Four of them, sometimes five – a dog or a spoiled cousin. Their lives are exquisite yet they long to escape something unnameable that compels them to leave home on the first day of the holidays: it’s a scorcher say the boys, and Cook has packed a hamper. As if these are reasons enough for what follows.

The girls must leave a note with full directions and a map of the adventure, with the time Mother and Cook should expect them back. Just like girls to dally! 

Then off they trot, the boys and the girls plus cousin or dog, and after a jolly good slog it’s the girls who want to stop. Just like girls to nag!

So the boys find an island in the last of the light, or map the best way up a mountain before tea, or reach a clearing in the forest’s heart that waits for their knapsacks.

The boys now must plan how they’ll attack tomorrow, tell the girls to take charge of domestic arrangements so the boys can rest their clever heads. The girls make up beds from bracken – there’s always bracken – and moss, just the right amount, to make beds soft for sleeping. And their make-do home for the night? Let’s say it’s a handy cave with a floor of sand, but it could just as easily be a hollow tree, an abandoned rustic’s hut, a caravan of red and gold. The boys’ choice will always be the right one, and will always, somehow, be waiting for them just when they need it.

Wherever they are, the girls must sweep the place, their brooms fashioned from twigs left from the firewood supply which the girls gathered quietly, for they mustn’t chatter, the boys say, while the boys do the hard work of thinking. And so the girls sweep, and while sweeping they speak in language they have learned every day of their short lives: wordless, urgent.

Their thinking done, the boys light the fire so the girls can cook the boys’ supper. The flames catch as they never fail to for the boys who keep the matches from the girls. Just like girls to moan!

And the girls should be busy anyway – there’s supper to find! Born to find berries blindfolded in every wilderness, these girls, and now the boys are sleeping, and when the girls have washed and dried and put away the supper things, and washed and dried and darned the clothes, they agree: they need to leave.

They creep, these girls, to the back of the cave, to the roots of the tree, under the caravan, to the hut’s hidden attic, and dig up the knives buried while sweeping. The knives pressed on them by Mother, by Cook, by the women they passed on their way who worried. Just like girls to be afraid!

They retrieve the berries they gathered, the poisoned and the safe. They light torches of moss from the fire that must never burn out, never leave them in darkness. Then they’re off. They take the cousin or the dog, and sweep their prints as they go. Just like girls to scope the exits!