The Boy with No Boots (7 page)

He strutted down the street, past Monterose Post Office and the church, the graveyard and the Board School. Through the cattle market and down the next street which had houses one side and tall
elm trees on the other. At the end of it, Levi saw the roof of his new property coming into view, and it felt like the sun rising. Leaning on the garden wall he savoured the strength of the stones,
sun-warmed and inlaid with intricate lichens, yellow stonecrop and toadflax. Inside the wall on the sunny side was a mass of pink and white valerian covered in butterflies. It was a long time since
Levi had even glanced at flowers and butterflies, but now he gazed, his soul hungry for beauty. This was his garden. His paradise garden. Annie would love it.

His eyes moved down the overgrown path to the door next to the shop window and looked up at the dilapidated sign. A new one was needed. Barcussy’s Bakery. It sounded grand. Freddie would
help him paint the big letters. Annie would be inside that big window in an apron as white as a goose, welcoming people into the shop, while he and Freddie made the loaves and rolls, the currant
buns and the lardy cake. Levi could smell it cooking as he stood there. Freddie would have the sturdy bicycle with the delivery basket on the front and he’d go out, cleanly dressed and
confident with his cargo of fresh bread.

Levi got over the wall and walked across the overgrown lawn. He stood looking at the rest of the terrace which consisted of two cottages, each with a garden. Suddenly he could smell the musty
interiors, feel the heavy sag of the red tiled roofs, the collapsed chimney at one end and the bulging crop of ivy which housed a colony of sparrows. He peered through one of the dark window panes
and saw a room lit by a hole in the roof. On the floor were big puddles, and in the fireplace a group of rats sat up with stiff whiskers looking at him knowingly, as rats do. This is our place. Not
yours. It belongs to us rats, and the jackdaws in the chimney watching with their blue eyes, and the ivy tearing the stones apart with sinuous creepers. It belongs to the rain and the wind and the
mould and the frost. Don’t think you can change it, human.

Levi’s exuberance was totally eclipsed.

‘What have I done?’ he said to himself. ‘How am I going to cope with all of this? And my money’s all gone. All of it.’

Freddie had a plan for his life.

First he had to endure school until he was fourteen. He did his work diligently in beautiful copperplate writing that he was proud of, he did his arithmetic accurately and with relish, and read
the books he was told to read. None of it challenged him now. Sitting in a class whose ages ranged from five to thirteen, he’d heard the same history and geography lessons over and over;
he’d sung the same old songs and heard the same old Bible stories. He developed strategies to deal with his boredom, and dreaming was top of the list. He felt useless and imprisoned, except
on the rare occasions when Harry Price asked him to help the ‘little ones’ or mark the register or clean the blackboard.

He longed to be fourteen. On his birthday he would leave school forever and learn to be a mechanic. Then when he was sixteen, old enough to drive, he planned to buy a lorry and start a haulage
business. And he’d save every penny to buy tools and paints for the art he wanted to do. In his mind he had a queue of pictures waiting to be painted and sculptures waiting to be carved. He
grew increasingly resentful of his wasted time in school. At home he had no time to himself at all, always out on errands or helping with the endless tasks that needed to be done. Sometimes he
stayed up late in his bedroom making models by candlelight, as quietly as he could. His latest was a model of a queen wasp which he’d found hibernating in a fold of the curtains. He’d
caught her under a glass jar and studied every detail of her stripy body, then he’d made a model using an acorn and a hazelnut shell. The face was a tiny triangular piece of wood cut from a
clothes peg and drawn in ink, the legs and antenna from bits of wire found in the hedge. The yellow paint he’d begged from the sign-maker’s workshop in the village, a precious spoonful
in a tobacco tin, and the brush he made from a chicken feather. The wings were two of Annie’s hairpins.

Annie was thrilled with the model. She made Freddie take it to school, but Harry Price wasn’t interested.

‘So that’s what you waste your time on is it?’ he mocked. ‘Making silly models of wasps.’

Freddie thought carefully about what he was going to say in reply. He tucked the anger away in a corner of his mind, looked Harry Price in the eye, and spoke slowly.

‘I need to practise making models,’ he said calmly, ‘because one day I’m going to make aeroplanes for the war and I think that’s important, don’t you,
Sir?’

The mole on Harry Price’s right cheek began to twitch, and the pupils of his dispassionate eyes became small pinheads.

