The Exiles at Home

by Hilary McKay

  For my mother

  CONTENTS

  A Note From the Author

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  A long time ago, in a different world (no internet, no mobile phones) my mother sponsored the education of a young boy in Africa. His name was Joseck. Really, of course, the money went to his school, not the individual, and benefitted all the children there. However, the letters that were sent from home went directly to Joseck, and he sent his own letters back.

  They opened up a way of life to us in quiet Lincolnshire that we had hardly considered. We lived in a much less outward-looking world in those pre-internet days.

  Much later, when my own children were small, we sponsored more young people. Once again the letters came and went.

  There was something about those letters – they brought their writers to life so well. They often had small drawings in the corners: a squirrel, a bus, some goats on a roof, a face. Sometimes on the thin paper we could detect a faint red smudge of African dust. They often seemed to fizz, with a sort of exuberant joy. I used them when I wrote The Exiles at Home.

  That was more than twenty-five years ago. Many things have changed and the home life of my characters was a different world. It was a time when children took themselves to school and back with no adult in charge. There was much less fuss, much less traffic on the roads, and consequently, much more freedom.

  There was also much less understanding. Enormous gulfs between Joseck’s world and ours. In those days we learnt about other countries in school, with atlases and Geography lessons – there was very little on TV. Every now and then Blue Peter would whisk us away for a while, or something would be reported on the news, but real life, the ordinary everyday life of people in another country was beyond our knowledge. No one I knew had been further than France – there was no internet and no instant messaging. We wrote letters, and waited slow weeks for replies. No wonder they meant so much to us.

  In this new publication of The Exiles at Home, I have been able to smooth out some attitudes that would jar with new readers today. But the story is just the same. Ruth, Naomi, Rachel and Phoebe work as hard as they can (not always in the most sensible ways) for something they believe worth doing – helping out a friend.

  Hilary McKay

  March 2019

  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. It 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 al
l 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 Christmassy 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.

  Christmas morning came, and Rachel got her sledge.

  ‘Who did it come from?’ asked Phoebe in disbelief, as Rachel stripped the wrappings away.

  ‘Father Christmas,’ said Rachel triumphantly.

  ’You see!’ said her father.

  Naomi heard Big Grandma ask her mother the same question and the whispered reply: ‘John. All yesterday afternoon and half the evening with the wood he bought to make the new gate.’

  ‘Ah! I noticed he kept disappearing.’

  ‘He was out in the shed! I thought he’d freeze. He dried the varnish with my hairdryer at one o’clock in the morning . . . Oh, Naomi!’

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Naomi. ‘I didn’t think it was Father Christmas.’

  Phoebe, who had kept a copy of her letter-that-should-have-gone-up-the-chimney sat under the Christmas tree methodically unwrapping and ticking things off. Rachel loaded her sledge with all
her unopened presents and started tugging it across the room.

  ‘Oi! You’re running me over!’ said Ruth.

  ‘Aren’t you going to see what they are?’ asked Mrs Conroy.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Rachel, and sitting down on her sledge, unwrapped them all saying, ‘Oh yes books, oh yes socks, oh yes a new bear . . .’

  ‘He’s got a zip in his back for pyjamas.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Rachel, not bothering to look. ‘Oh yes, chocolates!’

  ‘Look in the envelope!’

  ‘Oh yes, money as well! And a school thing . . .’

  ‘It’s not a school thing, it’s a Spirograph. It draws lovely . . .’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Rachel and dumped all her presents back on her sledge and started pulling it across the room again.

  After unwrapping some clothes, a few books and some chocolates from Big Grandma (with ten pound notes attached) Ruth and Naomi gloomily watched Rachel and Phoebe as they were gradually submerged in an ocean of wrapping paper, until Phoebe, glancing out of the window, exclaimed, ‘Someone’s been mucking up our snow!’ Then they rushed outside and followed huge black sooty footprints to the garden shed and found two new bikes labelled ‘Ruth’ and ‘Naomi’, one red, one green, shiny beyond their wildest dreams, and with tinsel round the handlebars.

  ‘Don’t think we’ve ever had a better turkey,’ Mr Conroy remarked at dinner-time.

  ‘Free range,’ said Big Grandma. ‘Makes all the difference!’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Rachel.

  ‘They wander round free,’ explained Mr Conroy, ‘they lead more natural lives!’

  Phoebe, who had eaten an enormous dinner, despite having consumed chocolates all morning, stared in horror at the turkey.

  ‘That turkey,’ she announced, ‘is dead! Dead!’ she repeated. ‘A dead animal.’

  ‘Is it?’ asked Rachel.

  ‘Yes, and that’s its corpse!’

  ‘Phoebe, really!’ said her mother, but Phoebe could not be stopped.

  ‘Corpse!’ she continued. ‘I’ve eaten dead corpse!’ and she rushed off to the bathroom. When she emerged, pale and clammy, she announced, ‘I’m a vegetarian!’