Текст книги "The Boy with No Boots"

Автор книги: Sheila Jeffries

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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 16 страниц)

Chapter Three

BROKEN CHINA

Levi fumbled with the brass buckle of his leather belt as he strode towards the cottage. The boy deserved a good strapping. He’d never tell such lies again; Levi would beat it out of him. The Barcussy family didn’t tell lies. Now Freddie had brought shame on the family. Levi had always known his last son was different, and clever, Harry Price had said. Levi had swelled with pride, momentarily, then the lies had come scorching in, spoiling it, burning it black like a slice of good bread accidentally dropped from a toasting fork into glowing coals.

He was close to the cottage now, his throat hot with rage. He could see Annie’s face watching him over the hedge like a rising harvest moon half hidden under the navy blue hat that loomed on her head. Wait until she heard what Harry Price had said about her precious son.

The rage festered in his boots as he covered the last strides to the cottage gate. His swollen feet wanted to stamp and punish the whole earth until his bones rang with the pain. The sight of Freddie’s pale quiff of hair and luminous eyes stopped Levi in his tracks as the boy darted towards him, smiling with a radiance so disempowering that Levi could only stand locked into his fury.

‘Hello, Dad. I’m better. And look what we found.’ Under Freddie’s small arm was a bristling sheaf of golden barley.

‘He’s a good lad,’ crowed Annie, looking down at him fondly. ‘He’s helped me all the way home. I had a – a turn. Proper bad I was. Shaking. And he got me home, bless his little heart.’

Levi stood, powerless, hands clenched at his sides as he felt his limited supply of language escaping, the words swirling away from him like tealeaves down a plughole.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ Annie stared at him, her eyes suddenly dark with alarm. ‘Lost your job or something?’

‘What’s wrong, Dad?’ Freddie hovered in front of him and Levi glowered into the child’s eyes. He took hold of Freddie’s shoulder and steered him into the cottage with Annie bustling behind. She took the rustling barley sheaf from Freddie’s arms and stashed it against the kitchen wall.

‘Your hand is shaking, Dad,’ said Freddie, and Annie swung round, pausing in the middle of taking her hat off. A strand of grey hair fell across her cheek.

‘Levi,’ she said in a warning tone. ‘You haven’t been drinking, have you?’

Levi sat down heavily at the scrubbed wooden table, his head in his hands. Still the words refused to assemble. He raised a knobbly fist and banged it down on the table with such force that the nearby dresser shuddered and the china tinkled. Two willow pattern plates rolled along the shelf and perched precariously. Annie moved towards them, and the sight of her arm reaching out, and the disapproving frown on her face unlocked Levi’s anger.

At first the words came slowly, like shingle tumbling.

‘You. Boy. Stand up straight and look at me.’

Freddie responded eagerly, his back straight, questions shimmering in his eyes.

‘I’ve been to see Harry Price,’ rasped Levi. He fingered the buckle of his belt again. ‘Look at me, boy.’

‘I am,’ said Freddie, shivering now as he saw the colour of rage seeping up his father’s stubbly throat, over his chin and up his cheeks until, when it reached his eyes, it was crimson.

‘I’ve never laid a finger on any of my children,’ whispered Levi. His eyes bulged with pain. ‘But you’ve been telling LIES.’

Freddie stared hotly back at him.

‘I have not.’

Levi lunged forward and caught Freddie’s threadbare shirt by the sleeve, his angry fingers tore a strip out of the material. Annie gave a cry, and Freddie’s bottom lip started to quiver.

Levi’s other hand was on his belt, undoing the buckle, the wide leather strap trailing to the floor.

‘So help me, God, I’ll thrash you, boy. Any more lies. Do you hear? Do you?’

‘No, Levi!’ screamed Annie. ‘He’s not strong, Levi. You’ll kill him.’

