by Hilary McKay
‘Yes,’ agreed Ruth dolefully.
‘You’ve already swum half way without even trying.’
‘Yes.’
‘I wish it was me. Just my luck to break my arm.’
Ruth thought she would much rather have a broken arm but didn’t say so.
‘But anyway,’ said Naomi generously, ‘you can swim much better than I can. 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,’ 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.
A quiet time followed. It was ordered by Big Grandma, who threatened to send them home to their parents if she didn’t have a little peace. It was surprising that instead of seizing on this promise of escape, the girls made an honest attempt to become trouble-free guests. Although they still disapproved of many aspects of their enforced holiday, they no longer wanted to escape.
They used the time after Naomi’s accident 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, 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 attempts to delude the local wildlife were a failure, Rachel’s diary was an undoubted success. In it every meal she had eaten that summer had been carefully recorded. Describing anything else but food, 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, pink 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, spent an afternoon discussing the ghost.
If there was a ghost. They hoped there was, and they longed for evidence, but Big Grandma wasn’t very helpful.
‘I asked her,’ recounted Naomi, ‘that night after I broke my arm and I could hear all sorts of sounds (and smell weird smells too, but it might have been that cheese sandwich) I asked, “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. She doesn’t care. It’s all right for her; she’s old enough to be a ghost herself.’
‘There’s ways of getting rid of them,’ said Ruth. ‘You can exercise them or something.’
‘They probably get enough exercise, tearing around the house all night.’
‘And I’ve heard you can keep them out by painting the window frames and the doors bright red. They don’t like red. It upsets them.’
‘It would upset Big Grandma too. She’d go mad.’
‘Or you can eat garlic.’
‘I didn’t know ghosts could smell things. How do they sniff?’
Graham heard Naomi’s last remark as he came sneaking up on them, and obligingly sniffed a ghostly and horrible sniff. He smirked with satisfaction when they glared at him.
‘Don’t look at me like that,’ he said. ‘I’m just here for a minute with a message from my mum, and then I’ve got to go school uniform shopping. She said to tell you you’re all to come to tea tomorrow.’
‘Big Grandma too?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Graham answered. ‘I think it’s more to give her an afternoon off. Anyway, it’s you they want to have a look at.’
‘Who?’
‘My brothers. When I told them about you, they said they’d like to have a look,’ said Graham, ‘and my mum said to tell you to come to tea and give poor old Mrs Sayers an afternoon off.’
‘Thanks a lot,’ said Ruth at the end of this charmless invitation. ‘Any more kind remarks or are you going?’
‘I’m going,’ said Graham cheerfully. ‘See you tomorrow then. Don’t come too early though.’
‘Why not?’ asked Naomi incautiously.
Graham opened his mouth to explain what his father had said about not wanting a pack of children hanging round the farm half the afternoon, but at that moment he caught sight of Phoebe sitting beneath the damson tree, earnestly fishing in her bucket.
‘I never seen anything like that,’ he murmured in amazement, and left very quietly.
Much to everyone’s surprise, Big Grandma took her granddaughters’ launch into village society quite seriously. They must look decent for once, she said; they were not going to tea with her friends looking (as they so often did) as if they had just been pulled out from under their beds. She made them put on their best (and only) dresses. Ruth’s and Naomi’s dresses were navy blue, which was Mrs Conroy’s favourite colour because it didn’t show the dirt. Rachel’s dress, newly mended by Big Grandma, was pale pink. It had once been Ruth’s bridesmaid’s dress, with puffed sleeves, a lace collar, and a pink bow. However, following Graham’s invitation, Rachel had secretly altered it with rather blunt scissors. It looked a lot plainer now.
Phoebe was in a colour her mother described as Pretty Emerald (again, good for not showing the dirt). Phoebe didn’t look right; her dress, which Mrs Conroy had wisely remarked, ‘Would fit when she grew into it,’ had not yet acquired that state.
When they were ready, Big Grandma held a gloomy inspection. Something looked unnatural, but she couldn’t think exactly what.
‘Clean socks!’ she ordered, wondering if it would help.
‘None left,’ replied Ruth.
‘Well, no socks at all then,’ said Big Grandma. ‘And for goodness sake, wash your feet.’
‘We’re going to the beach first,’ said Naomi. ‘We’ll get them clean there.’
‘No bathing then,’ said Big Grandma, ‘and keep tidy, and don’t get that plaster wet, Naomi. And behave yourselves.’
‘We always do.’
‘And have a nice time,’ said Big Grandma.
‘What’s that?’ asked Rachel, as they stopped on the way down to the sea and Ruth extracted a bulging carrier bag from under a hedge.
‘Swimming things.’
‘She said “No swimming”.’
�
�She said “No bathing”.’
‘It’s the same thing.’
‘It’s not. Bathing’s with soap and swimming’s just swimming. Anyway, you don’t have to.’
I’ll say they made me, thought Rachel comfortably to herself.
I’ll pretend I didn’t understand, thought Phoebe.
However, when they reached the beach even Rachel and Phoebe were slightly shocked to see Naomi struggling, one armed, into her swimming costume.
