It was rare for Sally to look worried, but she did now, and it alarmed Kate. Something bad had happened, on this last day before she went away to school. She never remembered her father being ill. He was up at first light, organised and hard-working, but always made time to talk to his children. Kate adored him. He’d played games with her, read her stories, and showed her how to love and care for animals, trusted her to fetch the gentle Shire horse on her own, let her care for orphan lambs and piglets. He often said, ‘Our Kate – she could run the farm on her own.’
‘Where is Daddy?’ she asked now.
‘In bed.’
‘In bed! So what is it, Mummy? The ’flu?’
‘No. We don’t know, dear, ’til the doctor comes. But he looks bad.’
‘I don’t want to go to boarding school when Daddy is ill,’ said Kate. ‘I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to stay and look after him.’
‘No, dear. No, you’ve got to go. You can’t miss the first day, it’s so important.’
‘But Daddy is important, to me.’
‘I can look after him.’
‘No you can’t, Mummy. And you can’t run the farm on your own. Who’s going to milk the cows?’
‘Don’t tell me what I can’t do, Kate. You go up and see your father, see what he wants you to do.’ Sally looked wearily at her daughter’s assertive expression. She didn’t need a battle with her now. ‘And don’t twist your father round your little finger – madam,’ she added, in a good-humoured way.
Kate flounced up the stairs, her cheeks hot with determination. She pushed open the varnished wood door to her parents’ bedroom and swanned up to the bed.
‘Daddy?’
What she saw extinguished her enthusiasm like a candle-flame being snuffed out. The man looking at her from the bed was a pale ghost of the father she knew. The sparkle had gone from his eyes, they looked like two bubbles surrounded by shadows, and his skin was a sickly yellow. Even the whites of his eyes were yellow. He tried to smile, but it didn’t convince Kate. Obviously her father was seriously ill.
Shocked, she sat down in the green Lloyd Loom chair beside the bed, and reached for his hand, which lay limply on the satiny brown eiderdown. Her hand looked pink against his yellow skin.
‘What is it, Daddy?’
‘I don’t know,’ he whispered. ‘Not ’til the doctor’s been.’
‘I’m going to stay home and look after you. And I’ll milk the cows,’ said Kate firmly.
Her father put his arm round her as she sat on the bed, and his fingers twiddled the ends of her hair.
‘My Kate,’ he said. ‘You’re a good girl.’
‘I’ll do anything you want, Daddy, to help you get better.’
‘Now you listen to me,’ said Bertie, and his eyes shone out of his sickly face. ‘What I want, Kate, is for you to go to school. You put that smart uniform on in the morning, and you go, without any fuss, and get a good education. That’s what I want.’
‘But Daddy—’
‘No buts. And no argument, please. Ethie is going to stay, ’til I’m better. She’s older and stronger than you, Kate.’
Tears of frustration ran down Kate’s face.
‘It’s not fair, Daddy. I’m a much better nurse than Ethie. I’ll cheer you up. Ethie is so cross and grumpy.’
‘I know, but Ethie will do her best, Kate. Come on, you do your best for me, go to school and that will make me happy.’
Exhausted, Bertie sank back against the stack of lavender-scented pillows Sally had arranged for him. Kate gazed at him, her lips twitching with the conflicting feelings in her mind. She held her father’s hand tightly while he dozed, and she could feel the love and the ebbing strength he was sending her through those work-worn fingers. She felt as if she was part of him. She was the bright love and encouragement he’d given her all her life. She was the beaming smile that lived inside Bertie’s soul, a smile more powerful than the sun.
Kate had come upstairs determined to refuse to go to school. She felt old enough and well capable of nursing her father, giving him back some of that love, making him smile. She would put a rose on his breakfast tray on the snowy white cloth. She’d cover his boiled egg with a cheerful red and green cosy she’d knitted. She’d write jokes on a square of paper, fold it into sixteen triangles, and hide it in his napkin for him to find. Then she’d sit on his bed and chatter. Kate knew what her father needed, better than Ethie did. It wasn’t fair. Or was it?