Freddie stood motionless. His calm eyes inspected Levi’s tortured soul with sadness and understanding. A shell of light seemed to be protecting the boy, and Levi couldn’t touch him. He raised the belt high and hit the table with it, again, and again. He worked himself into a frenzy, his lips curling and spitting, the smell of the corn mill and the stench of sweat emanating from him into the room. Freddie backed away and climbed onto the deep window seat, his favourite corner, shuffling himself back behind the brown folds of curtain. Annie just stood, her hat in one hand, her face like a stone lion.

Levi heaved the table over with a crash, kicking it and roaring in wordless fury. The tinkle of china from the dresser, the chink of anxiety in Annie’s eyes, and the sight of Freddie hunched in the corner with his torn shirt and bony knees and eyes that refused to look shocked, enraged him further. One by one he seized every plate, every china cup, every jug and teapot from the dresser and smashed them on the stone floor. When he had finished, he collapsed into his fireside chair and cried. The rage was spent, purged into a mosaic of winking china across the flagstone floor. Now the last dregs of it sobbed out of him like ripples, further and further apart until finally Levi was still.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry,’ and he began to weep again until his eyes were red and his rough cheeks soaking wet. ‘I’m sorry.’ He looked across at Freddie, surprised to see him sitting calmly, watching.

‘Don’t you ever,’ Levi said. ‘Freddie, don’t you ever be like me.’

‘I won’t,’ said Freddie. Throughout his father’s display of rage, Freddie had sat quietly, looking across the room at his mother’s frozen eyes. It wasn’t the first time in his young life that Freddie had witnessed Levi’s uncontrollable temper, watched him smash things then cry with shame, as he was doing now, stooping to pick up the two halves of a cream and brown teapot, holding them tenderly in his hands.

‘I can mend this. I’m sorry, Annie. I’m so sorry. I’ll make it up to you.’

Annie moved then, picking her way through the fragments of china. Her mother’s willow pattern. Auntie Flo’s jug. The gold-rimmed bone china cups which were her pride and joy. She went to Levi and put a comforting hand on his shoulder. She said nothing but her silence was powerful. It healed Levi’s battered psyche like nothing else. She looked at Freddie, and he crept out to be part of the silence, both of them nursing Levi as if he were a hurt animal.

Levi glanced up at the fragile radiance of his small son.

‘I’m sorry, lad. I’m so sorry,’ he said again, in a grating voice, and his red-rimmed eyes checked the pale moon of the clockface over the hearth. Right on cue it breathed in and started to chime its Westminster chimes, and each melodious note seemed to vibrate through the smithereens of china.

‘I gotta go to work,’ said Levi. ‘I took time off to . . . to . . .’

‘All right dear,’ said Annie, steering him away from the subject of Harry Price and Freddie’s lies.

‘My arthritis. ’Tis bad.’ Levi stood up unsteadily. ‘But—’ He looked at Freddie. ‘We gotta talk about this.’

‘After tea,’ declared Annie. ‘We’ll sit round the table and sort it out. Now – help me pick up this table before you go – and Freddie, you get the brush and sweep up.’

Freddie swept the shattered china into a rusty dustpan.

‘I could make something with this,’ he said.

‘No you couldn’t,’ Annie replied. She was stripping the grain from the barley sheaf, putting it to soak in a deep bowl.

‘I could, Mother. I could make a sailing ship.’ Freddie collected the white and gold curved fragments of cup, holding them up and turning them thoughtfully. He could see in his mind the billowing white sails and the idea of making a model ship excited him. The broken curves of Auntie Flo’s jug would make the base of the ship. He planned to get clay from the streambed and work it into a boat shape. Then he’d set the broken china into it. Or he’d make a bird. An owl with big eyes.

‘No Freddie. You’ll cut your hands,’ warned Annie. ‘You put that china in the bin.’

