by Hilary McKay
She did not even turn to look at them.
‘It was my candle,’ Rachel said bravely.
‘We can’t leave tonight. Mrs Brocklebank says there isn’t a train. We’ll go tomorrow, very early.’
‘We know where the tickets are. You don’t need to get up or anything – we can easily go to the station ourselves.’
‘I took your key,’ Phoebe confessed. ‘I’m very, very sorry.’
‘We all are,’ said Ruth. ‘We’ll go now. It was a lovely summer until last night.’
It began to dawn on Big Grandma that they were saying goodbye, not just for the day or for the summer, but for always. An old memory of Robert flickered at the back of her mind.
‘Thank you for having me,’ she heard Rachel say.
‘It was lovely having you,’ said Big Grandma.
‘Graham said he’ll help clear up the mess in the garden the fire engine made.’
‘Mr Brocklebank found some boxes that were hardly even damp.’
‘We’ve put them in the front room to dry. We’ve spread them out carefully. I think they’ll be all right.’
‘Mrs Brocklebank’s left a brilliant tea all ready in the kitchen,’ said Rachel.
‘You seem to have the sympathies of the entire village,’ said Big Grandma, some time later, when normal relationships had been resumed. ‘I suppose I ought to thank you for saving my life.’
‘That’s okay,’ said Ruth.
‘It was the least we could do,’ said Naomi.
‘We’ll get you some more books,’ Phoebe promised. ‘I’ll use my Christmas List money.’
‘You’ve still got my diary, and that Shakespeare and the ones that are drying,’ said Rachel.
‘I shall start a new collection,’ said Big Grandma. ‘Things could be a lot worse. And I’m sorry I said what I did. When I asked …’
She stopped. From their faces she could see that they had no idea what she meant. The question that had shocked the Brocklebanks had not disturbed them in the slightest. They would have asked exactly the same.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Dear Big Grandma,
Naomi and I have arranged to do the bookstall for the school winter fair. It was a bit hard because we are in different classes. (Naomi should be doing cakes and she had to get herself thrown out of cookery), but we have managed it so you will soon get a lot more books. Some will be quite good because we helped the English teacher sort out the library stockroom (this was hard to arrange too) and he likes us. Did you know that in all the hurry I came away without my bones? They are all packed and ready so please could you post them?
Lots of love from Ruth
Dear Sir / Madam,
If you have finished with my diary could you send it back now? These are from me and Phoebe. They gave us fifteen books for a pound at a market stall so now you have something to read.
Very much love from Rachel
They are givin my Xmas list muny 50p a week for the rest of my life dad says so me and Rachel bort you these.
Love, Phoebe Conroy
Dear Big Grandma,
I hope you got your insurance money, and that the lettuces and radishes I planted were all right. We didn’t know Rachel and Phoebe hadn’t put stamps on their books until too late. When they said they had made a long thin parcel, and squeezed it into the letter box to swiz the postman we went to try and get it back, but it had gone. Luckily they were paperbacks, so they shouldn’t cost too much. Ruth and I have got you some very good books. But Mum says you will have to come and get them if you want them because there are fifty-seven. You should see the house. All our rooms are pink (the curtains and sheets, and the walls) only with a dark grey carpet so as not to show the dirt. Mum asked what we thought. ‘It’s a hellish pink,’ said Ruth for a joke. ‘You’ve come back worse,’ said Mum – but she was laughing. So are you coming for Christmas?
Love, Naomi
Turn the page for an extract from the
The Exiles at Home
CHAPTER ONE
Ruth Conroy was thirteen and she was the eldest, which was sometimes difficult, with Naomi, Rachel and Phoebe, pushing from behind. If Ruth could have had one wish it would have been for adventures. Adventures in far-away countries, with exotic animals, and mountains and forests and white towns and red roads and blue seas and ice fields and bright colours and interesting people with stories to tell. Ruth had never been out of England, but she knew about these places because she had read too many books.
Next in the family was twelve-year old Naomi. Naomi lived one step back from real life, like a cat. Like a cat, she had many interesting thoughts, which she mostly did nothing about and kept in her head.