Ethie had almost finished her education, begrudgingly, now she only wanted to leave school and work at home. She was perfectly capable of running the farm, making butter and cheese, making clothes on the treadle sewing machine. But she worked mechanically and joylessly, only laughing when Kate was with her.
It didn’t take Kate long to change her mind.
‘All right, Daddy. If that’s what you want,’ she said, ‘I’ll go to school. I was looking forward to it.’
Bertie opened his eyes and saw her smile.
‘That’s my girl,’ he said huskily. ‘My golden bird.’
Kate’s face lit up.
‘Tell me again, Daddy – about the golden bird,’ she begged. ‘Please, Daddy.’
‘Come here then.’
Kate snuggled onto the bed, curling her legs up, her head resting on Bertie’s shoulder. She could hear his heart going faster as he started to talk, his breath rattling a little. His voice grew stronger as he told their favourite story, his hands twined in his daughter’s wavy hair, enjoying the bright energy of her presence.
‘When you were born,’ he began, ‘here in this room, ’twas a scorcher, one of the hottest days in the summer. The cows were in the shade under the elm trees swishing their tails, and the horses were standing in the river up to their bellies. I was downstairs making cheese in the kitchen, and listening to the midwife walking about upstairs, I could hear the ceiling creaking and squeaking. It was scary, for me down there, listening. When Ethie was born, she didn’t come easy and there was a lot of noise, but when you were born your mother never made a sound. It was a surprise. I heard one scream, at three o’clock, and it wasn’t a scream of pain, it was a scream of joy.’ Bertie stopped for breath and Kate glanced up at the yellow skin of his face, thinking that already a hint of pink was returning to his cheeks.
‘Then –’ he continued. ‘The clock struck three – one – two – three chimes, the door opened, and the midwife called me to go up. Oh I went up those stairs three at a time, wiping my hands on—’ He paused, waiting for Kate to giggle as she always did at that part of the story. He looked at her bright eyes.
‘On the seat of your trousers!’ she squealed.
‘Yes,’ fuelled by her ringing laugh Bertie continued, lowering his voice as he approached the magical part of the story. ‘Well, I went in, and there you were, bright as a button in your mother’s arms and she was sitting up in bed with her face round and smiling like a dinner plate.’
‘Was I crying?’ asked Kate.
‘No. You weren’t. You were lovely. The midwife wrapped you in a cream shawl and put you in my arms. I carried you over to the window, and there, outside, on a branch of the walnut tree, was a golden bird.’ He lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘And none of us had ever seen a bird like it before. It was bright orange-yellow, sitting there in the tree, and it stayed there, singing. It stayed in the garden for the rest of the day.’
‘What was it?’ Kate asked, even though she knew the answer.
‘A golden oriole,’ said Bertie. ‘We asked old Mrs Barcussy and she knew; she looked it up in a book she’d got about birds, and showed us a picture of it. It came over from Europe, she said, and a very rare visitor, it was. So that’s why I called you my golden bird.’
‘And my name,’ said Kate. ‘Oriole Kate, that’s why.’
‘That’s why.’ Bertie closed his eyes again and the breath rattled in his chest. ‘Oriole Kate.’
They rested, each thinking about the golden bird. The effort of talking
had drained Bertie, but he was struggling to tell her something else.
‘There’s a legend,’ he said, ‘that if a golden bird appears when a baby is born, it . . .’
His voice faded away and he sank deeper into the pillows, his eyes fixed on Kate’s eager face. Then the door opened and Ethie came in with a bucket. She looked sourly at her younger sister curled on the bed.
‘You shouldn’t be in here, Kate,’ she said curtly, ‘Daddy’s too ill to cope with you bouncing around.’
‘I’m not bouncing around, I’m cheering him up.’
‘That’s MY job now,’ said Ethie fiercely. ‘I’m staying here and you should be packing, shouldn’t you?’
Kate felt that Ethie wanted to drag her off the bed, the fierce jealousy in Ethie’s eyes made her uncomfortable. She smiled, but the smile only made Ethie look even more draconian. Kate wanted to keep the peace, so she got off the bed and kissed her father on the cheek.
‘I’m going to pack right now,’ she said, ‘and I’m going to enjoy it.’