But Freddie just looked at her. He took the dustpan outside, where he quickly picked out the bits he needed for his sailing ship and his owl and hid them inside a hollow log at the back of the coal shed. He tipped the remainder into the dustbin. When he went back inside, he saw that Annie was touching the empty dresser, and he planned to make the ship and the owl in secret and stand them up there to fill the empty space. He wasn’t going to let his parents stop him.

After a tea of thick yellow cornbread spread with dripping followed by baked apples, Levi slumped into his fireside chair, looking apprehensive.

‘We gotta sort this out.’

Annie sat on the other side of the bright fire, darning a grubby grey sock with brown wool, and despite her apparent indifference, Freddie was glad of her solid presence as he faced his father. He dreaded another outburst, but Levi was calm now, his voice and eyes flat and defeated.

‘Now, Harry Price told me you was clever,’ he began. ‘And I were proud, Freddie. I were proud of you.’ His eyes glistened with disappointment. ‘Then he said you told lies, Freddie. And it weren’t just one lie. Now what have you got to say about that?’

‘I don’t tell lies,’ insisted Freddie. He squared his shoulders and directed his candid gaze into Levi’s confused eyes.

‘But Harry Price says you do.’ Levi wagged a crusty old finger and put his face closer. ‘He says you told him you saw his wife standing there, and you described her, and she’s dead, Freddie. Dead. So how can you see her? Eh?’

‘But I did see her. I can see people who are dead,’ said Freddie.

Annie gasped and her darning needle paused in mid-air, the long brown strand of wool slowly slipped out of the metal eye and trailed over her lap. Freddie turned and looked at her.

‘Can’t I, Mother?’

Levi looked flummoxed, the colour spreading again from his collar and over his neck.

Annie leaned forward, the darning needle still in her hand. Her bust heaved with the dilemma she now faced. Pacify Levi, or protect Freddie, or tell the truth? She took a deep breath.

‘Levi,’ she said. ‘He’s got the gift.’

Levi sank back into a confused silence.

‘It’s in my family,’ Annie said. ‘My mother had it, and my Nan. Whether you like it or not, Freddie’s got it. He can see people who’ve passed on. It’s a gift, Levi. A gift.’

‘Tis wrong,’ shouted Levi. ‘I’m telling ’e. Wrong. Bad, that’s what. And I don’t want no son of mine doing it. I don’t want no fortune-telling or mumbo jumbo in this family. D’you hear? I won’t have it. I might be poor, I might work in a corn mill, but I’m honest. I don’t tell no lies.’

‘Tell him, Freddie,’ encouraged Annie. Freddie was edging nearer and nearer to her, backing away from his father, glad of Annie’s warmth and support.

‘I do really see people,’ he said. ‘Not all the time. Just now and again. But why is it wrong to see nice people? They aren’t bad just because they’re dead, Dad, are they?’

Levi didn’t answer. Instead he took out his pipe, tapped it on the hearth and started stuffing a fruity mix of tobacco into it. He lit a dead match from the fire and disappeared into the curls of blue smoke. Then he coughed convulsively, growling and retching. Words had abandoned him again, leaving him spluttering like a clogged engine. Exhaustion, frustration, the war, the corn mill, all of it loomed between him and his longing to be a good father. Levi was fighting his own war, and he wasn’t winning. All he could do was put up barriers of discipline, whether he agreed with it or not.

‘Now you listen to me,’ he drew Freddie close again, noticing the torn shirt and yesterday’s bruises. ‘I forbid you ever to speak of this again. D’you hear? If you do see people, as you say, then you are not to speak of it. Not to me, or your mother, your sisters and brother, or Harry Price.’

‘And not Doctor Stewart either,’ added Annie.

‘Or the vicar.’

Freddie studied their frowning faces in the firelight. From now on his life would be ring-fenced. Secret. A secret life. That’s what he would have. He’d say yes and no, and go to school, and stand in the queue for the shop, and carry his dreams in a secret golden box inside his head. But when I’m grown up, he thought, things will be different. No one will tell me what to do and what not to do.

