The Exiles

thought as she opened the door, ‘and their dresses …’
    ‘Come along in,’ she said very kindly. ‘Come along in. Tea’s ready – you’re just in time. Do you want to wash your hands or anything?’ Not that it would help much, she reflected, when what they really needed was a good bath.
    ‘No thanks,’ said Phoebe cheerfully. ‘We’ve just come out of the sea!’
    ‘And you look like it,’ remarked one of Graham’s older brothers who had followed them in.
    On the way to the farm Ruth had been chosen to speak for the family, since she was the oldest, and (marginally) the cleanest, so she began,
    ‘I’m sorry …’
    ‘We’re in the dining room,’ said Mrs Brocklebank. ‘You come in and make yourselves at home. And you go and clean your boots up,’ she added to Mark, ‘trailing in muck and acting so cheeky. This is our Peter,’ she continued, shepherding them along in front of her and nodding to the person who had teased Rachel and Naomi earlier in the summer when they had come for help in digging up a frying pan, ‘and that’s Graham’s grandad over by the fire. No need to get up Dad! Now you know us all. Mr Brocklebank’s away today.’
    ‘’E ’ates cump’ny!’ shouted Graham’s grandad from the fireplace. ‘Not like me! I like a crack and a laugh I do!’ Then he seemed to change his mind and turned so that only his back was visible to the visitors.
    In a few moments they were seated round the table. Ruth began again:
    ‘I’m sorry—’
    ‘What a lovely tea,’ said Rachel, eyeing the table with such undisguised greed that Graham could not resist winking at his mother.
    ‘I’m sorry we look a bit untidy,’ Ruth said desperately (she didn’t want anyone to think they didn’t know what they looked like), ‘but we went swimming and Naomi’s plaster got wet – we put plastic bags on it but it still did – and Rachel stood on Phoebe’s dress and the sand was wet, and then it got a bit ripped when she put it on when her own dress blew away, and they had a bit of a quarrel, well, a fight actually, and Naomi had to stop them with her plaster.’
    This honest recital was a great success. The party cheered up tremendously. Peter choked on his chicken leg, and Graham wore the conceited expression of a conjurer who has just produced his first rabbit. Only Graham’s grandad was quiet, staring into the fire and drinking tea out of an old cracked mug, the only one he would ever use. He carried it around in his pocket.
    The girls talked and talked. It was the first time in their lives that they had ever tried to be pleasant, on purpose. Graham was proud of them. And they ate nearly as much as he had prophesied they would. Mrs Brocklebank, in the pleasure of watching them enjoy her cooking, forgot that she had ever thought of sitting them on newspapers to save her chairs.
    Rachel had just neatly turned the conversation to a discussion of Big Grandma’s motives in keeping dog food, when Graham’s grandad swung round in his chair and roared, ‘Greedy young beggars!’
    In the silence that followed he said loudly, ‘There’s been many a corpse washed up on that beach!’
    Graham and his brothers made moaning sounds.
    ‘If you’re going to start that, Dad,’ said Mrs Brockle-bank, who knew too well what was coming. ‘Why you can’t be pleasant I don’t know …’
    ‘Have you ever found one?’ asked Naomi with a note of envy in her voice.
    ‘I wish we could find one,’ said Ruth sincerely, and Phoebe nodded her head in enthusiastic agreement.
    ‘Don’t encourage him,’ whispered Peter, but it was too late.
    ‘Many a one,’ shouted Graham’s grandad, ‘but mine were worse. It were bad, it were …’
    ‘Enough’s enough,’ said Mrs Brocklebank. ‘Pass that cake to the girls, Graham, don’t just sit there eating it all yourself.’
    ‘It were rotten!’
    ‘What did you do?’ asked Naomi, fascinated.
    ‘Me and Jim (you wouldn’t know Jim), we see it from the fields, and I says ’twas a corpse, and Jim say ’twere a drowned sheep. By gum, ’e soon knew better …’
    ‘Be back at school before you know where you are,’ remarked Mrs Brocklebank. ‘I don’t know where the summer goes to!’
    ‘ ‘E were soon a lot wiser!’
    ‘I don’t think we want to hear any more, thank you, Dad!’
    ‘Old Jim runs off for the police (there was money if you found a body in them days. Bounty. Seven and six it were. Nowt now, nothing in it. Well, he runs off