The Crowstarver

by Dick King-Smith

  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 goodnight, 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.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Kathie 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.

  Next morning she said nothing to Tom about the matter, but she could not get it out of her mind. Later, she was hanging out washing on the clothes-line when she saw a blue-grey bird fly low across the nearby field. Its flight was hawk-like, and it was being followed by a mob of small birds. As she walked back up the path carrying her clothes-basket and peg-bag, she heard the cuckoo begin calling from a little spinney at the bottom of the field.

  The kitchen window looked out onto the back garden of the cottage, conveniently, in that Kathie could keep an eye on her child as he sat on the little lawn or scuttled about it in his strange way. Now, she saw, he was quite still, looking away from her, in the direction from which the cuckoo’s calls were still coming. They ceased, but after a little while she heard a loud ‘Cuckoo!’ from the lawn. Spider turned and saw her watching him.

  ‘Cuckoo!’ he cried again. It was a perfect imitation. Then he came scuttling towards her, sat beneath the open kitchen window, and cuckooed once more. He looked up at her, smiling. ‘Good un!’ he said.

  ‘It was you last night then,’ said Kathie. ‘Oh Spider, there’s clever you are!’

  Other children his age couldn’t do that, she thought, copying the hoot of an owl and the call of a cuckoo, so exactly too. Maybe I’m wrong, thinking he’s not normal, maybe he’s going to be cleverer than other children, it’s just he’s a bit slow learning to walk and talk, maybe he’ll not only catch them up, he’ll pass them.

  Later that morning Kathie heard a cat miaowing. The Sparrows did not have a cat, but the Stanhopes, who lived in the next farm cottage along the road, had a big ginger tom, a ragged-eared, half-wild old creature that sometimes paid a visit. Kathie looked out now and there he was, sitting on the garden wall. She was looking directly at the cat when the next miaow rang out, but his mouth had not moved. He was staring down at Spider below.

  ‘Miaow!’ called Spider again. At this the tomcat leaped down from the wall and ran, tail held high, across the lawn, straight towards the child.

  For a fraction of a second Kathie Sparrow felt a cold chill of fear, but before she could move a muscle, the cat reached Spider and proceeded to rub its big round head against his face, while he in his turn clasped and stroked the animal. It was plain that they were the greatest of friends. Even from the kitchen window the tom’s purrs could be plainly heard.

  At the sight of the woman coming out of the cottage, the ginger cat, accustomed as he was to being chased out of other people’s gardens, ran off and leaped the wall and was gone. Only the purring continued, once again, like the miaow, a perfect imitation.

  That evening Kathie could not keep this news to herself. Once the child had been put to bed, she told Tom, about the owl, about the cuckoo, about the cat. ‘I couldn’t believe my ears,’ she said. ‘He had all those different sounds exactly.’

  ‘Well I never!’ said the shepherd. I’d sooner he started to talk, said some proper words, he thought. ‘He weren’t frightened of thik old cat then?’ he said.

  ‘Oh no! He’s ever so fond of animals, I’m sure. You’ve only got to see him with our Molly.’

  For ever since Spider had been a tiny baby, the collie bitch had accorded him a special devotion. To be sure she was first and foremost Tom’s dog, to do his bidding and respect his wishes, but she seemed very attached to the child, lying by his cot when her duties permitted, and later, once he was mobile, delighting in being close to him and being touched and stroked by him. The touching and the stroking were always very gentle, and in return Molly would lick him as though he was her puppy.

  ‘Just as well he is fond of animals,’ said Tom, ‘if he’s going to work on the farm when he’s older.’

  ‘He might not,’ Kathie said. ‘You never know, he might learn a trade, go to work in town perhaps. In three or four years he’ll be going to school.’

  There was a short silence. Something told the shepherd that the moment had come when he no longer could or should continue this pretence. ‘Kath love,’ he said. ‘I reckon ’tis time to stop beating about the bush. Let’s be straight with one another, we always have. He’s slow, our Spider, isn’t he now?’

  ‘He’ll catch up,’ said Kathie hastily. ‘Look how clever he is
, making all those noises.’

  ‘Now Kath,’ said Tom gently,‘I do know and you do know. I been saying it to myself for a long while now.’

  ‘Oh Tom,’ said his wife. ‘So have I. He’s not normal, is he?’

  The shepherd shook his head. ‘What’s the matter with him we shall never know, I don’t suppose,’ he said. ‘Maybe it was something to do with his birthing or maybe it was the fault of his mother or his father, whoever they were. But we’re his parents now and it’s our job to look on the bright side. The boy may not look all that strong but he’s healthy, so far as we know, and he’s happy.’

  ‘And you never know, Tom, we might be wrong!’ cried Kathie. ‘We might be imagining it. After all, no-one in the village has said anything to me about him, not even Betty Ogle. Have the farm men said anything to you?’

  ‘No,’ said Tom. Not yet, he thought.

  Next day he and Molly were up on the downs with the flock. The ewes were Border Leicesters, white-legged, white-faced, and imperiously Roman-nosed. Tom’s critical gaze swept over them, elegant after shearing. With them was this year’s crop of lambs, part grown now and showing by their colouring that they had been sired by black-faced Suffolk rams.

  Tom had the collie drive the flock slowly away as he looked intently for any signs of lameness or foot trouble. Then he gave the command ‘Away to me, Molly’, and she ran right-handed around the flock, working them back towards him as he stood, leaning on his crook, and looking again, this time at their forelegs. At the rear one ewe, he saw, was hobbling and, calling the dog round to hold them up, he pushed in amongst the mass and, as the lame animal turned away, slipped the head of his crook around one hindleg and made her prisoner.