‘Well, Frederick – and what war are we talking about?’ he asked. ‘The war ended years ago, or were you too busy making models to notice?’

Again Freddie allowed a silence to hover as the words dropped into his mind like aniseed balls from a jar.

‘When you are an old man,’ he said, ‘I’ll be a young man, and World War Two will come. And I’m not going to fight. I’m going to make aeroplanes. About the
nineteen thirties, I would say.’

‘Oh, and how do you know this? You can see into the future now, can you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes, what?’

‘Sir.’ Freddie searched Harry Price’s eyes and discovered a sea of fear lurking behind a barrage of anger.

‘And stop staring at me like that, boy. Insolent. That’s what you are. And arrogant.’ Then Harry Price lost his temper, as Freddie had known he would, thumping the desk so hard
that a tray of pencils jumped in the air and scattered, some rolling onto the wooden floor.

Freddie wasn’t fazed. Quietly he picked up the fallen pencils and put them back.

‘Arrogant. That’s what you are,’ shouted Harry Price. ‘Look at me when I’m talking to you, boy.’

‘Excuse me – Sir –but you just told me to stop looking at you,’ said Freddie quietly, and he strolled back to his desk, lifted the lid and put the model wasp inside.

‘I’ve got better things to do than talk to a boy who thinks he can see into the future.’

Ignoring Harry Price’s blustering and the extravagant curls of smoke that suddenly puffed from his pipe, Freddie opened his copy of
Treasure Island
and tried to read. He was aware
of the other children glancing at him as much as they dared, and he felt a sense of kinship with them. But the words on the page blurred into a mist. All he could see was a vision of a fleet of
aeroplanes lined up on a vast airfield in the rain. They weren’t like the ones he had seen. These were small, elegant planes with rounded wing tips and rounded noses lifted towards the
eastern sky. The clouds rolled back and he heard the roar of the brave little planes, as they took off one by one into the dawn. And he saw himself, a grown man, standing watching on the airfield,
wearing dark blue overalls, a spanner in his hand.

The vision made him feel strong.

When he got home from school, Freddie was surprised to see his father there, sitting under the apple tree. Annie was with him and the two of them were talking animatedly.

‘Now, you sit yourself down, Fred. I got something to tell you,’ said Levi in a rather ominous tone, and Freddie sat down on the grass, and looked at his father, puzzled by the
unusual sparkle in his eyes.

‘Now,’ said Levi again. ‘You take this in, Fred. ’Cause this is what your life is gonna be in a few years when you leave school. I got a job, and a business all lined up
for you. What do you think of that?’

Freddie didn’t answer. He felt a shadow creeping over his shoulders, the shadow of a great wall which his parents would build to keep him in confinement.

Levi rushed on, anticipating a smile on his son’s face, a light in his eyes, gratitude.

‘I bought a bakery,’ he said proudly. ‘And it’s got all the equipment, the ovens, the recipes, the big bicycle with the basket on front. In town, it is, near the railway.
We’re going to live there. There’s a school just down the road you can go to.’

‘And a shop at the front,’ said Annie. ‘You and Levi’s going to be making the bread, and I’ll be behind the counter selling it.’

‘And – I haven’t finished,’ said Levi. ‘It’s got a terrace of two cottages. We’ll live in one, and let the other – just need a lick of paint, they
do – and that will bring in some money, plenty of money. What with that, and the bakery, you’ll have a ready-made job to go to when you leave school, Fred, and one day, when
you’re old enough, you’ll take over the business.’

A bolt of pain shot through Freddie’s mind. A baker. They wanted him to be a baker.

‘I done it for you, lad, and for your mother,’ continued Levi, puzzled by the way Freddie was staring stonily at the sky.

‘She can’t go out much. Now she won’t have to. There’s work for all three of us, years of work. I done it for you.’

Annie was frowning at Freddie. ‘Say thank you,’ she mouthed.

‘Thank you.’

‘’Tis a risk,’ said Levi. ‘Cost me all my money, it did.’

‘Granny Barcussy’s money?’ Freddie’s eyes stung with the threat of tears.

‘Ah. Granny Barcussy’s money.’

Freddie stood up. Even the soles of his feet burned with anger. But I won’t be like Dad, he thought. I won’t lose my temper. I won’t. I will not. His face went hard with the
effort, hard as glass, and his fists ached in his pockets. He looked at Levi who was sitting with his back against the apple tree, his hands idly collecting petals from the fallen blossom, scooping
them into his palm and blowing them playfully at Annie.

