Grasshopper

Clodagh was nineteen when her parents packed her off to college and a relative's house in north London, two years after the death on the pylon, the worst thing that had ever happened to her. They blamed her for it, everyone did, and that was why they were sending her away.Maida Vale was unexpected. Not the suburban mock-Tudor houses of her imagination, but mansions like Italian palaces and the towers of a Victorian metropolis. And not the kind of people to look after a lonely and wayward niece. It was obvious to Clodagh from the first that her aloof, academic cousin and his sitcom-star wife saw themselves as being exceptionally helpful in lending her their dingy basement flat. They knew nothing of her claustrophobia, that she felt free only in the wide open fields of her Suffolk home.