The Boy with No Boots (2 page)

Freddie felt giddy with hunger and anxiety as he pushed open the door of the cottage. Annie was stoking the coke oven, her huge arms glistening in the firelight. On the table was a bowl of
something she had mixed, waiting for the treacle. Freddie stood in the doorway, close to the heavy curtain, its fusty folds comfortingly dark. Suddenly the firelit room rocked like a boat. He fell
forward onto the stone floor. The earthenware jar smashed, and so did his head. He heard Annie’s scream fly past him and disappear into the whirling darkness.

Doctor Stewart threw his bike against the hedge, unlatched the wicket gate and reached Annie’s cottage door in brisk strides. Sparrows chirruped in the thick ivy that
covered the walls, its tendrils catching in his shock of white hair as he pushed open the door. He was used to this place. In his younger days he had delivered all four of Annie’s children in
the polished attic bedroom, and he’d spent some rowdy evenings playing cards with Freddie’s dad, Levi, the two of them hunched over a green baize table while Annie pounded dough in the
kitchen.

Delivering Freddie had been memorably different from most of the births Doctor Stewart had managed. The first song thrush was singing on a crystal morning in February when Freddie had emerged
easily and quickly.

‘An angel,’ Annie had gasped when Freddie was put in her arms, not crying, but staring into her soul with eyes the colour of blue cornflowers. And when Levi held his new baby son for
the first time and stroked the quiff of blond hair with a gentle, grime-encrusted finger, Freddie’s intense gaze had moved the giant of a man to tears.

‘He’s – different,’ he’d mumbled. ‘Different from the others. He’s . . .’ Levi had wanted to say ‘heaven-sent’ but it seemed an
unmanly sort of comment. Gruffly he handed the baby back to his beaming wife.

‘I got to work now.’ Then he’d gone out and flung his hat high up into the morning sun. ‘A boy! A boy! After two girls, I got a boy!’

Freddie would be seven now, Doctor Stewart thought, as he pulled aside the heavy brown curtain. The kitchen floor was splattered with blood, and the broken treacle jar. He raced up the
stairs.

‘Where are you, Annie? It’s Doctor Stewart.’

‘In here. In the front bedroom.’

Visibly trembling, Annie sat at Freddie’s bedside, a blood-soaked rag in her hand.

‘Calm down, Annie, he’s not dead.’

Numbly she moved back and let the doctor examine her precious son who lay unconscious in his little iron bed with its horsehair mattress and coarse grey and red blanket. He examined Freddie in a
methodical silence, frowning over the child’s bruised face and swelling nose. Then he peeled back the blanket and saw the boy’s thin scarred legs and blistered feet.

‘Look at the state of his feet. How did they get like this?’

Annie hung her head. ‘We’ve no shoes for him, Doctor.’

‘These blisters are going septic’

Everything he said sounded like an accusation to Annie. Raising Freddie with the Great War going on had been difficult. She’d wanted a happy childhood for him, wanted him to be rosy-faced
and robust like her other children had been, carefree and healthy.

‘Have you got salt in the house, Annie?’

‘Yes, a block in the larder.’

‘You must bathe his feet in warm salty water. Every day. Twice a day.’

‘Yes, Doctor.’

‘And he’s very thin. Undernourished.’

Annie sat absolutely still, afraid that any small movement she made might produce another curt diagnosis. But the fat tears kept on running over her cheeks, and the suppressed need for a good
cry manifested a hot pain in her throat.

‘Will you tell me how this happened, Annie?’

She blurted out the story to its bitter end, only omitting the real reason why she had sent Freddie to fetch the treacle.

‘Is he going to die?’ she asked finally.

‘Not yet. But he’s seriously concussed, malnourished and, I would say, exhausted.’

Freddie’s eyelids flickered open. He stared at Doctor Stewart who shook his head and smiled reassuringly.

‘It’s all right. You’ll be fine. Just a bump on the nose and a little cut on your head that bled a lot. You be quiet now, Freddie. I’ll come and see you again in the
morning. No school tomorrow.’

‘Mr Price threw a book at my head,’ said Freddie clearly, ‘and it was Palgrave’s
Golden Treasury,
and it’s got a poem I really like in it. Shall I say it
to you? It’s about . . .’

‘That’ll be the Innisfree thing,’ said Annie. ‘He knows it by heart.’

‘No, Freddie. Not now. You go back to sleep.’