Chapter Four

GRANNY BARCUSSY

Twice a year Freddie was sent on ‘his holiday’, a mile across the fields to where Levi’s mother lived alone in her farmhouse. He didn’t have much to pack, a few matchboxes, a pencil, a tobacco tin and a precious fishing net. This time he had something extra.

‘When you give a present, you wrap it up in something,’ Annie had said. ‘Brown paper and string, and sealing wax. But we haven’t got any of that now the war is on. Wretched war. I’ll be glad when it comes to an end.’ She rummaged in the kitchen cupboard and fished out a piece of butter muslin. ‘Here you are. Roll it up in that.’

Freddie took the soft butter muslin and wrapped the present for Granny Barcussy, and tied it round with a frayed blue ribbon.

‘I used to wear that in my hair, when I was a girl,’ said Annie, taking the ribbon and tying it in a bow. ‘There. That looks like a present now. But don’t you let your father see it. He’ll . . .’

Freddie nodded. ‘I know.’

‘What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over,’ said Annie, and she packed it into the old carpetbag with Freddie’s pyjamas, and a dead pigeon.

‘Do I have to carry that?’ asked Freddie, looking at the iridescent greens and purples in the pigeon’s neck, and its head flopped sideways, the eyes closed under white lids.

‘’Course you do. Don’t be so silly. I’ve got to send something for you to eat. Granny will make a pigeon pie.’

Freddie looked at his mother anxiously.

‘How are you going to go out, Mother? When I’m not here.’

‘I shan’t need to.’

‘But what if you do?’

‘I’ll manage. Now don’t you worry, Freddie. You like going to Granny don’t you? Just remember she’s eighty-one. You get the wood in for her and feed the chickens – and don’t go playing by the river – and don’t loiter about daydreaming. Go straight there.’

Freddie still worried about his mother as he waved goodbye and set off across the fields which were wet and squishy underfoot. He knew the way well. Over the sheep pastures, through the woods and down towards the river valley. The baby lambs and the song thrushes cheered him up, and the thought of a holiday, and the present tucked in his carpetbag under the wings of the dead pigeon. And he had another surprise, hidden in one of his matchboxes.

He was climbing the stile into the woods when a strange feeling crept over him like a warm wind blowing on his skin. Something, or someone, was inside the woods, waiting for him to jump down from the stile. Freddie perched on the rail, the carpetbag clutched in his hands looking, searching the flickering twilight of the woods. He could smell the primroses and the moss, and he could smell the person who was waiting. He smelled of sweet meadow hay and boot polish.

Freddie got down from the stile and started to walk over soft pine needles on hushed footsteps. It was silent under the tall conifers, but he could hear the whisper of soft-treading feet padding beside him, and the swish of a cloak brushing his skin. He stopped under a lime tree, and the other feet stopped. But still he couldn’t see anyone, even when he sat down against the cool trunk of the lime tree, and searched the space with his eyes.

The sun had gone behind a cloud and the lights of the wood vanished into translucent gloom. Around his legs were the amber spirals of young ferns uncurling from dark leaf mould, and pale mounds of primroses which seemed to shine with a light of their own. The light that appeared in front of Freddie was primrose-coloured, a tall shimmering shape. He reached out and touched it, and it felt like velvet, indescribably smooth and lingering, a sensation that infused his skin with secret energy.

Freddie closed his eyes and visualised the space around him, something he practised doing often. The scene came instantly to life. First he saw the energy of the sap rising from the tree roots below the soil like fountains of glistening light, green gold and lemon gold, branching into thousands and thousands of arteries that trickled through the new young stalks and leaves. He listened and he could hear the subtle high-pitched music of growth; each tree sang with a different voice, the voice of its growing. The sky between the leaves rang with the hum of honeybees in the lime flowers.

‘The bee-loud glade,’ Freddie thought, remembering the poem he had learned at school. ‘This is like Innisfree. I’ll live alone in the bee-loud glade.’ He loved the poem because to him it was about a man who wanted to live alone where no one could tell him what to do.