Chapter Eight
PLAYING TRUANT
Monterose was a small Somerset market town, centred around the railway which curved its way through cuttings in the hills and over viaducts and embankments. The town was half on a hill and half in a river valley, the lower part of it flooded for much of the winter. Boats were rowed along the streets and wild swans, ducks and geese swam in and out of gardens and cottages where the occupants lived upstairs from November to March. The top half of the town had a busy market square and a capacious church with the loudest bells in the county.
The railway station was a magnet for Freddie. The thrilling power of the steam engines fired him up as if he had swallowed a furnace. When he wasn’t making bread or going to school he ran down the street to the station and hung around watching coal being shovelled, wild-eyed cattle being loaded into trucks, and the spectacular cauliflowers of steam erupting from the saddle-back engine as it shunted to and fro. He was fascinated by the fire inside it and the glimpses of sooty-faced men working in the cab, the white gleam of their eyes as they shovelled and shouted. Freddie spent so much time there that his clothes started to smell of coal, and Annie complained. So did his father, and Freddie was given a brush which was kept outside for him to brush himself down before being allowed back into the bakery.
He soon discovered there was money to be earned at the station by carrying luggage over the cream and brown footbridge. Passengers put their hands in their pockets and gave him tuppence, or thruppence. Freddie made friends with the other boys who went racing down the hill after school to earn money at the station. At first he watched and listened, soon figuring out that it wasn’t always the pushy boy who got asked to carry luggage. It was the cleanest ones, the strongest-looking and most respectful. Freddie soon learned how to doff his cap and call people ‘Sir’ and ‘Madam’, and how to look after his money. He memorised the times of trains and found out which trains would have the wealthiest passengers.
Every morning he rose at 5 a.m. to help bake the bread. By then Levi was taking the first batch out of the three coke ovens and Annie loading the shelves in the shop or cleaning the window. By 7 a.m. the whole street smelled of fresh bread and Freddie stacked the bicycle basket with loaves for the round he had to do before school. Usually he had breakfast, a big chunk of lardy cake and a cup of cocoa before setting off. Once he’d discovered the station, he took his lardy cake with him to eat while he waited for trains. If he did his bread-round quickly, he managed to be there for the eight o’clock and the eight-thirty trains, and still get to school at nine.
He liked the teacher, Miss Francis, but despite being in the top class there seemed to be very little for him to learn. He was far ahead of the rest of the class in reading, writing and maths and there were no workbooks to take him further. Sitting at the back of the class, Freddie spent a lot of time daydreaming, drawing, and reading his way through a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica and the works of Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson. Miss Francis told his father Freddie should go to university, but the thought of more study filled him with horror. He wanted to get out there and do real work with engines. He didn’t want to be a baker, and he didn’t want to waste his life sitting in school.
One September morning he decided not to go. He’d be there for the ten-thirty train to Weymouth. It wasn’t a decision he’d taken by himself. Granny Barcussy had appeared to him in a dream, and she was unfolding a piece of drawing paper, holding it up to show him, and it was his picture of the little girl on the Shire horse. Annie had extracted it from Freddie’s wet jacket, ironed it under a cloth and put it in an old picture frame on top of a photo she didn’t like. It hung on the wall halfway up the stairs, and even though Freddie protested that he could now draw much better than that, Annie insisted on keeping it there, as if she wanted to cling to a relic of the child he had been.
In the dream, Granny Barcussy had shown him Monterose station and pointed at the clock. It was ten thirty. She wanted him to be there. So he went, pretending he was going to school as normal, then running round the back of the bakery, through an alleyway and down the hill to the station, his breakfast wrapped in a cloth under his arm. He prayed he wouldn’t be found out. Deceiving his parents wasn’t something he enjoyed, but lately it had become an essential part of his life.
Annie never went out, and Levi spent most of his time working in the bakery. Freddie felt oddly calm about what he was doing. He thought about Miss Francis calling the register at school, questioning why he was absent, but he didn’t care.
