the theatre, was likely to send them into a state of apoplexy.
Below her, the washing shrugged wetly on the line. A leg of the denim jeans Grandma Nicolson hated so much (‘You look cheap, Laurel— there’s nothing worse than a girl who throws herself around’) flapped against the other, frightening the one-winged hen into squawking and turning circles. Laurel slid her white-rimmed sunglasses onto her nose and slumped against the tree-house wall.
The problem was the war. It had been over for sixteen years—al- most all her life—and the world had moved on. Every-thing was different now; gas masks, uniforms, ration cards, and all the rest of it, too, belonged only in the big old khaki trunk her father kept in the attic. Sadly, though, some people didn’t seem to realise it; namely, the entire population over the age of twenty-five.
Billy said she wasn’t ever going to find the words to make them understand. He said it was called the ‘generation gap’ and that trying to explain herself was pointless; that it was like it said in the Alan Sillitoe book he carried everywhere in his pocket, that adults weren’t supposed to understand their children and you were doing something wrong if they did.
A habitual streak in Laurel—the good girl, loyal to her parents— had leapt to disagree with him, but she hadn’t. Her thoughts had fallen instead to the nights lately when she man-aged to creep away from her sisters; when she stepped out into the balmy dusk, transistor radio tucked beneath her blouse, and climbed with a racing heart into the tree house. There, alone, she’d hurry the tuning dial to Radio Luxembourg and lie back in the dark letting the music surround her. And as it seeped into the still country air, blanketing the ancient landscape with the newest songs, Laurel’s skin would prickle with the sublime intoxication of knowing herself to be part of something bigger: a worldwide conspiracy, a secret group. A new generation of people, all listening at the very same moment, who understood that life, the world, the future, were out there waiting for them …
Laurel opened her eyes and the memory fled. Its warmth lingered though, and with a satisfied stretch she followed the path of a rook casting across a graze of cloud. Fly little birdie, fly. That would be her, just as soon as she finished school and turned eighteen. She continued to watch, allowing herself to blink only when the bird was a pin prick in the far-off blue; telling herself that if she managed this feat her parents would be made to see things her way and the future would unfurl cleanly.
Her eyes watered triumphantly and she let her gaze drop back towards the house: the window of her bedroom, the Michaelmas daisy she and Ma had planted over the poor, dead body of Constable the cat, the chink in the bricks where, embarrassingly, she used to leave notes for the fairies.
There were vague memories of a time before, of being a very small child, collecting winkles from a pool by the seashore, of dining each night in the front room of her grandmother’s seaside boarding house, but they were like a dream. The farmhouse was the only home she’d ever known. And although she didn’t want a matching armchair of her own, she liked seeing her parents in theirs each night; knowing as she fell asleep that they were murmuring together on the other side of the thin wall; that she only had to reach out an arm to bother one of her sisters.
She would miss them when she went.
Laurel blinked. She would miss them. The certainty was swift and heavy. It sat in her stomach like a stone. They borrowed her clothes, broke her lipsticks, scratched her records, but she would miss them. The noise and heat of them, the movement and squabbles and crushing joy. They were like a litter of puppies, tumbling together in their shared bedroom. They overwhelmed outsiders and this pleased them. They were the Nicolson girls: Laurel, Rose, Iris, and Daphne; a garden of daughters, as Daddy rhapsodised when he’d had a pint too many. Unholy terrors, as Grandma proclaimed after their holiday visits.
She could hear the distant whoops and squeals now, the faraway watery sounds of summer by the stream. Something inside her tightened as if a rope had been pulled. She could picture them, like a tableau from a long-ago painting. Skirts tucked into the sides of their knickers, chasing