With his eyes still closed, and believing himself to be alone, Freddie decided to say the whole poem aloud, say it to the singing trees and the dancing lights of the wood that were coming alive in his vision. He took a deep breath and began:

‘I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

Nine bean rows will I have there, and a hive for the honeybee

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.’

Preoccupied with his recital and his vision, Freddie didn’t hear the very real footsteps coming through the wood. Softly and briskly they came, winding between the ferns, a long black skirt swinging, snagging on brambles, a forked hazel stick hooking them away. A person so small and light inside the black skirt and shawl, she could move over the ground like a whisper, not shaking it. She could pause like a hoverfly over a flower, and listen undiscovered to Freddie’s clear boyish voice under the canopy of the lime tree. With a benevolent swish she sat down on the other side of the tree trunk and waited.

Freddie emerged from his dream very slowly. To be slow was real luxury, and he could only do it when he was quite alone. Even now, Annie’s words were hammering insistently in his head. No loitering around daydreaming. Or Harry Price’s barking voice. Wake up, boy. Wake up.

But now he was on holiday, under a lime tree. A time to stretch and yawn out loud, and open his eyes a slit at a time, allowing the rich colours of mosses and tree roots to come in gently. The backs of his knees were embossed with the patterns of twigs and grass, and he rubbed them back to life, brushing leaves and scraps of bark from his socks. Then his hand touched a different fabric, a fabric that wasn’t his, smooth and cottony, draped over the tree roots. His eyes opened wide, following the swirl of black fabric round the tree.

‘Granny Barcussy!’

‘My Fred.’

She never called him Freddie. Too babyish, she declared, for an old soul like her grandson.

‘How are you, Granny?’ said Freddie politely.

‘Eighty-one, and still dancing, my luvvy.’

Granny Barcussy only had three teeth, one at the top and two randomly spaced at the bottom, but her eyes more than compensated for the dark cave of a smile. Eyes that danced with secret knowledge, eyes that made Freddie feel grown up and trusted, and loved. He studied the pattern of wrinkles on her face and saw her as a line drawing, if only he had a sharp enough pencil and a clean square of paper.

‘I got you a present,’ he said.

‘A present! And it ’tidn’t me birthday, Fred.’

Shoving the dead pigeon aside, Freddie extracted the butter muslin parcel from the carpetbag. His heart began to thud excitedly as he put it into her hands.

‘Ooh. ’Tis a cheese,’ she cried, sniffing it.

‘No,’ said Freddie. ‘Unwrap it. Go on.’

‘’Tis heavy. What can it be?’ She looked at him sideways under her silver eyebrows. ‘What have you been up to?’

Freddie was so excited he felt his stomach trembling as she slowly untied the blue ribbon and he watched her old hands unrolling the muslin parcel in the woodland sunlight. At last it was out, and he saw it again, the owl he had made from the broken china.

Granny Barcussy gasped. Speechless, she stared down at the owl. Its eyes, ringed with two gold cup handles, winked back at her, cleverly made with black and white china flowers. Its breast feathers, set in the clay, were made from the splinters of Annie’s china cups, the wings from fragments of a brown and cream jug, the feet from more curly bits of handle.

‘Where did this come from, Fred?’

‘I made it. For you.’

Now he’d said it. Freddie had looked forward to this moment all the winter. He’d worked on the owl in secret, digging clay from the streambed, moulding it and rolling it, keeping it wet and pressing the china into it. Some of his blood was in it too; he’d cut his fingers and got into trouble for it, but he wouldn’t be stopped, and he’d kept the owl hidden under a loose floorboard in his bedroom. And each time he took it out he’d imagined how Granny Barcussy’s eyes would shine when she saw it. He wasn’t disappointed.

‘Oh, but ’tis beautiful. Beautiful,’ she murmured, the words surfacing from somewhere deep in her chest. ‘You made this. You clever, clever boy.’

