by Ruth Thomas
At last they came to a horrendous bit – a sharp twist to the left, and what seemed like a vertical incline – and here it was that Julia’s strength gave out. ‘Nathan, I can’t!’
‘Yes you can,’ Nathan insisted, but turning round to look he saw she meant it. White-faced, her chest heaving, she slumped over her bicycle, holding it still, but with her feet beginning to slide ominously backwards. ‘Help me!’
‘Hold on!’
In another moment Julia would lose her grip completely. The bicycle would hurtle backwards down the hill, knocking Julia to the ground, and getting itself smashed, possibly beyond repair, as it crashed. Nathan thrust his own bicycle into the hedge, ramming it between two roots to stop it from sliding. In almost the same movement, he grabbed Julia’s handlebars and twisted them sharply to the left. She let go as he did so, and her knees sagged under her. She sat on the ground, sobbing and trembling. Nathan secured Julia’s bicycle as he had secured his own, then tried to make her get up.
But Julia’s nerve had gone, and she was beyond reason. In her mind she saw herself bowling head over heels down that dreadful hill, the bicycle bouncing on top of her, smashing her bones to powder. She shuddered, and pushed Nathan away.
‘Leave me!’
Just at that moment, a car appeared. It was on the other side of the road, and going downhill, slowly in first gear because of the steep drop, and the woman driver called out to the children. ‘You all right?’
‘Yeah, fine,’ said Nathan.
‘Is she ill, do you need help?’
‘No, she ain’t ill. She’s fine.’
‘Are you sure?’
How many times did this stupid woman have to be told? ‘We’re fine. We’re just having a rest.’ Nathan forced his lips into a grin, and waved jauntily, to show that all was well.
There was danger everywhere. The danger of the hill, of the traffic, of people noticing them, just when they wanted to be particularly invisible. And on top of it all, Julia had to be difficult.
‘Ju, come on,’ said Nathan, losing his patience. ‘Come on, you’re not hurt. Come on, we’re nearly there.’ He didn’t know if they were, of course, but there was no harm in saying it. ‘Come on, Ju, we’ll have a rest now. Against the hedge though. Come on, don’t sit in the middle of the road. The next car might stop. They might start asking questions.’
But Julia ignored him. She just sat in an exhausted heap, weeping uncontrollably.
‘Julia!’
‘I wish we never come up this hill,’ she sobbed.
‘Come on, get up.’ Nathan grabbed Julia’s arm, and this time she let him drag her to her feet. They leaned against the bank, and Nathan searched his mind for an answer to their problem. The road ahead, he could see, was no less steep. Julia was too weak to push her bicycle any further. Even after a rest, he doubted she could do it. He doubted he could push his own. Not the way he’d been pushing it before.
Suddenly an idea occurred to him. ‘I know, I know how we can do it, Ju!’ He seized the handles of his bicycle to show her his idea. ‘Look, like this – we wiggle the bicycles. See? Side to side, like this. Keep twisting the wheel. See? Zig-zag, like this!’
It was certainly better that way. Still hard to push, of course, but the angled front wheel did prevent the bicycle from slipping backwards. ‘Come on, Ju,’ said Nathan. ‘You try it.’
‘No,’ said Julia.
‘After you rested then.’
‘No,’ said Julia, stubbornly, ‘I ain’t going no further.’
‘What you want to do then?’
‘Don’t know.’
She was in one of her moods. Like in the bedroom, back in Brighton. There would be no shifting her.
‘All right,’ said Nathan. I’ll push mine to the top, then I’ll come back and push yours. You can just walk. You can do that, can’t you?’
‘Don’t leave me alone,’ wailed Julia, in sudden panic.
‘I’m going anyway,’ said Nathan, hardening his heart.
Well, what else could he do? She’d get over it. Ignoring Julia’s lamentations, Nathan pushed off with his bicycle.
In a caravan site not far from Watchet, an elderly man with a bald head was having a cup of tea and trying to resist the nagging of his wife.
‘Well, I say we ought to go to the police,’ she persisted.
