The Girls Read Free Page B

horror.
    ‘Slow down,’ said Adele, ‘you’re splashing it everywhere.’
    ‘What can we do after lunch?’ asked Willow, wiping soup splashes from her cheeks with the back of her hand.
    Adele looked at the time. Then she checked the timetable taped to the front of her folder. ‘Well, it’s double maths this afternoon, so it might be good for you all to burn off a bit of energy. Why don’t you go out in the garden for half an hour?’
    ‘It’s wet,’ said Catkin.
    ‘No,’ said Adele. ‘It’s damp. If you were at school it would be deemed playground weather.’
    ‘Yes, but we’re not at school, are we? Precisely because you didn’t like the way mainstream schools herd children around like cattle.’
    Adele sighed. ‘In which case, do whatever you want. But no TV. And back here at one fifteen please. With your brains switched on .’
    The girls left the table, grabbing oaty biscuits and apples on their way. Adele tidied up the soup bowls and wiped the crumbs from the ripped-apart bread rolls into the palm of her hand before dropping them in the bin.
    Adele had been home-schooling her children since Catkin was five. She and Leo had decided to take her out of school halfway through her reception year when she’d come home in tears after being told off for running in the playground. For a while they’d seriously considered moving to the countryside, putting Catkin into one of those wonderful little schools with woods and fields and pigs and goats. But Leo’s revolting father had refused to sell them his half of the flat: ‘It’s my little bit of London! I couldn’t sleep at night without my little bit of London!’
    They’d been to see Montessori schools, Steiner schools, some of the woollier local private schools, but they hadn’t managed to make the finances work. So Adele had given up her job as an education coordinator at an arts centre – it had barely paid her anything anyway – spent a month familiarising herself with the foundation stage of the national curriculum and become her child’s teacher.
    Then had come Fern and then Willow and what had started off as an experiment became a way of life. Not everyone approved. Adele’s sister Zoe, for one, thought it verged on child abuse. ‘But they won’t know how to play with other children,’ she’d said. ‘And they won’t know what’s in and what’s out and everyone will think they’re weirdos!’
    ‘Do you think they’re weirdos?’ Adele had asked in reply.
    ‘No. Of course not. I think they’re lovely. But I’m a middle-aged woman. I’m not another child!’
    ‘They’ve got the garden,’ Adele would counter. ‘They can do all the peer-to-peer stuff they need to do out there. It’s just like a playground.’
    ‘Except it’s not. It’s just not. It’s just another weird thing that makes them different from other children. I couldn’t live like that.’ She’d said this more than once. ‘Everyone being able to see in. Never being able to go and sit in your garden, on your own, in your bra. Always having to talk to people.’
    It was an acquired taste, Adele supposed. Sometimes she did wish she could take a blanket and a book outside and sit and read undisturbed. Sometimes she did resent other people’s children running through her freshly hoovered flat. But the benefits far outweighed the difficulties. And for the girls it was crucial, the lynchpin to their entire existence. Without the garden her sister would probably be right, they would be odd and out on a limb. The other children were their connection to the mainstream world. And, of course, as a world heard about only through the anecdotes of friends, school did sometimes become a romanticised concept and each of the girls had on occasion begged her to let them go to school. When she was eleven years old, Fern had even taken to walking up the hill to Dylan’s school to meet him at three thirty just to feel that she was experiencing the first flush of independence