The Distant Home Read Online Free

birth and the events that began on their twelfth birthday, were absolutely normal. Almost, one might say, suspiciously normal.
    The only odd thing, the only thing that people could point to later, was that Sally never got sick. People say sometimes that they’ve never had a day’s illness in their lives, but it is never quite true. With Sally Harrison it was literally true. She was never ill, never had a cold, never had flu, never had measles or chicken pox or mumps or any of the things you expect kids to catch when they are young. Even when her twin brother Bobby caught them, she never caught them from him.
    Apart from school health checks, Sally never saw a doctor, and as we will discover later, she never even saw one then. So the events of her twelfth birthday came as something of a surprise.
    It really started the night before, when Jim and Maria were going out to an official dinner, one at which the accountancy firm that Jim still worked for, Flannery and Flannery, was to be given an award.
    Old Mr Flannery had died some years back, so it was young Mr Flannery (as the staff still thought of him, though he was not young in any other sense) who would be accepting the award on behalf of the firm.
    Young Mr Flannery had been pretty busy going to lunch and playing golf that week, so Jim had written his acceptance speech for him, had his secretary word-process it and print it out and had then left it on Mr Flannery’s desk that morning.
    Now Jim was dressed up in his dinner suit, and Maria in her evening dress, and they were preparing to go out, just as they had when they were dating before they got married and had children.
    Sally and Bobby were so impressed with the way their parents looked—just like rich people on TV was the way Bobby put it—that they were taking turns photographing Jim and Maria when Mrs Webster arrived from next door to babysit, though that was a word that the twins had banned from the house since they were six. As far as they were concerned, it was okay for Mrs Webster to visit any time Jim and Maria were out. Mrs Webster was their friend, and they enjoyed her visits and her stories, but any talk of babysitting and there was a revolution.
    So this night, the night before their twelfth birthday, Mrs Webster was coming in to visit. As usual she brought her cookie tin and her knitting with her, and as usual, the twins were expecting one of her stories.
    Mrs Webster’s stories had become a big part of their lives, just the way that Mrs Webster had. Their real grandmothers both lived in towns a long way away, and they had adopted Mrs Webster as a third grandmother. Not that they ever said that to their real grandmothers, because they did not want to hurt them, but Mrs Webster was really interesting.
    She had had a very colourful life. She had worked on ships, she had been in a war once (she never said which one, but Sally had estimated her age and decided she had probably been in the services in World War Two, perhaps in the Navy which would also explain the ships). She had travelled a lot, she knew heaps about one of Sally’s favourite subjects, astronomy (though she sometimes called the constellations by very strange names) and she had more stories in her head than the whole school library had on its shelves.
    She was more like a friend than a grown-up. You could tell Mrs Webster things you could not tell other people, and she always seemed to understand. So Sally and Bobby were really looking forward to this night.
    Just as Mrs Webster came in, the phone rang and Jim picked it up. Maria saw his face change. A moment before he had been making faces for the camera, and posing with Maria as if they were models. Now his face got that kind of worried, sad look that it always did when Mr Flannery rang him.
    And of course it was indeed Mr Flannery. He was wanting to know where his speech was. Jim explained that he had left it on Mr Flannery’s desk, and Mr Flannery was saying that was no good, he had not