A Stitch in Time Read Online Free PDF Page B

with their network of lines all differently coloured which might be roads or rivers or railways but you could never be certain which, and their blocks of green and blue and grey which meantother things, and their innumerable names. And there were the places to which they referred, bright and moving with houses and buses and waving trees and bustling people, and how on earth you married the one to the other, as it were, she could not see at all. How you stood before a map and said to yourself, ah! I am here, and I want to be there, so I must walk (or drive, or take a bus) in that direction. And then one day she had wrestled with this problem all on her own, standing in the shopping centre near her home before the street map that said so confidently, with its red pointing arrow, YOU ARE HERE. And all of a sudden she had realised where indeed she was, and the familiar streets and shops had turned themselves into lines and writing and laid themselves handily out upon the map.
    â€œNot very bright, were you,” said the cat. “Most would have tumbled to that a long time ago.”
    â€œI never said I was,” said Maria, “bright.”
    â€œNow take Sally in your class at school,” the cat went on, warming to the subject. “She’s what I’d call bright. Hand up all the time – ‘Please, miss, I know,’ ‘Please, miss, can I answer…’ Nice writing. Red ticks all over her exercise books.”
    But Maria found suddenly that she did not want totalk about Sally in her class at school. It was too nice a day – sun making a white glittering sheet out of the sea, the fields beyond the house ablaze with buttercups and daisies – and moreover, she wanted to look at the map undisturbed. The cat, ignored, went to squat on the kitchen doorstep, and Maria returned to the map. The beach to which they went, she knew, was at Charmouth, and the cliffs beyond it, between Charmouth and Lyme Regis, were called first Black Ven, and then Church Cliffs. And today, she knew, was the day to start exploring all this on her own, very slowly, at great length and in much detail and with conversations with anything likely that happened to come along.
    They drove to Charmouth and walked along the beach, as they had done the first time they had gone there. To shake off the crowds, said Mrs Foster, and Maria thought, to get closer to Black Ven, and, thinking this, wondered why it should be called Black when in fact it was grey and green and golden. Picking their way along the beach she thought of this and other things while her mother selected and then discarded likely sitting-places with all the deliberation of someone buying a house. At last a place was found that was neither too windy nor too shady, neither too near the sea nor too far, unencumberedby seaweed or noisy neighbours. Mrs Foster set about the process of making herself comfortable and establishing the boundaries of their territory, and Maria, watching her, thought that if you were a person who didn’t know about seaside holidays – a visitor from outer space, say, or a prehistoric person – you might be amazed to find that at certain times of the year everybody gathers on the edges of England (and Scotland, and Wales) and just sits on them, looking at the sea. It might seem a very odd thing to do.
    â€œAll right?” said Mrs Foster.
    â€œAll right,” said Maria. And then, after a moment or two, “I think I’ll go and explore.”
    â€œMmn,” said Mrs Foster, opening her book.
    Maria began to climb the slopes at the back of the beach, the toes of the cliff. Grey, muddy toes they were, and looking up she saw that this dried grey mud had slid in long tongues down from the top, like pictures of glaciers in geography books. The mud had cracked into scaly patterns, and here and there, as you walked upon it, it quaked a little as though deep down its foundations were uncertain. A notice back at the