Free The Outside Child by Nina Bawden Page A

have proper families. Mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters. All living together.”
    I said, “If that’s being outside, then I’m outside, too. I mean, I’m outside George and Annabel’s family.”
    “That makes two of us.” He giggled. “Like the two Bisto Kids.”
    It was then that he told me about this old advertisement. Sitting on a dustbin at the end of the cinder path, he wrinkled his nose and pretended to be a starving orphan smelling something good cooking.
    He made me laugh. He made me hungry. I said, “Aunt Sophie made me cold roast beef and cucumber sandwiches. Enough for the two of us.”
    *
    We went into the cemetery and ate lunch sitting on the tomb of Stanley Arthur McAlpine who had been ‘called to the Lord’ in 1925. The flat part of the tomb was grey-green with lichen, but the marble angel with folded wings thatstood over it was still white and clean. There was a verse on its base.
    Father in Thy gracious keeping,
    Here we leave Thy servant sleeping.
    These words brought a lump to my throat, but Plato said it wasn’t so sad since Mr McAlpine had been eighty-two when he died. After we had finished eating we tried to scrape some of the mouldy green off the flat part of the tomb, and Plato pinched some plastic daffodils from a newer grave and stuck them into the earth at the feet of the watching angel. Then we looked round the cemetery for other McAlpines, but we didn’t find any; Stanley Arthur was the only one of his family who had been buried there. Plato said perhaps all the others had been cremated but neither of us knew if there had been cremation so long ago.
    Plato said he would look it up in the encyclopedia when he got home. He said he would rather be cremated when he died because it was tidier and took up less space, but I thought I would rather be buried, so that people could come and look at my tombstone and wonder about me.
    Neither of us mentioned Annabel and George. It was as if we had each decided, on our own, separately, to ignore what had brought us here, to Bow Cemetery; as if we had both realised, since the dog chased us out of the garden, that we had no real idea how to go on. I knew I was beginning to be afraid that if we hung around Shipshape Street very much longer, something awful would happen, and Aunt Bill and Aunt Sophie would find out what I’d been up to.
    I said, “Perhaps if we go soon, we really could go to the National Gallery on the way home.”
    I thought Plato would object. But he shrugged his shoulders. “Okay. Why not? We’ve found out the interestingpart, after all. Where they live, what they look like. Spying gets boring after a bit.”
    *
    And that would have been that, over and finished and no harm done to anyone, if we had not walked to the station by way of the grassy clearing at the side of the railway line, and seen the grandmother— my grandmother—asleep on a bench in the sunshine.

Chapter Eight
    She looked quite comfortable, her head resting on the back of the bench, her legs stretched out in front of her, and her hands folded across her handbag on her lap. Her mouth had fallen open and she was snoring gently. A little bit of cottony stuff, some sort of seed blown on the wind, had settled on her upper lip, and it fluttered with each breath.
    I looked at this sleeping person who was my grandmother, and thought how odd it was that she was a stranger to me.
    She stirred and muttered something. “Come away,” Plato said. “They’ll see you. They’ll think we’re thieves. Stealing her handbag or something.”
    The children had come out of the bushes on the other side of the clearing. They were running towards us, a little, matted dog chasing them, leaping up, yapping. We walked slowly towards them and they glanced at us briefly as they ran past us. George said, “Gran?” and Annabel hushed him. “Don’t wake her.”
    At the edge of the clearing we stopped and looked back. Annabel was fastening the dog’s leash to its collar and