asked Big Grandma, who had been listening behind the door hardly able to believe her ears, ‘that Ruth is planning a little trip?’
    ‘To the Isle of Man,’ said Rachel. ‘Dad sent the boat money home.’
    ‘Forty odd miles?’ said Big Grandma.
    ‘That’s what we worked it out to be,’ agreed Naomi.
    ‘By strange coincidence,’ said Big Grandma, ‘your mother has just this minute telephoned. Cancel all plans, Ruth. She says you can’t do it!’
    ‘Can’t do it?’ asked Ruth, looking up for the first time.
    ‘Absolutely forbidden,’ said Big Grandma, ‘and you’re to ring her up at once and tell her you know.’
    ‘Oh damn,’ said Ruth, her face shining with relief. ‘I was just getting ready to go!’
    ‘Go and speak to your mother.’
    Ruth, hardly able to believe her good fortune, hurried downstairs. She returned a few minutes later.
    ‘She says you’re not to learn to drive a tractor,’ she said to Naomi.
    ‘Can’t anyway with a broken arm,’ said Naomi.
    ‘Quite,’ said Big Grandma. ‘Did you tell her about Naomi’s arm?’
    ‘I thought Naomi would rather tell her herself,’ said Ruth virtuously.

    A quiet time followed Naomi’s accident. It was ordered by Big Grandma, who threatened to send them home to their parents if she did not have a little peace and tranquillity in which to marshal her forces. It was surprising that instead of seizing joyfully on this promise of escape, the girls made an honest attempt to become trouble-free guests. Although they still disapproved of very many aspects of their enforced holiday, they no longer wanted to escape. Big Grandma had thought she might have to buy her peace with literature, despite all her resolutions, but this turned out not to be the case. Her granddaughters used the time to develop their own peculiar interests.
    Rachel’s diary, the future Christmas present of her sisters Ruth and Naomi (and perhaps Phoebe too), was finally brought up to date. A certain amount of one-armed gardening was done too, and a great deal of fishing in buckets. Badger baffling disguises were attempted and discarded.
    ‘I am afraid you will only succeed in repelling them even further,’ remarked Big Grandma when she discovered Ruth’s jeans and jumper buried in the compost heap.
    ‘But it says in my book that badgers are frightened and suspicious of human smells,’ explained Ruth. ‘Wearing these will stop me smelling so human.’
    ‘But no less frightening and suspicious,’ pointed out Big Grandma, an aspect that Ruth had not considered.
    If Ruth’s efforts to delude the local wildlife were a failure, Rachel’s diary seemed an undoubted success. In it every meal she had eaten that summer had been carefully and accurately recorded. Writing accounts of mere events, she had soon decided, was a waste of time and not at all necessary. For example, she could look at the previous Sunday’s entry: ‘Ordinary breakfast, roast chicken, peas, pots, runny trifle, egg sandwiches, chocolate cake, ginger biscuits,’ and the whole day’s happenings would immediately spring to mind and insert themselves neatly between the appropriate meals. Rachel thought that everyone’s brains worked this way.
    Ruth and Naomi, stationed at the end of the garden so they could watch Naomi’s radishes growing while they consulted, spent an afternoon reviewing the supernatural situation.
    ‘And I said, “How can I go to sleep in a haunted house?’ and she said, “Haunted my foot, and anyway, what do you think I’ve been doing for thirty-seven years?”’
    ‘Wasn’t she even scared?’
    ‘Just bad-tempered because I’d woken her up again.’
    ‘Perhaps that’s why Uncle Robert ran away – because the house had a ghost in