‘She said not to get your plaster wet,’ pointed out Rachel.
Ruth and Naomi ignored her. They were doing something with plastic bags and elastic bands.
‘Hope it works,’ said Naomi.
‘Plastic’s waterproof,’ Ruth answered, ‘and they haven’t got any holes in, I’ve checked. Anyway, what would happen if it did get wet?’
‘Nothing,’ said Naomi, thinking hard. ‘I’m sure I’ve seen people with broken legs out in the rain.’
‘She said “Behave yourselves”,’ said Rachel when she realised what her sisters were doing.
‘She said “Wash your feet”,’ said Naomi. ‘So shut up and go and wash ’em.’
‘And she said “Have a nice time”,’ added Ruth. ‘So shut up and go and have it.’
Mrs Brocklebank, Graham’s mother, stood gazing at her dining room table with pride. There were sandwiches and cakes and roasted chickens’ legs and bowls of fruit and tomatoes. There was a big apple tart, cut up into slices, and a trifle and a lemon cake with whipped cream on top. There was nothing that couldn’t be managed one handed.
‘Won’t be enough there,’ said Graham, coming in. ‘Rachel could eat all that by herself.’
‘You do talk some rubbish,’ said his mother, laughing. ‘They none of them look as if they’d ever had a square meal in their lives!’
‘You wait and see,’ Graham told her.
Graham’s grandad, who always came to tea on special occasions, was sitting listening. Sometimes he wouldn’t speak all day, but then he made up for his silence on other days, by shouting. He always shouted; he was deaf, except when it suited him to hear. Now he shouted, ‘They must ’ave worrums!’
‘Do be quiet, Dad,’ said Mrs Brocklebank. ‘You shouldn’t talk like that. It’s not nice!’
‘Mittering and muttering,’ shouted Graham’s grandad. ‘I can’t ’ear you!’ and he fell silent again, staring at the table. Some days he could be very awkward.
Not far away, down on the beach, the girls were having problems.
‘My plaster’s got wet,’ said Naomi, ‘and I’m stuck.’ She writhed inside her half-on dress, trying to force her broken arm through the sleeve.
‘You should have dried before you got dressed,’ Ruth said as she stuffed her sister into her clothes. ‘Now you’re covered in white streaks from where the plaster’s gone soft.’
‘So’re you!’
Navy blue, while an excellent colour for not showing dirt, was a failure when it came to concealing white plaster smears. Scrubbing at the marks with a wet handkerchief dipped in sea water only made them worse.
‘You’ll get into trouble,’ Rachel remarked.
‘Stop standing on Phoebe’s dress,’ Ruth ordered, ‘and put your own on. Where is it?’
Phoebe was rubbing sand from between her toes. ‘It blew away,’ she said.
‘WHAT???”
‘Rachel’s dress blew away,’ repeated Phoebe to her three indignant sisters.
‘Where to?’
‘I don’t know, I didn’t watch.’
‘You can’t watch something blowing away and not watch where it goes.’
‘I can.’
It was difficult to spot a pale pink dress on a pale gold beach on a windy, sun-glarey day. They spent some time looking before they located it, half in, half out of a rock pool.
‘Do I look all right?’ asked Rachel, when they had wrung it out and put it on her.
‘Oh, well,’ said Ruth, looking at her doubtfully.
‘Oh, well, what?’
‘I wish we’d brought a comb,’ said Naomi.
Mrs Brocklebank wasn’t a vain woman. Just because she had invited people to tea, she didn’t expect them to dress up for the occasion. For herself, she didn’t bother much about fashion; she believed in being neat and comfortable. It took a good deal to shock her, but Ruth, Naomi, Rachel and Phoebe, all looking neither neat nor comfortable, managed to do it by walking up her drive.
And their hair’s all wet! she thought as she opened the door, And their dresses …
‘Come along in,’ she said very kindly. ‘I’m so pleased to have you here. 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 hot bath.)
‘No thanks,’ said Phoebe cheerfully. ‘We’ve just come out of the sea!’
‘And you look like it,’ remarked Mark, one of Graham’s older brothers who had followed them inside.
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 get your boots off,’ she added to Mark, ‘trailing in muck and acting so cheeky. This is 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, ‘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 for the day.’
‘’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 and Ruth began again:
‘I’m sorry—’
‘What a lovely tea,’ said Rachel, eyeing the table with such undisguised greed that Graham couldn’t 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 damp, and then her own dress blew away, and they had a bit of an argument, 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 the first rabbit from his hat. 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 predicted 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 Brocklebank, 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!’
‘’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 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 had a drink!’
‘Graham!’
‘Know what the police did when he sees it? First thing he done? ’E was sick! Sick! 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 didn’t want the story to continue, so she said very cheerfully, ‘If you wrote down the recipe for that lemon 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 plank,’ shouted Graham’s grandad, ‘and they took an arm each and I took ’old of the legs to lift it on …’
‘I would have liked a daughter,’ continued Mrs Brocklebank valiantly, ‘and Graham always used to say he wanted a sister.’
‘To boss about,’ put in Peter.