‘Oh mother leave it alone. It’s nearly a week ago now.’
‘Yes, and we ought to have gone when it happened, straight away.’
‘Well we didn’t. How were we to know?’
‘We knew they stowed away in our caravan. We knew they came all the way from Brighton. We saw it was two kids when they ran off into the trees.’
‘We’re on holiday. We can’t be responsible for other people’s kids.’
‘But suppose it was those two children from London They’re still missing, it says in the paper. We could have helped the police find them.’
‘It can’t be them. It’s too much of a coincidence.’
‘Why is it too much of a coincidence? They’ve got to be somewhere. In someone’s town, or street, or back garden. I say we should go to the police. Today.’
‘All right, all right, anything for a quiet life. We’ll take the car and go into Minehead. There’s sure to be a police station there. Come on, get your coat, we’ll go now, and get it over.’
14
On the moor
Pushing the bicycle, Nathan’s head was well down, his field of vision restricted to the road beneath him, with brief glimpses of the banks on either side. When he felt the ground levelling out, he looked up. But this was not the moor, this was not what he had seen on telly. Before he went back for Julia, Nathan wanted to get to the real moor.
There was a sort of metal grid in the road. Nathan clattered over that and looked up again. Still hedges on either side – this was not the moor. He pushed on, almost running with the bicycle now. Just a bit further, just a little bit further. Stupid Julia would be fretting, but she could wait.
And at last, there it was. And it was better than in the book, the one about Lorna Doone, better than the programme on the telly, better than anything Nathan had ever seen in his life, except perhaps the sea at Brighton. Bitterly, Nathan regretted the loss of the glasses that would have allowed him to see it better. Never mind, he could see, he could see!
He could see a great undulating carpet of green and purple, spread all around him, away and away into the misty distance. He could see the sea, far below. ‘Look at that!’ he said aloud. ‘What about that!’ And he dropped his bicycle and did a little dance, tired as he was, all by himself on the moor, where there was no one to see him, and think he was mad.
Wait till Julia sees this, he marvelled. Wait till the old Rat-bag sees where we’re going to camp. Then she won’t say she’s sorry we came up the hill. Nathan laid the bicycle in the heather, and started to make his way down on foot. When he first caught sight of Julia, he saw that she was watching, with great interest, something going on in the hedge beside the road. As she saw him coming, she dropped her head and made herself look tragic and abandoned again, but she was clearly putting it on now.
‘It’s a bird, learning how to fly,’ said Nathan, spotting what it was she had been looking at.
‘Is it?’ Julia tried to sound indifferent, but really she was so glad to see him, the remains of her mood melted into the air.
‘Yeah – it’s a young one.’
‘I thought it might be hurt.’
‘Nah – it’s all right. Jul, it’s terrific up there. Just you wait till you see it. It’s terrific.’
Nathan grabbed Julia’s bicycle and started to weave it up the hill. It seemed easier now he knew what was at the top. Julia followed him quite happily. At the top she gazed around her ‘Gawd!’ she exclaimed (her mother’s favourite expression), ‘it’s pretty ain’t it.’
‘It’s more than pretty, Ju.’
‘What’s that purple stuff?’
‘It’s call
ed heather.’
Julia touched it with her hand. ‘It’s all springy. It’ll be nice to put under the beds.’
Trust Julia, to think of something practical.
The children mounted their bicycles and began to ride, cautiously at first, still conscious of the hampering weight, but with increasing confidence. It was still quite early in the morning and there were no other humans in sight, only clusters of white sheep with their half-grown lambs, some of which raised their heads to glance warily at Nathan and Julia. But most of the sheep were not interested, just went on quietly munching their breakfasts, or elevenses, or lunches, or whatever meal it was they were supposed to be having.
The sun was on the children’s faces as they rode, and the moorland air was clean in their city-bred lungs. The loneliness was awesome in a way – all that vast expanse of rounded hills, and tumbling valleys, and no one in it but them. But the solitude was comforting too, because there was nobody to question them, or look at them with suspicious eyes. The children felt safe.
