Free The Exiles by Hilary McKay

with her arms full of socks.

    The rain did not stop after one day as everyone had hoped it would. It went on and on and there was nothing to do. No secret passages were discovered, and they tapped in vain upon the walls of the house, listening for a ‘hollow sound’. Big Grandma explained quite kindly to them that although the walls were two feet thick, they were solid stone right through. (‘Except for the garage,’ she added, ‘which is a twentieth century breeze block atrocity, but serves its purpose.’) So they abandoned the walls, and decided to hunt for trapdoors in the floors instead, and Naomi had quite a nice time organising Rachel and Phoebe onto their knees in the attic, listening for suspicious squeaking boards. Ruth came up and spoilt it.
    ‘Trapdoors in the attic will go into the bedrooms and trapdoors in the bedrooms will go into the living rooms and trapdoors in them go to the coal cellar and the coal cellar floor is just the hillside, you know it is; you can see where the rock shows through!’
    ‘Oh, go away,’ said Naomi peevishly.
    To Big Grandma the days of wet weather seemed like a time of constant searching, as the girls wandered preoccupied through the house, questing for ghosts, books, relics of the mysterious disappearing Uncle Robert, secret passages, something to do, books, books, books, anything to read. A less determined woman would have broken down, but Big Grandma did not.

    Towards the end of the week, as the supply of unread cookery books dwindled, as the rain continued to pour, and as people became less and less tolerant of their relations’ little imperfections of character, the strain began to show. Rachel and Phoebe staged a spectacular fight which began at the top of the stairs and ended when they rolled in a heap at their grandmother’s feet in the hall below, still gripping handfuls of each other’s hair, after having smashed a banister on the way down.
    ‘She blew at me,’ raged Phoebe as Big Grandma ripped them apart.
    ‘I can blow at whoever I like!’ screeched Rachel, lunging at her sister. Big Grandma locked them in the dining room to fight it out and for quite a long time there was no sound to be heard from them but that of loud blowing and running footsteps. When the room grew quiet and Big Grandma cautiously opened the door they were both fast asleep on the hearthrug, exhausted by the struggle.
    Ruth wandered around the house, depressed not only by the general gloom, but also because to date her collection of Interesting Bones consisted of one skull and one shoulder blade. On top of this, she still had no proof that the house was haunted, although she lay awake and heard prowling ghosts for several hours every night. Naomi refused to discuss the matter, finding even the idea intolerable. She no longer had much faith in the deterrent powers of Rachel’s Bible, for encountering Big Grandma unexpectedly on a midnight visit to the bathroom, and mistaking her in the dark for an unearthly apparition, she had thrown the Bible with great presence of mind (and force) into Big Grandma’s stomach.
    ‘If I had been what you thought I was,’ said Big Grandma nastily when she had undoubled, ‘that would have gone straight through me and you would have died of shock!’
    What upset Naomi most, however, was that the Bible had come in two, the pages torn away from the hard cover. She was sure a Bible in two pieces would not work.

    ‘Go away,’ said Big Grandma one morning, in her usual unfeeling way. ‘Go out. I cannot bear you any longer. I didn’t invite you here so that you might spend the whole summer breathing your quarrelsome little breaths down my neck.’ And she forced them to put on coats, fitted them out with umbrellas, and pushed them out for a walk. They slopped sulkily down to the post office and bought stamps and sweets.
    ‘Ice cream here,’ said the shopman proudly. ‘Told you we’d be getting it in!’ He wrung his hands and grinned weakly at them