The Crowstarver (2 page)

The popular view amongst these country folk was that she must be ‘one o' they girls from town, no better'n they should be', and that the father was probably, as Tom had thought, ‘one o' they squaddies'. It was as though no local boys and girls could possibly be to blame for such a thing.

At five to seven the next morning, the farm foreman, Percy Pound, was waiting in the cart-horse
stables for the men to arrive for work. The carter, or horseman as he liked to call himself, was already busy with brush and shovel and barrow, mucking out. Some of the dung he would, by right, use upon his own garden. Two others, the poultryman and Tom Sparrow, never attended the foreman's giving out of the day's orders, for they were largely independent of him.

Now hooves rang hollowly on the cobbled floor as the horses shifted in their stalls, while Percy Pound waited for the arrival of the six farm labourers. He stood in his usual position, behind the big shire mare Flower, his left arm flung up over her massive rump to ease the weight on one leg. In 1916, on the Somme, a German shell fragment had smashed his left knee, and even now, ten years later, the foreman suffered pain, pain that sometimes made him short-tempered, though he was by nature a kindly man. He pulled from his waistcoat pocket an old half-hunter watch and consulted it. As he did so, three men walked in together through the stable door.

‘You'm late,' growled Percy.

‘Come day, go day, God send Sunday,' said the oldest of the three, a small man with a squeaky voice. ‘If ever I do come through theseyer door of a morning, and you bain't led on
old Flower's backside, and your old watch bain't five minutes fast, then the natural world as we knows it will have come to an end.'

The other two men, brothers by the names of Frank and Phil Butt, smiled at each other at these words. The speaker was their uncle, Billy Butt by name, and he never used one word where three would do, whereas they only spoke if they must.

‘You'm late!' said Percy again, more sharply this time, as the last three members of his workforce came running in, jostling one another and giggling like the schoolboys they had not long since been.

One, a tall curly-haired lad, was Albie, son of Ephraim Stanhope the horseman. The other two were the sons of Stan Ogle the poultryman, whose love of chickens, alive or on his plate, was a long-standing local joke. Although he and his wife had given their boys perfectly good names, no-one ever used them: Stan's favourite bird was the Rhode Island Red, and ever since his sons were quite small, the village had always called one Rhode and the other Red. Both, as it happened, had red hair, they were stocky thickset boys as like one another as twins, but easy for the village to tell apart since Rhode was shortsighted and
wore spectacles. Now, at the foreman's sharp words, Albie and Rhode and Red said with one voice ‘Sorry, Mr Pound,' while looking anything but. Percy Pound gave out the day's jobs. The three Butts had to strip down and replace a long line of old fencing bordering a distant field. They were to load the fencing stakes and rolls of barbed wire and the tools they would need, crowbar and sledge, wire-strainers, wire-cutters, pliers, hammers, and a supply of staples and nails on to the Scotch cart, and then Ephraim would drive them and their materials up the drove to the downs.

Rhode and Red were to go thistle-cutting in a piece of rough ground. ‘And I'll be up later on,' said the foreman,‘and if I see one single thistle or nettle or dock as you've missed, you'm in trouble. As for you, Albie, I want you to go up to the lambing-pen and give Tom a hand. He's been a bit busy lately, one way or another.'

‘I bin on this farm fifty year, man and boy,' squeaked Billy Butt,‘and I never heerd tell o' such a thing. Boy-child it is, my missus says.“Poor little bastard,” I says to her. “Billy”, she says, “your language!”“Well, that's what he is, thees't know”, I says, “a bastard, no messin”. Call a spade a spade, I says. What d'you reckon will happen to un, Percy? Will Tom and Kathie be let keep un?'

‘Depends,' said the foreman. ‘The mother might come back and claim him, I suppose.'

Frank and Phil Butt both shook their heads. ‘Never,' they said.

‘Does Mister know about all this?' said Ephraim the horseman, leaning on his yard-brush.

‘Mister' was how all the workers referred to their employer. Major Yorke was what was known as a gentleman farmer, an appellation to which he took no exception. This meant in effect that, unlike his men, he had no need to get his hands or his boots dirty, though he liked to put in some time at haymaking, driving about the fields in an impressive old Lea-Francis open tourer on the front of which was fixed a haysweep.

He had been a regular soldier but had left the army on inheriting the farm from a relative. He loved above all things to ride to hounds.

‘Yes,' said Percy in answer to the horseman's question.‘He knows. T'will all have to go through the proper channels of course, but if Tom and Kathie decide to adopt the babbie, well, good luck to 'em, Mister said.'

Percy Pound and Major Yorke might almost have belonged to separate races, so different were their life-styles, but Percy respected his employer
simply because they alone had been through the War. Billy and Ephraim and Stan had been too old, Frank and Phil too young, and as for the other three, they had hardly been born when the Armistice was signed. Tom had joined up but the War ended before he had seen action.

‘What they going to call the baby, Mr Pound?' asked Albie Stanhope.

‘I got no idea, boy,' growled the foreman (thinking about the War had made his knee ache), ‘but I know what I'm going to call you if you don't get to work. Go on, off you go, and you two, Rhode and Red, don't forget to take a whetstone. You can't cut thistles with a blunt sickle.'

Later, while the fencing party was loading the Scotch cart, Percy walked with his distinctive limp, for his left knee was locked stiff, out of the farmyard and up the road to the Sparrows' cottage. He knocked on the door with his stick, and Kathie came to it, carrying the baby.