After Naomi came Rachel. Her life was mostly spent in the hard work of looking after Rachel. She did it as well as she possibly could, because somebody had to do it. If any of the Conroy girls were pretty, it was Rachel, not that anyone admitted it. Their father said they were all beautiful, and their mother said it wasn’t how you looked, but how you behaved, that mattered. Rachel knew they were both wrong, but it was no use saying it, because nobody ever listened.
Last of all, came Phoebe, who was six years old and did as she liked, as well as anyone could with three bossy big sisters in a very small house.
The Conroy girls went to unspectacular schools where they didn’t work hard, although they always regretted this when it came to school reports at the end of term.
The Christmas holidays began with the bringing home of school reports. Although these had been handed out in sealed envelopes with instructions to deliver them unopened, only Phoebe’s arrived home this way. Phoebe was so serenely detached from other people’s opinions of herself that the report on her term’s work held no temptation at all. When her mother read aloud: ‘Phoebe continues stubbornly to ignore all help and advice …’ she glanced briefly up from the letter she was writing and remarked, ‘Miss always says that,’ before continuing unruffled with her message to Father Christmas. For several weeks now, a great deal of Phoebe’s time had been spent this way.
Outdoors was rainy, but the Conroy family were lucky enough to have a real fire in their living room. Rachel was still in her school coat, enjoying the way the steam rose from her sleeves when she held them close to the heat. She had been watching as her sister wrote.
‘You should post it up the chimney,’ she said, as Phoebe began to add the usual row of kisses to the bottom of the page, but Phoebe preferred to leave her letters lying about where they could be discovered by her relations.
‘What about your report, Rachel?’ asked Mrs Conroy.
Rachel fumbled in her mitten for a while and then handed her mother a wet bundle of grey paper. She had dropped her envelope in a puddle on the way home from school in the hope of unsticking it. It had not only unstuck, it had disintegrated, the ink had run, and during its journey home squashed in the end of Rachel’s mitten, it had fallen to pieces. All that it was possible to read were the two words, ‘Rachel tries …’ Rachel brightened up tremendously at these words, so much more encouraging than she had dared to hope.
‘It could be short for “Rachel tries but fails”,’ Naomi pointed out.
‘Yes,’ agreed Ruth, ‘or, “Rachel tries to do nothing,” or “Rachel tries to drive me mad”!’
‘You’re just jealous,’ said Rachel, ‘because I’ve got a good report and you haven’t.’
‘No one ever gets good reports at our school,’ replied Ruth. ‘Mine was one of the best in the class, actually. We all opened them and looked.’
‘Yours is disgraceful,’ said her mother and read aloud, ‘ “Ruth’s work suffers from an almost total lack of planning. Her homework is rarely completed on time and she appears spend a great deal of the school day in a dream!” ’
‘What’s wrong with being in a dream?’ asked Ruth. ‘It’s a survival technique. Anyway, mine’s better than Naomi’s. Hers doesn’t even make sense!’
Naomi’s report had puzzled everyone. I
t said that Naomi was one of the worst-motivated boys in the class and made no real attempt at any subject except football. Mrs Conroy read it again and passed it to Big Grandma, who had arrived that day to spend Christmas with the family.
‘Frightful handwriting,’ commented Big Grandma cheerfully, who had once been a teacher herself. ‘Still, you must remember that it was probably written at dead of night by an exhausted, underpaid teacher, almost certainly driven mad by lack of sleep …’
‘So you don’t think we ought to complain?’ asked Mrs Conroy.
‘No!’ cried Ruth, Naomi, Rachel, Phoebe and Big Grandma added, ‘Perish the thought!’
‘Christmas is no time for complaining,’ agreed the children’s father, who had been listening in silence to the chatter. ‘Hey! Not there, Rachel!’
He was too late. Rachel, gathering together the fragments of her report, had wandered across the room searching for the magic words ‘Rachel tries’, and, having found them, sat down to gloat. She sat on the Christmas cake, newly iced and left to dry on the coffee table. Father Christmas, twelve reindeer, the North Pole and Rachel all sank together into a sudden valley of marzipan.
