Free Ash Road by Ivan Southall

to reach to the sky. The world seemed to be a gigantic noise.
    She was sure her father was dead. He seemed suddenly to have taken a long, long journey, leaving her alone and helpless in a violent world.
    Pippa hurried up the hill to Grandpa Tanner’s. She knew it was a waste of time. Grandpa wouldn’t even be up. He was hardly ever up before eight o’clock or nine o’clock. Not that he slept. He merely lay there in his untidy old bedroom, with his eyes shut so that it would be easier to see things the way they had been when his farm was so beautiful that passers-by often stopped their cars to look at it, when strong and handsome children played in the garden, when Marjorie his wife kept a home so crisp and sparkling that people were heard to say, ‘You could eat your dinner off the floors.’ Anyway, Pippa couldn’t imagine him lying there with his eyes open, for there was nothing to see but faded wallpaper and heavy old furniture in need of a polish and a bare electric-light globe hanging from the ceiling.
    Pippa thought how terrible it would be to be old and lonely and to have nothing to get up for, not even a nice breakfast. Pippa knew that Grandpa wasn’t very interested in food. She was sorry that he wasn’t her real Grandpa because she wanted to love him that little bit more; and this was difficult when he wasn’t her real Grandpa, for it was a right that belonged to other people: to his real grandchildren who sometimes came to see him.
    Pippa was jealous of these real grandchildren, in a way. They were older children (many of them were grown up) and she didn’t know them very well and didn’t like them over much. One day one of them had said to her, ‘You’re only nice to him because he might leave you some money.’ This had so upset Pippa that she hadn’t visited Grandpa for weeks afterwards. She felt awful about it because she had always thought Grandpa was poor. She was only ten years of age when she said to him, ‘Please, Grandpa, don’t leave me any money. It’d spoil everything.’ Now she was thirteen and still she wasn’t sure that Grandpa hadn’t left her anything, or whether Grandpa had enough money to leave anything to anybody; but she was surer than ever that if he did leave her something she’d give it away. Every time she thought of what that sharp-faced girl had said to her, even years afterwards, a cold and dark feeling grew inside her. It was the only unhappy memory Pippa had.
    She knocked on Grandpa’s back door. It sounded a firm and confident knock, but it wasn’t. Pippa
knew
that Julie wasn’t there. She
knew
that Julie was lost or hiding somewhere in the bush. Her father’s attitude had made her angry. She felt she wanted to hit him. Her father could be a very nice man, but Pippa believed she was beginning to see him as a person, as a stranger might see him, not just as a once rather wonderful Dad. Sometimes, particularly in the mornings, he was a very disappointing person.
    She knocked again, convinced that Grandpa had not heard her and probably wouldn’t hear her anyway because he had the wireless going. She knew she was wasting precious time, that she should have been in the bush searching, should have bullied her family into helping her, should have gone to get Peter, perhaps Lorna as well, to help to search systematically. All she had got from her father was a snarl, a roughly spoken order. Julie, for all they knew, might even have been down a mine hole or caught up in blackberries somewhere, crying, scared to try to free herself because the thorns were as sharp as knives. There were bush cats, too—domestic cats run wild—that would attack even a man. Dad had a scar from his elbow to his wrist to prove it. And snakes, venomous black snakes and poisonous copperheads. Then Grandpa opened the door.
    â€˜Hullo, Pippa,’ he said.
    He was dressed!
    â€˜Looking for Julie, I