‘Morning, Kath,' said the foreman. ‘How's it going then? Anything we can do to help?'

‘It's all right, thanks, Percy,' Kathie said.

The foreman looked carefully into the face of the foundling. No beauty, he thought, and he doesn't look strong.

‘He's beautiful, isn't he?' said Kathie.

‘What you going to call him then?'

‘Well,' said Kathie, ‘Tom wants to call him John after his old dad and I want to call him Joe after mine.'

‘You'll have to toss for it then.'

‘Don't know as we'll be let keep him,' said the shepherd's wife. ‘After all, tisn't as though he was a normal baby.'

‘Not normal?' said Percy. ‘What d'you mean?'

‘I mean we don't know who he belongs to.'

R
ather more than two years later, John Joseph Sparrow was moving rapidly across the postage-stamp-sized lawn at the rear of the shepherd's cottage. Kathie and Tom worried a little bit that the boy showed no signs of walking, but he got about smartly enough, using his own peculiar method. It could hardly be called a crawl, because his knees did not touch the ground, but on what seemed to be unusually long arms and legs, he scurried about on hands and feet, like a monkey, like a crab, like a spider.

Kathie Sparrow watched him fondly from her back door. Our little Spider, she said to herself, for that was their nickname for the child that they had finally been able formally to adopt. This had been due in some measure, it seemed, to
Mister's influence, for Major Yorke was a magistrate and a power in the district.

‘Spider!' she called now, and the little boy came scuttling back across the grass towards her. He sat up on his thin backside and stared up at her, smiling a lopsided smile.

‘Who's a good boy then?' said Kathie, and Spider, prodding himself in the chest with a forefinger, replied ‘Good un!' At almost two and a half these were the only intelligible sounds he had thus far uttered, and about this absence of speech Kathie and Tom worried a great deal. Each wanted to ask the other the same question, yet each forbore to do so. Is this a normal child? each parent thought.

In the village there was little doubt. Other mothers, meeting Kathie with her baby in his pram, at the shop, at the Post Office, at the baker's, had from the start taken a kindly interest in the foundling, and had at first thought him an ordinary if somewhat strange-looking infant. But as time passed, their suspicions grew, and now they spoke of them, to each other and to their husbands.

‘Wass think of thik baby of Kath Sparrow's then?' would be an opening question, and the replies were varied yet similar.

‘Funny little chap, ain't he?'

‘Got a funny look about him, thees't know.'

‘Seems a bit slow.'

‘Don't say much.'

‘I'd worry if I was Kath.'

No-one said, as they said of their own and each other's children,‘He's lovely, isn't he!'

Everyone thought – some with pity, some without – that it rather looked as if John Joseph Sparrow, known by now to all as Spider, was odd.

Betty Ogle the poultryman's wife, sharp-eyed and blunt-spoken, summed it up one Sunday morning as she came out of church, despite having just listened to the vicar's sermon which took as its text St Matthew's dictum ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself'. ‘Tom and Kath Sparrow's baby?' she said to a group of others as they walked down the churchyard path. ‘I'll tell you what I think. He's queer in the head. They've only got themselves to blame. Same as I said to Stan at the time, they'd have been better letting the child be took to the orphanage.'

On the evening of that same Sunday, a fine summer's evening, Tom Sparrow was hoeing weeds in his cabbage patch when his wife came down the garden path, Spider in her arms.

‘It's time for his bed,' she said. ‘Say goodnight to your dad, Spider.'

Spider grinned. ‘Good un!' he said.

‘You and your “good un”', said Kathie. ‘Say good
night
, there's a good boy,' but the child only pointed to himself and repeated his catchphrase.

‘Sleep well, my son,' said Tom. ‘Pleasant dreams.'

‘I suppose he does dream?' said Kathie. ‘He sleeps so sound. I don't think he's ever woke us.'

‘He's contented, that's why,' said Tom. I hope, he thought as he watched them go back up the path to the cottage. I hope he's content, poor little chap, because of one thing I'm certain now – he's simple. I don't know how Kath will take it when she realizes.

Upstairs, Kathie tucked Spider up in bed. She bent to kiss him and he smiled his twisted smile, and then shut his eyes as though he would be asleep in an instant.

Which he will be, thought Kathie as she left the room. He don't never complain nor grizzle like most babies do, some time or another. Don't cry neither, hardly ever heard him cry. Yet when I come in in the morning, he'll be lying there with his eyes wide open just as if he'd been awake all night. He's not like a normal baby.

Suddenly, at this last thought, a suspicion that Kathie Sparrow had harboured for some time but had ruthlessly suppressed became a certainty.‘He's
not
a normal baby,' she said quietly to herself. ‘Thank the Lord Tom doesn't realize.'

That night she woke some time in the small hours to hear an owl hooting. Beside her, Tom snored softly. The owl, she could hear, was on his usual perch, in the old Bramley-apple tree at the bottom of the garden. She waited, half asleep again, for the bird to hoot once more, but when he did, it sounded much much closer. It sounded in fact as though it came from the room next door. Spider's room.

K
athie lay wide awake, tense, listening intently, but the night was silent again. She slipped out of bed, switched on the landing light, and peered round Spider's bedroom door. He lay still, eyes closed. I must have dreamed it, she thought.