‘I’m not eating that now!’ remarked Phoebe, as Rachel ran wailing from the room, shedding tears and lumps of icing. A huge clean-up operation followed, during which Mrs Conroy forgot all about school reports. Ruth and Naomi took the cake away and resourcefully re-iced it.
‘Even better than before,’ said Ruth, and it was: a beautifully hilly landscape with Father Christmas and the reindeer now on cardboard skis. They sailed down the hillside beside a blue icing stream with chocolate button boulders.
‘Reminds me of home,’ said Big Grandma when she saw it. Home for Big Grandma was Cumbria, hills and streams and sheep. The girls had spent the summer there and Phoebe, remembering the sheep, rinsed three plastic lambs from her farmyard and stuck them into the icing snow.
‘Phoebe! They look grey!’ exclaimed her mother.
‘Sheep do look grey against the snow,’ said Big Grandma. ‘We have lambs in the village already. And snow on the tops of the hills.’
Naomi, thinking of the six weeks spent in the Cumbrian hills, felt suddenly homesick for them. Climbing on to the windowsill she drew the curtains behind her, shutting out the bright, noisy room. The garden was grey and full of deep shadows.
‘Snow!’ begged Naomi silently to the dark sky, and leaning her forehead against the cold window-pane, she peered hopefully into the garden.
Ruth slid round the curtains, guessed immediately what Naomi was wishing for, and asked, ‘Do you think it might?’
‘It’s all I really want for Christmas,’ Naomi replied. ‘I don’t know why it never does. It always snows in books!’
‘Look! There’s Broken Beak,’ said Ruth, as the tame family blackbird hopped out from under the hedge.
‘He should be in bed. A cat might get him.’
Broken Beak looked enquiringly at the house and then up at the sky.
‘He’s waiting for something,’ said Ruth.
She and Naomi gazed at the dark bundle of feathers, motionless upon the lawn. Magically, as they watched, a white star appeared on his black velvet back, and then slowly, in ones and twos, more snowflakes drifted down to balance on the blades of grass. Broken Beak gave a satisfied flounce of his feathers and disappeared back under the hedge.
‘It worked!’ exclaimed Naomi in delight. ‘That’s the first time ever I’ve wished a wish and it’s really come true!’
‘I wished it too. Is it going to stick?’
‘It looks like it might. It’s not melting anyway.’
‘Don’t tell the others yet, in case …’
‘No.’
‘Do you think Mum’s forgotten about my report?’ Naomi said, after a pause.
‘Ages ago. Why? Are you glad your teacher mixed them up? Do you think it would have been awful?’
‘I think,’ said Naomi cautiously, ‘that Mum might not have understood what the teacher was trying to say, even if she did get the right one. You know, they always have to write uncomplimentary things in case we get big-headed, but they never mean them. So they never could write what Mum wants to read, things like: “Naomi has worked very hard and done extremely well and is always polite and helpful”.’
‘No, they’d never write that,’ agreed Ruth, ‘because it simply isn’t true! They …’
‘Anyway,’ Naomi interrupted hurriedly, ‘the snow’s settling! That’s all that really matters!’
In the morning the ceilings were luminous with snow-light. Naomi and Ruth, who were sleeping on camp-beds in the living room so that Big Grandma could have their bedroom, rolled out at dawn to look at the garden. There they saw Phoebe, in her dressing-gown and slippers, marching solemnly across the lawn, admiring every footprint. Rachel was following her, stepping carefully into her sister’s tracks so as not to spoil the snow. In places it came up to their knees.
Ruth and Naomi watched as their little sisters bent and scooped handfuls of snow into snowballs and then stowed the snowballs in their dressing-gown pockets. ‘Hmm,’ said Ruth thoughtfully, and slid her bed across the room to barricade the door.
‘Just for ten minutes,’ she said, ‘until the snowballs melt or someone catches them.’
They waited until they heard giggling in the hall and saw the door handle turning slowly. After that, there was much heavy breathing and pushing on the door, whispered orders from Phoebe and then retreating footsteps and the sound of the fridge door being opened.