Annie sat holding Freddie’s small hand in her red fingers, watching his eyes closing. Doctor Stewart folded his stethoscope into its wooden box. ‘Is it worth a jar of treacle?’
He laid a kindly hand on Annie’s humped shoulder, looking into her face in the October twilight. ‘I’m telling you Annie, you mustn’t expect Freddie to do so much when
he’s undernourished.’

‘I know, I know.’ Annie began to rock herself to and fro, the gentle rhythm easing the pain of her guilt.

‘You can go to the shop, Annie. While he’s at school, can’t you?’

Annie nodded, avoiding Doctor Stewart’s probing eyes. Her darkest secret was the terror she felt at going out, the way her heart hammered and the elm trees swayed towards her, and the road
spun like a slow spinning top. She wasn’t ill. It was how her mother had been. Housebound. Perpetually afraid. Agoraphobic. But tell the doctor? Never. He’d have her locked up in a
mental hospital. Things would have to go on as they were. She’d find a way of giving Freddie more food, and a pair of boots.

Yet Freddie knew about her phobia, though she hadn’t told him. She depended on Freddie, on his inner light, his depth and compassion. He’s only a child, she thought now, a frail
child. He might die.

‘Why does he get hit so often at school?’

‘He daydreams, Doctor.’

‘Is that all?’

‘That’s all, as far as I know.’

‘I’ll go and see his teacher. That’s a nasty bruise, too near his eye. Keep him warm and quiet, and let him sleep for as long as he wants. No school tomorrow. And . . .’
Doctor Stewart frowned at Annie, ‘Pull yourself together, Annie.’

She rocked harder. I’m not that kind of woman, she wanted to scream, not a wartime woman, cheerful and heroic. I’m a lump. A frightened housebound lump.

‘I’ll see myself out.’

‘Thank you, Doctor.’

Annie sat with Freddie through the pink of evening watching the changing sky from the square of window. On the deep stone sill were all of Freddie’s possessions. Two books, his collection
of stones, conkers and cones, his precious wooden spinning top, three green marbles, and a sepia photograph of his Gran in a tiny silver frame. She thought about how she could make him some shoes
by sewing leather onto socks, and the possibilities of making cakes without eggs so he could have a boiled egg for his breakfast. She longed for her girls, Betty and Alice, who were all living in
lodgings and working at the glove factory in Yeovil. Only George, her eldest, came to see them on his motorbike. He worked at Petter Engines making shells for the war. Occasionally on a Sunday he
brought one of his sisters home in the sidecar.

Levi worked long hours in the corn mill, coming home grumpy and stinking, capable of nothing but sitting by the fire in the rocking chair. He wouldn’t read. He wouldn’t chop
firewood. He just sat, staring endlessly into the bright flames.

‘Freddie’s took sick,’ Annie said tonight as he hung his stinking coat on the back of the door.

‘Oh ah, what’s up with him?’

‘The doctor says it’s exhaustion. And he’s undernourished.’

‘Ah.’ Levi stuffed tealeaves into his pipe and gazed into the fire for long minutes before his eyes sparked into life.

‘You had the DOCTOR?’

‘Sally from down the farm sent her son to fetch him. Freddie’s been hit again, a nasty bruise near his eye. For daydreaming.’

‘Ah.’ Another lengthy pause while guilt, anger and helplessness sorted each other in Levi’s mind. ‘He’ll have to learn to pay attention then, won’t he? Or end
up useless like me.’

‘You aren’t useless, Levi. Don’t talk like that. Just because they turned you down for the war. It’s not your fault you’ve got arthritis.’

Freddie woke slowly after a long sleep. Bees hummed and fussed outside his window and the smell of cooked apple drifted up the stairs and through his open door. The cottage was
strangely silent and Freddie sensed a new emptiness about it. The clock chimes were icy cold in the apple-flavoured air. He counted ten. Ten o’clock! He ought to be in school!

Freddie got up quickly and ran barefoot down the stone stairs where he found his clothes hanging, stiff and crusty by the stove.

‘My beechnuts!’

To his relief she had emptied them into a dish and put it on the table. Next to it was his plate with a slab of yellow cornbread thickly spread with dripping and the unexpected white gleam of an
egg, boiled and shelled. A piece of firewood was next to it with ‘Freddie’s breakfast’ written on it in black charcoal. And the broken treacle jar had been pieced together with
some kind of glue. Freddie smoothed his fingers over it, doubting that it would hold together for all the journeys it had to make. He climbed into his clothes and sat at the table to eat breakfast
hungrily, finishing every single crumb. Then he found his tin mug and filled it with hot water, lifting the heavy kettle with two hands clutching the string-wrapped handle.
‘Mother?’

