“Will they me?” Patsy was alarmed, even though thirteen seemed impossibly far away, almost the whole length of her lifetime.
“I don’t think so, because it’s really expensive and you’re a girl,” Oswald said. He wasn’t looking at her, he was tracing a complicated design in the sand with his finger. “I think they’ll send you to a day school.”
“Why will they send you then?”
“Because of what Dad just said about getting on. Dad left school when he was fourteen and he’s been sorry ever since. He wants me to be a gentleman, just the same as Mum does.” He didn’t look up, but he piled up the sand wildly over the pattern he had made.
“Like Adam,” Patsy said, and for the second time didn’t understand why she had made somebody laugh.
“But it’s all such tosh,” Oswald said. “I’d a hundred times rather be brought up by Gran and get a job at fourteen than spend my life trying to ape something I’m not.”
“Why don’t you tell them so, then?”
“Oh come on Pats, you know there are things you can say and things you can’t.”
She did know. It seemed she had always known. She wanted to do something to comfort her brother, but there wasn’t anything. Gran would have hugged him, but in their house hugging was discouraged. She put her hand out again for him to shake, and he shook it solemnly.
“Come on,” he said.
“Where?” she asked, getting up at once expectantly.
“You’d come anywhere with me, wouldn’t you, Pats?” Oswald smiled down at her. “I must go down to the sea again!”
“The lonely sea and the sky!” she shouted.
“Anything less lonely than the sea in Weymouth on a hot Sunday morning in July is difficult to imagine,” Dad said.
Later, after a bathe where she had swum ten strokes without Dad holding on, she ran on rubbery legs up to Mum’s deckchair. Mum was reading the paper and looking very serious, but she put it down when she saw them and got out the towels and their clothes so they could dress nicely for lunch. Mum had sewn brightly striped beach towels into little tents with elastic around their necks so that they could take their wet things off underneath and didn’t have to go into the changing huts, which were smelly and besides cost money.
Dad dried his back with a big flat towel. “Patsy’s really learning to swim,” he said. “You should enroll her for lessons at the baths when we get back to Twickenham. It’s easier to swim in the baths,” he said over his shoulder to her. “There aren’t any waves to smack you in the face.”
“All right,” Mum said. “If she’d like it. Oswald started going when he was about this age.”
“Have you had a nice peaceful morning?”
“Lovely,” Mum said, though how it could be lovely sitting still in a deckchair reading Patsy couldn’t imagine.
“Is there any news in the paper?” Dad asked.
Mum tutted, which she did when she was going to report on something of which she disapproved. “It seems as if the Nazis in Germany have banned all the other political parties—made them illegal just like that. Theirs is the only party. Goodness knows how they think that’s going to work when they have elections.”
“I don’t suppose they’re planning to have elections,” Dad said. “It looks to me as if that Herr Hitler intends to be Führer for life.”
“And such horrible things,” Mum said. Then she changed her tone completely and turned to Patsy. “Aren’t you dry yet? They’ll be laying out our lunch before we get back if you don’t hurry. We don’t want to make extra work for Mrs. Bonestell.”
Oswald pulled off his towel, revealing his neat shirt and shorts underneath. “I wish we could have a picnic on the beach.”
“Not on a Sunday,” Mum said, reprovingly.
“We got the pulpit built,” Dad said quickly. “Mr. Price will be able to get right up there and preach, and we can all sing hymns as loudly as we can. Patsy was saying he’d convert any heathen on the beach.”
“I hope you built it in the right place this time,” Mum said.
“We took proper notice of the tide,” Dad said. “Don’t worry, there won’t be any of that King Canute preaching this year. Are you dressed under there yet, Patsy?”
Patsy had got her dress twisted up somehow so she couldn’t find the hole for her right arm. Dad held the big towel up and Mum rapidly sorted her out. “Now let’s go up and get some Sunday dinner,” Dad said. “Lunch, I mean. Come on!”
Twelve and a half more days of holiday, Patsy thought, and swimming lessons when she got home. Even if Oswald did have to go away to school it wasn’t for three years, and even if the Germans were acting peculiar they were a long way away. Mum and Dad were smiling at each other and Oswald was carrying the bucket and both spades, and if they were lucky there might be tinned salmon and tomatoes for lunch.
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