He was a tall boy now, taller than anyone in his class, and he felt awkward at school. Living in Monterose had been his education. At weekends and holidays, when he escaped from the bakery, Freddie had hung around watching men at work. He watched the wheelwrights and was allowed to help occasionally, and he learned everything he could about motorcars. If he saw one with the bonnet open, he would go and ask questions, finding people were usually proud to explain the workings of the engine to him. Freddie’s favourite place was the stonemason’s yard where he sat wistfully on the wall looking at the statues and tombstones being made.
In long strides he headed for the station, thinking there were two other trains due, and he’d have no competition. He felt jaunty and independent, a new feeling in his life, one that he wanted to cultivate.
With one and fourpence safely in his pocket from the two early trains, Freddie climbed up the grassy embankment and sat there to eat his lardy cake peacefully in the morning sun.
‘Shouldn’t you be in school, lad?’ the stationmaster, Charlie, paused to shout up to him.
Freddie shrugged.
‘Playing truant, eh?’ asked Charlie with a wink.
‘I’m too big for school,’ said Freddie. ‘And I need to earn a bit of cash.’
‘What you gonna spend it on then? Eh?’
‘A lorry.’
Charlie laughed loudly. ‘Ah, you’ll be buying a whole load of trouble. I don’t like those petrol lorries. Stinking things. I suppose you’ll be meeting the ten-thirty Weymouth train today? They’ll be plenty of wealthy folk putting the precious daughters on there, sending ’em off to that posh boarding school.’
Ethie had always been savagely jealous of Kate. From the moment Kate had been born, Ethie had felt unwanted and her sadness had curdled into a thundercloud lurking over her life. Sally had tried to treat her two girls exactly the same, but the contrast between Kate’s exuberance and Ethie’s negativity made such an ideal impossible.
Today Ethie felt smug that she, not Kate, had been asked to stay at home and run the farm while her father was ill. She hoped Kate would have a hard time, as she had done, starting at boarding school on her own. Ethie felt creepily adult as she headed off to catch the pony and harness her into the cart, proud that her parents trusted her to take Kate to the train.
The bay pony, Polly, was known to be ‘cussèd’. Once caught and harnessed she behaved beautifully, trotting with her neck
arched and her toes pointed like a dancer. Loose in the field, Polly was reluctant to relinquish her freedom. She didn’t much like Ethie, so that morning Polly chose to be awkward. Round and round the field she trotted, snorting, her nose in the air. She came close and snatched the square of bread Ethie held out to her, then spun around and galloped off.
Ethie got more and more exasperated.
‘WILL you come here?’ she called. ‘You wretched PIG of a horse.’
Furious, she ran after Polly, hoping to head her off and get her in a corner, but time after time the pony kinked her tail and cantered off to the opposite corner, where she stood tossing her mane and looking triumphant. Ethie got hotter and hotter, dressed in her farming gear, heavy breeches, boots and jacket. The sound of the Hilbegut Court clock chiming nine was the last straw. They’d agreed to leave at nine, allowing plenty of time for the pony and cart to reach Monterose station. Polly should have been caught, groomed and harnessed by now.
Ethie could have cried with rage, but she wasn’t good at crying. She’d seen girls at school who cried daintily into lace hankies with hardly a sniff. But if Ethie cried, it was ugly. Loud and snorty and convulsive, so embarrassing that people pushed her away instead of comforting her. So Ethie had turned her tears into anger, stamping about for hours with her face set rigid like a cardboard mask.
As the clock chimed, Kate appeared at the backdoor with her mother, dressed in her new grey and scarlet uniform. She looked good in it, her hair plaited in two thick braids, each with a red ribbon, one over each shoulder, the round grey hat just at the right angle over her expectant face. She was chattering as usual, and she and her mother were standing by the cart waiting.
‘I can’t catch this infernal damned pony,’ Ethie roared. ‘How am I supposed to harness her if she won’t be caught? She won’t. She WILL NOT. I’ve finished with her. I’m not doing it. She’s the most impossible, stupid damned awkward animal in the whole of this farm. It’d be easier to catch a cow than catch THAT.’ Ethie snarled like a dog and flung the halter over the gate. ‘You catch her if you want to go to the station.’
The Boy with No Boots Page 7