With his hands around the tin mug, Freddie walked into the scullery, pausing to sip the steaming drink. She wasn’t there. Still barefooted, he padded into the garden.
‘Mother?’

The garden flickered with late butterflies, Red Admirals and Tortoiseshells sunning themselves on the cottage walls or feeding on the Michaelmas daisies. Freddie listened. There was hammering
from far away, a robin singing, but no one was talking. Where was his mother? Annie had gone out when she shouldn’t go out. Only Freddie knew that.

Freddie pulled on his scratchy socks and the heavy clogs. Where would she be? Was it his fault for breaking the treacle jar?

Levi hesitated outside the schoolroom door. He could smell smoke from the stove, and the only sound was the occasional cough from a child or a creak from the floor-boards. Had
he been inside the schoolroom, he would have heard the steady squeak of thin chalk sticks on little black slates as fourteen children aged from five to twelve years old worked silently at their
arithmetic.

Once again Levi mentally rehearsed what he intended to say, and how he wasn’t going to be intimidated by the likes of Harry Price. He knocked on the heavily varnished door and pushed it
open, the dented brass knob cold in his hand. Fourteen heads turned to look at him. The children smelled of damp socks and rice pudding. Harry Price sat on a small platform at one end, stuffing
tobacco into a curly pipe.

‘Work,’ he barked, and the children’s heads snapped back into position. Levi took off his cap respectfully.

‘I’d want a word.’

Harry Price took a used match from a St Bruno tin on his desk and carried it to the stove, opened the door to a cloud of smoke and lit it from the roaring flames inside. He sucked and puffed at
the pipe, almost disappearing into curling smoke while Levi stood awkwardly. ‘Outside.’ Harry Price wagged a grizzled finger at his class. ‘If anyone moves or speaks, I shall
know.’

The two men stood in the brown corridor outside, looking squarely at each other’s eyes.

‘I’ve took time off work for this,’ Levi said. ‘It’s about my boy.’

‘Frederick?’

‘Ah, Frederick.’ Levi thought about the bruise he’d seen on the sleeping face of his small son, and the words jostled in his throat. ‘He ain’t strong. And I want to
know why he’s being punished so often. Is he a dunce?’

‘A dunce! No. On the contrary he’s clever, very clever.’ Harry Price’s eyes looked uncomfortable. Doctor Stewart had already admonished him for his treatment of Freddie
and he’d disagreed, of course. Boys had to be kept in line. How would Doctor Stewart cope, shut in a room all day with fifteen village kids? No matter how well they behaved, Harry Price could
sense their frustrations and their simmering energy waiting to engulf him if he once slackened his defences. Worse, he sensed their hatred of him, the way they stormed out at home time like a
basket of pigeons released into furious flight. And that Frederick always looking right through him with those eyes, as if he could see right into the secret rooms of his head.

Once Freddie had said something that had deeply disturbed Harry Price.

‘Sir, who is that lovely lady standing next to you?’

‘What do you mean, boy? There’s nobody here!’

‘Oh but there is, Sir,’ and Freddie had described his late wife, who he’d never seen, with breathtaking accuracy.

‘Don’t you dare tell me such lies, Frederick. Sit down and get on with your work or you’ll feel my cane. Shame on you boy!’

But no amount of shouting and blustering would erase from Harry Price’s mind the clear and startling picture of his late wife. From that day he feared and hated Freddie.

‘So what does he do?’ persisted Levi. ‘If it’s just daydreaming, does that warrant such punishment?’

‘He does daydream. But . . .’ Harry Price raised his bushy eyebrows at Levi. They were stained yellow from the pipe smoke. ‘I’m sorry to say he tells lies.’

There was silence while Levi’s blood pressure soared and his expression changed from concern to anger.

‘LIES,’ he shouted. ‘My boy tells LIES.’

‘Oh yes, daily.’

Levi could have sworn that Harry Price looked pleased with this information, as if it were a trump card.

‘What kind of lies?’ he thundered.

Freddie hurried along the lane to the village, checking inside every gateway. He paused by a stile, which marked a footpath leading to the woods, thinking his mother might have
gone looking for mushrooms or hazelnuts. He checked the stubble fields in case she was gleaning for any remaining grain, a hopeless task as the sparrows and finches had probably scoffed it all. A
few uncut heads of barley nodded in the hedge, and that was treasure. Freddie picked them happily, tearing off the stalks and cramming the bristly heads into both his pockets. Annie would add them
to the soup, boiling them until they were glutinous and soaked with the taste of beef broth.