They came to a fork in the road, and took the turning to the left, not because Exford had any meaning for them, but because that way seemed to be going deeper into the moor, further away from people. They were looking for a river, or a stream, but so far they hadn’t seen one. Nathan was sure they must come to one soon though. He knew there was at least one river on Exmoor – the Bagworthy, dark and menacing, with great boulders in it. Not dark on a day like this though, surely. On a day like this it would be bright, sparkling, with little yellow lights from the sun.
When they were tired, the children sat in the heather and ate their lunch. They ate crisps and biscuits and little triangles of cheese out of a box. There was one can of Coke each, but Julia hoped it wouldn’t be too long before they found a river, because after that there would be nothing left to drink. Besides, she didn’t think she could ride much further today.
They mounted their bicycles once more and rode on. By now they were no longer alone on the moor. Cars full of trippers were passing them all the time, and a boy in one leaned out of the window to wave to them. He was only being friendly, but Nathan didn’t like to be attracting attention. On Exmoor, he had thought, they would be really hidden. When they set off again, they took another turning to the right, one that didn’t seem to be interesting the passing cars.
And still they had seen no river.
They began to worry. Not out loud, but each silently, wondering what was to become of them if they could find nowhere suitable to camp. But they had not come so far for nothing. It was Julia who spotted it, of course. Nathan’s eyes could not have seen so far, and even Julia almost missed it, because at the angle of the road they were travelling, it was almost hidden between two great hills. ‘Look,’ she shouted, braking quickly and slipping off her bicycle.
‘Where?’ said Nathan, shading his eyes and peering.
It was just a flash of silver, a long way down, below the heather and the bracken and the little clumps of woodland.
‘There!’ said Julia. ‘I wonder if we can get the bikes down.’
It was not easy, dragging the bicycles over the rough ground, but there was no particular hurry, now they had found a place to go. Down in the valley the tiny brilliant stream danced over clean pebbles.
‘Can they see us from the road?’ said Nathan, anxiously.
‘We can’t put the tents just here anyway,’ said Julia. ‘It’s too slopy. We’ll have to go further on.’
They followed the stream, searching for ground flat enough to make camp. ‘I don’t mind if it’s a bit slopy,’ said Nathan, who was suddenly feeling very tired. After all, he had worked harder than Julia, that day.
‘Might as well find a really good place while we’re about it,’ said Julia, who seemed to have found an extra spurt of energy from somewhere. ‘Come on, lazybones!’
Who was she calling lazybones! Who did she think she was – after letting him push her bicycle half way up Porlock Hill? Nathan was going to say something nasty, but changed his mind. Julia was pulling her weight now all right, and he knew, without needing to be told, that when the camp was made she would take charge of the cooking and the laundry. She would make sure that the tents were tidy, and the rubbish cleared away, and he wouldn’t have to bother with any of that. He would be free to dream the days away for ever, or at least as far as he could see. The outlook was good enough.
‘There!’ said Julia suddenly in triumph. ‘Look!’
Nathan couldn’t quite see it yet, but Julia was clearly delighted. And, getting nearer, Nathan too was glad he’d made the effort because there, right beside the stream, was a flat space covered with sandy earth, just big enough for one small tent. And beyond a clump of bracken, round a little corner, was another level patch for the second tent to go. ‘Terrific!’ said Nathan, dropping his bicycle and smiling a real smile.
‘Are you tired?’ said Julia, unnecessarily.
‘What do you think?’
‘All right,’ said Julia, kindly. ‘You did push my bicycle, didn’t you. I’ll have a little rest with you, and then I’ll put up both the tents.’
‘You don’t have to,’ said Nathan, not protesting very hard.
‘I don’t mind,’ said Julia. ‘I like it here. I think this is going to be our sort of home.’
A police car had arrived from Minehead, and a man and a woman in uniform were searching the bushes on the sloping cliff that ran down to the sea, below the caravan site not far from Watchet. They did not know what they were looking for, but the bald man and his wife had said that was where the stowaways had run, and it was always possible they might have dropped something.
