Free Away From It All by Judy Astley Page B

us isolated out here was practically child abuse.’
    â€˜Joss didn’t believe in formal education. Inhibited minds, she said we’d end up with, if we went to school.’
    â€˜Couldn’t be arsed to get out of bed and take us there, you mean. It was all right for her, she’d hadher own education. It wasn’t right not to let us have ours.’
    And which bed was it she couldn’t be arsed to get out of? Alice remembered, after Arthur had died, Jocelyn had made a point of sleeping in every room in Penmorrow and with whoever was in it. She said that grief made her restless, unsettled, that she needed the comfort of warm skin against hers and the exhilaration of the procreative force. Alice had been fourteen – an age of acute curiosity and observation, of keeping close tabs on what your surrounding adults get up to, having realized for the first time that they are flesh and blood and as unruly of thought and deed as sly teenagers could be. She’d been reading D.H. Lawrence at the time,
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, and was completely absorbed in the notion that sex could be thrilling for being kept secret. Sex wasn’t any kind of secret at Penmorrow. Joss had always maintained that monogamy was drearily provincial and creatively stifling and had no place in her household. Several of the residents during Alice’s childhood had arrived as couples but always one or the other of the pair would find themselves drifting into another’s bed. Looking back, Alice suspected that much of the nocturnal visiting had been more to do with maintaining a credible Bohemian stance than with any real urge for sexual experiment. It must have been the cause of a lot of secret grief, one way or another. And all done to impress the commanding iconic presence of Jocelyn.
    Grace was sitting high up in an oak tree in the woods behind Penmorrow, keeping watch on Chas and Sam. She was delighted they had no idea she was there as it showed they didn’t know everything about woodcraft.They should have heard her creeping through the brambles, heard twigs snapping in spite of her being so careful to avoid them. They thought they knew it all, but they didn’t know enough to imagine anyone might want to be spying on them.
    The two boys were wearing dark green tee shirts and their boxer shorts and had daubed mud all over their arms and faces. There were leafy twigs stuck in their hair. They should have been at school. Grace knew this because she’d seen Mo send them off in their grey and blue uniforms with lunch boxes early that morning. They’d run down the track past Gosling and when they got to the road, instead of making for the school bus stop outside the shop, she’d seen them dart back along the coast path round the hillside and out of sight of Penmorrow. Harry had said they hardly ever went to school, she’d heard him. He didn’t seem to think it was a big problem, just something else to grumble about like the state of the drains or the birds pulling up his onion plants.
    No-one skived off at Grace’s school, which might have been partly down to having to wear a bright purple jacket. She could just imagine herself and her friends getting caught, a small posse of purple bodies, coming across an unexpected mother shopping in Warehouse. Mothers in these circumstances made you feel so guilty – it was their speciality, less crassly confrontational than simply shouting and getting cross. They’d say they were ‘disappointed’. Posh London parents were always saying that, as if they’d been looking forward to some wonderful event but had been really badly let down. Alice had been ‘disappointed’ a few months earlier when Grace had been brought home early from Sophy’s fourteenth birthday party because she’d drunk half a bottle ofSophy’s mum’s sherry and been sick on their stairs. It wasn’t just her, she’d told Alice