At breakfast time – which was late, with no bacon, because of the melted snowball floods in the fridge – Rachel suddenly announced, ‘All I want for Christmas is a sledge!’
It was the first time she had been able to think of a present, although for weeks her parents had been asking, ‘Isn’t there anything you really want, Rachel?’
‘Oh yes,’ Rachel had replied, ‘a real farm and a boat. Cows and sheep and horses and donkeys. One of those hot-air balloons!’ She had never thought of anything reasonable; until now, on Christmas Eve, with the roads deep in snow and more to come by the look of the sky, she had suddenly announced, ‘All I want is a sledge!’
‘Sorry, Rachel,’ said her mother, ‘no shopping on Christmas Eve. Not that I can think of anywhere we could find a sledge.’
‘What about Father Christmas?’ Rachel asked.
‘Father Christmas,’ said Phoebe, ‘isn’t true. Everyone knows.’
‘I should not care to say that,’ Big Grandma remarked. ‘Certainly tempting fate, on the twenty-fourth of December, to make rash remarks about the validity of Father Christmas!’
‘Reckless,’ agreed Mr Conroy solemnly.
‘At school,’ argued Phoebe, ‘everyone knows it’s just made up for children. And Rachel’s older than me! She’s nearly nine!’
‘And you are not yet seven and I am seventy-one,’ remarked Big Grandma, ‘so who is right?’
‘I only said what they say at school. Not what I think.’
‘What do you think?’ asked Mr Conroy.
‘Thousands of things,’ replied Phoebe.
That day the snow muffled all sounds. It slowed the speed of cars and walkers so that they were soft and heavy, like movements in a dream. It drew, with its whiteness, a clean blank page over the usual scribble of their lives.
‘Everything seems more real than usual,’ said Phoebe, but could not explain what she meant.
Martin-the-boy-next-door collected the girls to build a fort and dig paths, and his dog, huge golden Josh, chased snowballs down the street and snapped at falling snowflakes. Ruth waited until he wasn’t looking and then buried herself in the drift under the beech hedge but Josh, in seconds, sniffed her out and snuffled and pawed the snow away.
‘Josh, I love you,’ said Ruth as his hairy, anxious face peered down at her.
‘Josh is my favourite person,’ remarked Rachel.
Martin, who was often called Martin-the-good, felt suddenly Chr
istmassy and said, ‘You can share him if you like. You can come round and borrow him.’
‘Forever, or just for the snow?’ asked Rachel, believing more and more in Christmas magic.
Read them all
‘McKay has a genius for comedy’
The Sunday Times
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hilary McKay is a critically-acclaimed author who has won many awards, including the Costa Children’s Book Award 2018 for The Skylarks’ War, the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize for her first novel, The Exiles, inspired by her own childhood growing-up as one of four sisters, and the Whitbread (now the Costa) Award for Saffy’s Angel.
Hilary studied Botany and Zoology at the University of St Andrews, and worked as a biochemist before the draw of the pen became too strong and she decided to become a full-time writer. She lives in Derbyshire with her family.
COMING SOON
A beautiful, spell-binding novel about new families, a magical old house and a mysterious visitor, from acclaimed author and Costa-winner, Hilary McKay
Praise for The Exiles
‘McKay has a genius for comedy’ The Sunday Times
‘The Exiles is a delight’ Guardian
‘McKay has created a boisterous, chaotic family which almost makes me want to rush out and adopt three sisters’ Times Educational Supplement
‘I can’t think of a girl aged between eight and eighteen who wouldn’t enjoy this little gem of a book’ Jill Murphy, author of The Worst Witch
‘Readers will be tickled by the children’s attempts to evade their canny grandparent and will be touched by the affection that blossoms between generations despite initial clashes of wills.’ Publishers Weekly
‘Farce and genuine soft-hearted concern here mix wonderfully’ Guardian
‘The characters are beautifully developed … recorded with such humour and sensitivity that it is an engrossing, sometimes laugh-out-loud story’ Write Away
