A Stitch in Time Read Free Page A

she thought, must have been noisy last week. It was very quiet now, after lunch, as her mother washed up, her father read the newspaper, and she stood looking out into the garden.
    â€œShall we go and see what the beach is like?”
    â€œYes, please,” said Maria.
    The beach that they went to was a couple of miles or so from the town. Maria, with several years’ experience of beaches behind her, found herself instantly awarding it a high mark. It was unassuming, to begin with – a row of beach huts being about the only facilities it offered. And the clutches of people spread fairly thickly over the area near the car park and beach huts soon thinned out so that to either side the beach stretched away more and more uncluttered, with just a dog or child scampering at the water’s edge, or family group encamped against the cliff.
    It was the cliffs that instantly attracted her attention. Again, they made no large claims: not for them the craggy grandeurs of Cornwall or Wales. And they looked, in some indefinable way, soft rather than hard. It was the colour, chiefly, the slaty grey-blue that matched so nearly the now clouded sky, so that the sea, which had changed from milky green to a pale turquoise, lay as a belt of colourbetween the grey cliffs, the bright shingle of the beach, and the grey sky. And yet they were not, she saw, the same colour all the way up. They were capped at the top with a layer of golden-brown, which in turn was finished off with a green skin of vegetation. And here and there the three levels of colour became confused and inter-mixed, where grass and trees and bushes apparently tumbled in a green tongue down the face of the cliff. She stood staring, entranced, at this agreeable place where Dorset ends, and England, and both slide gracefully away into the sea.
    â€œHere, I think,” said Mrs Foster. They spread their rug and sat.
    They were sitting, as Maria soon found, upon more than just a slab of this grey-blue stone. In the first place it was not stone at all, but a hard, dry clay. A piece of it flaked off under her fingers, as she scratched idly at it. And then, looking closer, lying on her stomach with her face a few inches above the rock, it came to life suddenly under her very eyes. For it was inhabited. There, like delicate scribblings upon the clay, were the whirls and spirals of shell-like creatures – the same, she recognised, as those in the miniature chest of drawers in her room back at that house. But smaller, these were,barely an inch or so across, some of them, but perfect in each ridge and twist. And as she prised one out with the edge of a shell, it crumbled between her fingers into blue dust, but there, below and beneath, was another, and another, and another. The whole rock streamed with a petrified ghost-life.
    â€œLook,” said Maria.
    â€œFossils,” said her mother. “Ammonites. This coast is famous for fossils. You could collect them.” She settled herself on her back, a hump of jerseys under her head, and turned the page of her book.
    But I don’t want to spoil these any more, Maria thought. They’re so pretty. And they’ve been there for millions and millions of years so it’s stupid to spend a Friday afternoon now picking them out and breaking them. If I was good at drawing I would draw a picture of them.
    Instead, she examined the rock carefully, to remember it, and then wandered off among the neighbouring rocks to see if there were any more the same. Most were smooth and empty but one or two glinted with this remote life, though less lavishly. And then she found that by exploring carefully among the pebbles and chunks of rock with which this part of the beach was littered, she could collect fossil fragments, like sections of small greywheels, and occasionally a small, complete, flat one. Once she found a slab of the blue-grey stone, nine or ten inches across, in which two of the fossils hung one above another