Freddie soaked up the praise. It was something he so rarely had, and he stored the feeling away to sustain him in harder times. He’d made a treasure out of a disaster. But Levi wouldn’t see it like that. It would stir up guilt and shame, and Annie had deemed it wiser not to show it to him.

‘It’s got some of my blood in it,’ he said cheekily and Granny Barcussy laughed out loud and gave him a hug.

‘Then I shall love it all the more,’ she declared, and her eyes looked at him shrewdly. ‘And don’t think I don’t know where this broken china came from. Enough said. Come on now, Fred. I’ve got our dinner ready. We’re having BACON and potatoes.’

Granny Barcussy’s place was full of chickens. They sat up on the back of the old leather sofa, and on top of the oak sideboard plumped together in sociable little groups, coming and going as they pleased through the square-window which was always open. They weren’t allowed in the kitchen.

‘I’ve only got nine left,’ she said. ‘That old fox had my lovely cockerel; lovely bird he was, used to boss the hens about, rush them inside if the buzzard came over. They don’t lay many eggs now, now he’s gone. Fox had him in broad daylight. Now, mind you don’t sit on an egg, Fred. They lays them in funny places. You might hatch it!’ Granny cackled with laughter as if she was a chicken herself. She darted around the cottage, talking non-stop.

Freddie was quiet. He had found Millie, a glossy black chicken who would sit on his shoulder, or settle on his lap like a cat. He loved the warmth of her on him, the mysterious depth of her plumage, the motherly crooning sounds she made in her throat. And he loved being allowed to just sit there on the sofa and watch the life of the cottage. Sparrows came in and out with the chickens, and high on one of the beams were two corpulent spiders who had been there for years and their webs were old and dust-covered, festooned with the flies they had caught and wrapped in gossamer. Now one of them had a pale orange cocoon attached to the wall. Freddie watched her fussing over it and wondered what it was.

‘That’s her family,’ said Granny Barcussy. ‘All her hundreds of children in there. Waiting for the right moment to be born.’

‘How are they born?’ asked Freddie, fascinated.

‘The cocoon explodes, not like a gun, gently over a few hours, and the baby spiders float out the window on long strings of gossamer. ’Tis a miracle, I think.’ Her eyes were alight with the magic of it. ‘Spiders are so organised,’ she continued. ‘We can learn a thing or two from them.’

While she was talking, Freddie was absorbed with stroking Millie and looking at her bright eyes and orange beak. He imagined himself in a cocoon, and Granny Barcussy’s voice was wrapping threads around and around him until he was again in his own special sanctuary. The dark interior of the farmhouse grew bright, a hazy, primrose yellow light drifted in through the wall and settled itself right in front of Freddie. He smelled it – sweet meadow hay and boot polish, and suddenly a man stood there in a cream robe, the man who had walked beside him through the wood. The glow of his brown eyes was hypnotic. The man came close and sat himself down on the sofa next to Freddie, and Millie cocked her head to look at him.

‘Are you real?’ asked Freddie.

‘’Course I’m real. What a funny question,’ said Granny Barcussy sharply.

‘I wasn’t talking to you,’ said Freddie. ‘I was talking to him.’

‘Who?’

‘The man sitting next to me.’

‘What man?’ Granny Barcussy dragged a rickety music stool across the floor and sat on it, staring intently at her grandson. ‘Describe him, can you?’

Freddie looked at the man carefully. ‘He’s got brown eyes, and a moustache, and he’s wearing—’ He was going to say ‘a long cream dress’ but as he looked deeper into the shining robe he saw the man’s clothes. ‘He’s got shiny brown boots and breeches with buttons up the side of his knees, and a tweed jacket like the one Dad’s got, and a white shirt, and a waistcoat with one button missing, and he’s got a watch in his pocket on a gold chain. And . . .’