He’s got no idea what I want, Freddie thought. I’ll have to tell him, somehow.

And then he saw her. Granny Barcussy. Floating like steam, and radiant as sunlight, in the air next to Levi. She wore a robe that glistened with the colours she’d loved, he could smell the
honeysuckle and lavender she had grown, and sense the warmth of her. She didn’t look haggard and old now, her skin was smooth and her eyes full of life and compassion. She looked directly at
Freddie and her smile melted his anger. It was the same mischievous smile she’d always had, and now she held a finger to her lips and shook her head. He heard her voice.

‘Don’t tell him,’ she said. ‘Not now. You keep the peace.’

She disappeared gently, like salt dissolving in water, and Freddie became aware that Annie was looking at him with an alarmed expression on her face. He wasn’t allowed to tell her, but she
knew, Freddie was sure. The hours of eye contact he’d had with his mother on those long difficult walks, the way their souls had been linked by her panic, as if he was her anchor forever
chained to her, and she was his lifeboat, safe, but blotting out the light.

‘I’ll talk to him,’ she said to Levi. ‘He just needs time to think about it.’

‘Aye. ’Tis a big thing. For a lad,’ Levi nodded, struggled to his feet and brushed the apple blossom from his trousers. ‘I’ll leave you to it.’

Freddie sat down again, close to his mother’s bottle-green dress and the white apron she wore so proudly. They were better dressed since the war had ended. He had a new shirt and shorts,
socks without darns and new brown boots, a warm jacket and a cap.

‘Did Harry Price like the queen wasp?’ asked Annie.

‘No.’

‘More fool him,’ said Annie. ‘The old misery. Well, now you can wave him goodbye. You can go to a new school in town. They’ve got four teachers there, and one of them is
a lady. A Miss Francis. She takes the top class, and they say she’s very nice, and clever.’

‘But Mother – I don’t want to be a baker. I want to make aeroplanes.’

‘I know.’ Annie put her arm round Freddie. He was twelve now, tall for his age, his white blond hair had darkened a little. She looked at his long fingers. ‘You’ve got
hands like your dad. Do you know what he wanted to do when he was young?’

‘What?’

‘He wanted to be a jeweller.’

‘A jeweller?’ Freddie stared at her in surprise. ‘Why wasn’t he, then? What stopped him?’

‘His hands were too big. He couldn’t do the delicate work, so he had to give up his dream. Just as I had to give up my dream.’

‘Your dream? You had a dream? What was it?’

‘I wanted to be florist – to grow flowers and make them up into bouquets and wreaths. I was good at it. But then the family came along, needed me to do the washing and the baking and
the scrubbing and the nursing, and then the war came. We’ve all had to make do, and do things we don’t want, Freddie. And you will too. This bakery idea, it’s perfect for your
father. He won’t have to go out in the cold and the wet with his arthritis, he can work at home in a warm dry bakery. It’s perfect. We’ve gotta help him, Freddie. Give it a
chance.’

Freddie sighed.

‘But all my life I’ve been doing things I don’t want to do.’

‘I know,’ said Annie kindly. ‘But your turn will come. You’ll see.’

‘It hasn’t so far.’

Freddie looked gloomily at his mother. Her grey curly hair was scattered with apple blossom petals, her red cheeks shining with excitement. The hope in her dark blue eyes was underlaid with
layers and layers of old fear and old pain going deep into the distances of her soul, and right at the far end was a little child full of love who only wanted to pick flowers. He felt sorry for
her.

‘You’ve had a hard life,’ he said.

She nodded slowly. ‘But the hardest thing,’ she said, ‘is my fear, Freddie. Night and day it’s with me. I’m a strong woman, got to be, but that fear is stronger
than me. It’s like an illness, but it’s invisible. No one knows, Freddie, only you. No one knows what I go through.’

‘Isn’t there a medicine for it?’ Freddie asked.

Annie shook her head vigorously. ‘Even if there was, I daren’t tell the doctor, daren’t ask for it.’

‘Why?’

‘Because – he’ll think I’m mad, and they lock you up, in these terrible places. Asylums, they call them. I’m not going to one of those, ever. I’d rather be
dead,’ she said fiercely, wagging her finger at Freddie. ‘And don’t you let them take me.’