It did not take them long to find Julia’s beach bag. Inside were two grown-up blouses, the slit skirt, the high-heeled shoes, the torn school dress mended with Sellotape and – an anorak. Inside the collar, written on a tape in indelible ink as the school required, were the faint and smudged letters of a name, J. WINTER.
‘It’s her all right,’ said the policewoman. ‘They were here.’
‘Six days ago,’ said her colleague. ‘Who knows where they are now.’
‘Well, we weren’t to know,’ said the bald man, defensively, when he heard what the police had found.
‘I told you,’ said his wife.
‘Oh leave it mother,’ said the bald man. ‘Everybody makes mistakes sometimes.’
15
A bad storm
The police had found the young man in the grocery shop, the one with the long nose and the red hair, who had directed the children to Taunton to buy their tents.
‘I knew there was something funny,’ he said. ‘Two kids on their own going off to buy camping stuff. And they didn’t seem to know where they were. Never heard of Taunton even. Well, I said to Mrs Nosy Parker—’
‘Mrs Nosy Parker?’
‘Don’t know her name. We all calls her Mrs Nosy Parker – you can guess why. Well anyway, she reckoned it was they kids from London. She went after them, up to the bus stop. She came back after, though. Wasn’t they London kids at all, she said. They were caravanners with their mum and dad. Staying up the Lorna Doone, she said. Well, she seemed satisfied.’
‘Any idea where we can find this Mrs Nosy Parker?’
‘Naw, she ab’m been in the shop good few days now. She id’n local – holiday-maker. Probably gone back where she came from. I can tell’ee for certain the kids went to Taunton though. Mrs Nosy Parker saw them get on the bus.’
‘Well, that’s a help. It’s a lead, anyway.’
‘Hope you track ’em down, poor little devils.’
‘We will, we will.’
The next few days were the happiest either child had ever known. The weather was perfect, the grown-up world far away. With no pressures they relaxed, and blossomed.
Most of the time they went their separate ways. Nathan wandered over the moors, gathering heather and bracken for the beds and dreaming fantastic stories, which he might write down one day if he ever got hi
s glasses back Julia kept house, and practised her reading.
On the evening of the third day they saw three deer, silhouetted against the skyline. Nathan told Julia that people hunted the Exmoor deer, in packs, with horses and dogs. Julia didn’t believe him at first, she thought he was making it up. No one could possibly be so cruel. Nathan told her there were wild ponies on the moor as well as deer, but they hadn’t seen any of those yet.
On the fourth day, the spare cylinder of gas, which fuelled their cooking stove, ran out. Their supply of matches ran out at the same time.
‘I could make a real fire,’ said Julia, ‘if we had some matches.’
‘You can make a fire with the sun,’ said Nathan, ‘if you got a magnifying glass. Have you got a magnifying glass, Julia?’
‘Don’t be silly. . . . We shall have to eat our food cold. And drink water. Don’t matter, eh?’
‘Nah. It’s all right here, isn’t it, Julia. It’s good. It don’t matter having cold food.’
‘Yeah, it’s nice . . . We ain’t got caught yet, have we, Nathan. Elizabeth said we’d get caught.’
‘We’re probably cleverer than her.’
‘Are we going to be running away for always though, Nathan?’
‘I don’t see why not. We got plenty money still.’ Actually, the wads of money were shrinking fast. It didn’t look as though there was going to be any left over for Nathan’s house, after all. Never mind, there was still the tent. No need to think about the money running out just now. ‘Anyway – pretty soon I expect we can get jobs.’
‘What sort of jobs?’ said Julia doubtfully, looking at the wilderness around them.
‘I dunno. Something. Or . . . I know, we could grow things. Dig up the ground and grow our food. How about that, Ju? Isn’t that a good idea?’
‘Yes but – don’t it take a long time for things to grow?’
‘Probably. I dunno really. Anyway, we still got the money. We can go on buying stuff.’
Julia was silent, pondering for a good minute. ‘Nathan,’ she said at last, in a different sort of voice, ‘is it really our money?’