‘Go on.’ Granny Barcussy’s cheeks were wet with tears. The tears ran into the deep wrinkles and made her skin glisten.

‘Don’t cry, Gran.’ Freddie was alarmed. What had he done? Then he remembered he wasn’t supposed to talk about the spirit people he saw. His father had forbidden it. ‘I’m not allowed to—’

Granny Barcussy saw the shadow steal into Freddie’s eyes.

‘Don’t you be afraid. You can tell me anything. Anything you like.’

But Freddie looked at her as if he was peering out through prison bars, the sparkle gone from his eyes.

‘You saw my William,’ she said warmly. ‘He’s often around. William, your grandfather. He’s been dead a long time, before you were born. Oh he’d have loved you, Fred. He liked to make things with his hands like you, clever he was, and a heart of gold. Heart of gold.’

Freddie was silent. He looked again at the seat next to him, and the man had gone. ‘I’ve got it wrong,’ he thought. ‘Grandfather William wanted to say something to me and I didn’t listen.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with seeing a spirit,’ said Granny Barcussy. ‘I can see Levi’s been hammering you down – and that schoolteacher, he’s a pig. Don’t you let ’em bring you down, Fred. You’re a good ’un. And I’d fight for you, I would.’ She clenched her fist and grinned. Freddie smiled at her gratefully. William would come back, he knew it. If he went to sit under that lime tree again, or if he sat quiet and waited. It was the first time he’d seen a spirit person who belonged to him, and the feeling clung around him like a blanket.

‘I like coming here,’ he said. ‘I feel happy.’

‘Good. You deserve to be happy.’ Granny Barcussy was still on the music stool, giving him her undivided attention, another luxury he wasn’t used to.

‘Mother and Dad don’t think so,’ said Freddie. ‘They think everybody’s got to suffer because of the war.’

‘Pah!’ said Granny Barcussy passionately. ‘Never mind the war. Let ’em get on with it. Nothing to do with me. Yes, there’s poverty, but there’s beautiful life all around us.’ And then she said something that Freddie never forgot. She tapped her heart fiercely with one finger, and her eyes were full of fire. ‘I make my happiness inside myself, in here, in my heart, and nothing and nobody can take that away from me.’

A golden bubble drifted through the silence that followed, and came to rest in Freddie’s soul.

Then Granny Barcussy jumped up and whirled around, turning the music stool over with a crash. She pointed at Freddie’s feet.

‘You still got those blimin’ clogs!’ she cried. ‘How big are your feet? Big, aren’t they, for a seven-year-old? I’ve got some BOOTS for you!’

She tore upstairs, startling the chickens from the bottom step, pulling herself up energetically with the banister, and Freddie heard her crashing around upstairs. Then he heard a cry.

‘Got ’em! The little beauties.’

She reappeared, clambering downstairs with a pair of black boots in her hand. They looked new, the soles thick and clean, the long laces unfrayed. Freddie eyed them dubiously.

‘Are they girls’ boots?’

‘No. I wouldn’t give you girls’ boots, Fred. These were mine, yes, but they were men’s boots my William got me for working on the farm, and I never did wear them, too tight they were. But I’ve looked after them, kept rubbing in the saddle soap, kept the leather nice and soft. Go on – try them.’

Her excitement was infectious. Freddie beamed as he slipped his feet inside the boots and stood up. Immediately he felt taller and more important. He gave Granny Barcussy a hug.

‘Thank you.’

‘Are they too big?’

‘A bit.’

‘Right – that’s a good thing. You’ll grow into them. And if they’re too big we’ll stuff ’em with sheep’s wool.’

She produced some of that, too, from a box next to her spinning wheel, and soon Freddie was marching around in the garden, feeling as if his feet were in bed. He felt like a normal person who was worth something. He wanted to stay with Granny Barcussy forever.

‘When I’m grown up,’ he said, ‘I want to find a wife just like you. She’ll have long black hair and her name will be Kate.’