The Exiles

for police and I stay and watch it don’t float out again.’
    ‘It’s his favourite story,’ Graham explained, ‘but he usually only tells it when he’s drunk!’
    ‘Graham!’
    ‘Know what the police did when he sees it? First thing he done? ’E was sick! Sick! Laugh! Me and Jim did laugh!’
    Graham’s grandad slapped his leg and roared and his mug fell off the arm of his chair. Rachel picked it up for him and stood it carefully on his lap.
    ‘Get a cloth one of you boys,’ said Mrs Brocklebank crossly, ‘and you behave yourself, Dad. It was nothing to laugh at anyway.’
    Ruth saw that for some reason Mrs Brocklebank really did not want the story to continue, so she said very cheerfully, ‘If you wrote down the recipe for that cake, perhaps my mum might make it. If it’s fairly easy she might.’
    ‘You come round one morning and we’ll have a baking day,’ said Mrs Brocklebank, ‘and then when you go back you can make her one yourself.’
    ‘Can I come too?’ asked Naomi, relieved to see Mrs Brocklebank smiling again.
    ‘They got a bit a wood,’ shouted Graham’s grandad, ‘and they took an arm each and I took ’old of the legs to lift it on like.’
    ‘I would have liked a daughter,’ continued Mrs Brocklebank valiantly, ‘and Graham always used to say he wanted a sister.’
    ‘To knock about,’ put in Peter.
    ‘I were smoking Black Twist in my pipe, so it were all right for me, see?’
    ‘Why?’ asked Rachel.
    ‘Black Twist were right strong,’ explained Graham’s grandad, ‘and it like covered the smell. But smell weren’t nothing then to what it was when he tried to lift it…’
    ‘If he’s upsetting you,’ said Mrs Brocklebank to the girls, ‘the lads can take him out, and welcome.’
    ‘They’re enjoying it,’ said Mark. ‘Look at their faces!’
    ‘Well, Jim took ’is arm and we all said “Right then!” and lift together and poor old Jim slips on a rock and fall, and the smell …’
    ‘More trifle anyone?’
    ‘Yes please,’ said Rachel.
    ‘Like nothing you’ll ever have smelt! Like …’
    ‘Mark and Peter,’ ordered Mrs Brocklebank, ‘take him out. I’ve had enough.’
    ‘And it look …’ bawled Graham’s grandad, as they escorted him to the door, ‘… it look like …’ They heard the kitchen door slam behind him.
    ‘That there trifle!’ came muffled down the passage, and they could hear him groaning with laughter.

    ‘It was a lovely tea,’ said Ruth, when they left for home. ‘Thank you very much.’
    ‘Brilliant,’ agreed Naomi, ‘and we really liked listening to Graham’s grandad.’
    ‘Thank you for having me,’ said Rachel politely. ‘I’ll put it all in my diary.’
    ‘When can we come back?’ asked Phoebe.
    ‘You come when you feel like a bit of baking,’ said Mrs Brocklebank, ‘and we’ll have a goodbye tea before you go.’
    ‘A good riddance tea,’ remarked Graham.
    ‘We’re not going yet!’ said Ruth and Naomi, looking so alarmed that Mrs Brocklebank hastened to agree that they must have at least a week or two left. ‘And it’s nice to know you’re enjoying yourselves so much,’ she added.
    ‘It’s almost perfect,’ said Ruth, pulling herself together from the shock of hearing eternity described as a week or two, ‘except that there’s nothing to read at Big Grandma’s.’
    ‘Nothing to read!’ exclaimed Mrs Brocklebank. ‘Surely she’s found you more than enough to keep you quiet all summer!’
    ‘Shakespeare and cookery books,’ said Naomi, ‘don’t count.’
    Mrs Brocklebank was about to reply when she caught sight of Graham standing behind his guests, rolling his eyes, tapping his head, and making corkscrew motions with his finger in the air. Clouting him and telling the girls he’d be just like his grandfather (if not worse) in seventy years’ time took her mind off the subject of literature for that time.
    ‘She’s not letting them have any books,’ Graham explained to his mother when she had got him indoors and the girls had gone, ‘because too much reading sends people barmy. She’s curing them.’
    ‘What rubbish are you talking now?’ asked Mrs Brocklebank. ‘Too much reading sends people barmy! I’ve never heard such nonsense!’
    Graham, thinking that his mother had had the evidence before her eyes all afternoon, nevertheless did not bother to argue.
    ‘Did you like them then?’ he asked instead.
    ‘I thought they were smashing lasses.’
    ‘But didn’t