The Exiles

amateur naturalist. So far Ruth had seen three dead mice, caught in traps in the shed, one grey squirrel that lived in the school playground, attracted by an unlimited supply of crisps and sandwich crusts, several Cumbrian rabbits, and assorted, unremarkable birds.
    It was not much of a record. Ruth knew it was not, and was ashamed. It was bad enough for someone who lived in Lincolnshire, but for someone who had spent a summer in Cumbria it was disgraceful. Especially when only a mile or so away from that person lived the oldest and most wonderful of all British animals, the bear-like, panda faced, earth dwelling ancient of the countryside, the badger. All Ruth had to do was sit quietly in sight of a sett one night, and she would see them.
    She wished they didn’t only come out at night.
    She wished she was not afraid of the dark.
    ‘Come badger watching with me?’ she asked Naomi when she had faced the idea of going alone and turned it down as impossible.
    ‘No thanks!’ said Naomi emphatically. ‘Catch me!’
    Ruth approached Phoebe, who was not lacking in courage of the stubborn, pig headed kind.
    ‘I’m too busy,’ said Phoebe, who had learnt in an afternoon of intensive instruction the game of chess, and who was now engrossed in a book of chess problems.
    Rachel agreed to come, but her price was too high.
    ‘I haven’t got that much money,’ said Ruth. ‘You know I haven’t.’
    ‘Well, I can’t come then,’ said Rachel.
    Towards evening Ruth found herself heading for her last resort, Graham’s house. It was all very well Naomi pointing out that since they were living in a more or less haunted house already, she had little to lose by spending the night on a so-far-as-they-knew-ghost-free hill. ‘Better the devil you know,’ Big Grandma had remarked when she unscrewed the wastepipe of the kitchen sink to see why the water wouldn’t run. ‘And better the ghost you know,’ thought Ruth.
    The Brocklebanks’ kitchen door was standing open and there was a horrible noise coming from inside. It could have been bagpipes, but somehow it was more rasping; there was something horribly violinish about it, and the tune reminded Ruth of a song she didn’t like, but she couldn’t have said which song it was.
    ‘Do be quiet, Graham,’ Ruth heard Mrs Brocklebank say, ‘I can’t hear myself think!’
    Ruth knocked at the open door, but nobody heard her. Mrs Brocklebank was ironing a great heap of screwed-up blue denim. Graham’s grandad was sitting at the table rattling a pair of teaspoons. Graham was astride a chair the wrong way round, bright red in the face, and blowing and blowing into a large mouth organ. His eyes were shut tight.
    ‘We are the music makers,’ shouted Graham’s grandad when he saw Ruth in the doorway. ‘That’s poetry that is, but you wouldn’t know. You wouldn’t know how to play the spoons either, I doubt?’
    Graham’s mother clouted Graham across the head with a pair of trousers and he opened his eyes and stopped blowing. ‘Come in, Ruth,’ she called, ‘and I hope you’ve come to take him away! Goodness knows we’re not musical in this house, but that mouth organ is more than flesh and blood can stand!’
    ‘Sweet music,’ Graham’s grandad remarked, ‘though I like a nice brass band myself!’
    ‘Hello,’ said Graham, busily shaking the spit out of his mouth organ. ‘Did you know what I was playing?’
    ‘Sort of,’ Ruth admitted, ‘I recognised it but I couldn’t remember the name.’
    ‘See,’ said Graham to his mother, ‘I told you it was a real tune! “Amazin’ Grace”!’
    ‘Oh yes.’
    ‘Beautiful!’ Graham’s grandad shouted. ‘Amazin’ bloody Grace! You should learn “Moonlight and Roses”, and then I could sing along! Moonlight and roweses ,’ he wailed in his loud, flat, tractor engine drowning voice, ‘ Reminds me, a yew! and lass can play the spoons!’
    While they quietened Graham’s grandad, who insisted on playing the spoons all over his body (as, he said, he had once seen a stark naked sailor do in Calcutta before the war) Ruth explained about the badger watching and how she didn’t really want to go by herself.
    ‘I can’t come,’ said Graham, ‘I’m busy!’
    ‘Busy nothing,’ said Mrs Brocklebank, ‘of course you can go. If I don’t have some quiet my head will split. And you can walk your grandad back to his cottage on the way.’
    ‘I ’ent ready to go yet,’ said Graham’s grandad.
    ‘Neither am