Read "Dangerous Ages" by Rose Macaulay online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
The long strange days slid by like many-coloured dreams. The steep tumbling roads tilted behind them, with their pale, old, white and slate hamlets huddled between fields above a rockbound sea. Sometimes they would stop early in the day at some fishing village, find rooms there for the night, and bathe and sail till evening. When they bathed, Nan would swim far out to sea, striking through cold, green, heaving waters, slipping cleverly between currents, numbing thought with bodily action, drowning emotion in the sea.
Once they were all caught in a current and a high sea and swept out, and had to battle for the shore. Even Nan, even Barry, could not get to the cove from which they had bathed; all they could try for was the jut of rocks to westward toward which the seas were sweeping, and to reach this meant a tough fight.