  While the rest stood watching, all staring wide-eyed at the man amid a loud chorus of bleats, Tom threw the ewe on her back and knelt across her.

  A shepherd on wet land would have been confident of finding foot-rot, but it was rare up here on the well-drained chalk, and sure enough what Tom found was a small sharp stone embedded between the clicks of one forefoot. As he prised it out with his knife, he saw a figure appear over the edge of the hill, a figure which, as the ewe had been, was limping.

  Percy Pound liked to oversee the farm each day, and to this end he kept a powerful old motorcycle which he rode along the drove. This ran, like a spine, up the centre of the farm, from the water-meadows that fringed the chalk stream at the bottom, past the lower flattish fields, and then up the steep escarpment to the downs above. Leaving his machine at an appropriate point, the foreman had then less walking to do in order to reach whichever men or whatever field he wished to visit.

  ‘Morning, Tom,’ he said. ‘All right?’

  ‘Yes thanks, Percy,’ said Tom. He stood up to let the ewe free, and she ran back to join the flock, haltingly at first and then, feeling her discomfort gone, more easily. ‘Picked up a stone,’ said Tom.

  ‘Lambs look well,’ said Percy.

  ‘Shoulda liked a few more twins,’ said Tom. ‘But it was a good lambing this year. I didn’t lose many, nor ewes neither.’

  His thoughts jumped back to that other lambing time, when a newborn baby of a different sort had come into his life. Curiously, the same thoughts were going through the foreman’s mind, for only a couple of hours ago the subject had been raised in the stables.

  Percy was about to speak, when they heard a drumming of hooves and saw a rider in the distance, cantering towards them.

  ‘Mister,’ said Percy. ‘I was just going to tell you he was on his way.’

  Major Yorke was a heavy man and it was a heavyweight hunter that he rode, a big bay gelding that he reined to a halt beside foreman and shepherd.

  ‘Morning, sir,’ they said.

  ‘Morning, Mr Pound, morning, Tom,’ he replied. ‘Lovely day.’ And then, even more curiously, he said to the shepherd, ‘By the way, Tom, I’ve been meaning to ask you. How’s that little boy of yours getting along? I don’t think I’ve set eyes on him since he was a baby. Running around now, I suppose?’

  ‘He gets about,’ said Tom.

  ‘And chattering away nineteen to the dozen, I dare say!’

  To save a lie, Tom nodded. He caught Percy’s eye, and saw a half-wink.

  Mister noticed nothing. ‘Good, good!’ he said. ‘I must call in and take a look at him one of these days. What d’you call him? I forget.’

  ‘John Joseph, sir.’

  They talked sheep for a while, and then with a final word of farewell, Major Yorke clapped his heels against the bay horse’s sides and away they went at a hand canter, over the springy downland turf.

  Tom looked at Percy, mindful of that wink. The foreman looked back, remembering the conversation in the stables earlier that morning. He had given out his orders for the day, and one of the two Ogle boys, Red it was, had either not understood or perhaps purposely misunderstood what it was he had been told to do. Rhode took off his spectacles and wiped their lenses on a filthy handkerchief.

  ‘Come on, Red,’ he said to his brother. ‘Don’t be so daft. Anyone’d think you was soft in the head, like Tom Sparrow’s kid.’

  ‘Who says he’s soft in the head?’ asked Albie Stanhope.

  ‘Our mum do,’ said Rhode. ‘Going to be the village idiot, she do say,’ and the three younger ones laughed.

  Frank and Phil Butt reacted differently.

  ‘’Tis a shame,’ said one.

  ‘Poor little bagger,’ said the other.

  Billy Butt of course had rather more to say. ‘Same as I told the missus,’ he squeaked,‘Tom and Kathie’d have been better off without un. ’Twas a bad day for the Sparrows when thik babbie were dumped on them. Why, if that had been a lamb as wasn’t right, born with a girt big head, say, and a girt tongue stickin’ out of its mouth – like you do get a bulldog calf sometimes – or got five legs or summat, well then Tom would have knocked ’ee on the head, thees’t know. I bain’t saying he shoulda done that to the babbie, but he ought to have let un fade away.’

  ‘Not for my money, Billy,’ said Ephraim the horseman. ‘I reckon Tom done right.’

  ‘And so do I,’ said Percy Pound, and his voice was angry, ‘and I’m telling you all, here and now, you keep your mouths shut about that kid, especially you young uns. If I hear you’ve been poking fun so that Kath and Tom get to hear of it, you’ll get your cards, understand?’

  Now, as the sheep grazed peacefully away, Percy leaned on his stick and looked directly at the shepherd.

  ‘He’ll be all right, Tom,’ he said.

  ‘Who will?’

  ‘Your Spider.’

  Tom rubbed his chin. ‘You know, Percy, do you?’ he said.

  ‘Yes. We all know, barring Mister. All the village knows by now. Some’ll be kind about it and some’ll be cruel and some won’t care – that’s human nature for you. But I’ll tell you one thing, Tom. Your Spider is a lucky little boy.’

  ‘Lucky?’

  ‘Yes, to have you and Kath for his dad and mum. He’s happy, after all, isn’t he, now?’

  Tom nodded. But will he be happy when he’s older, he thought, say in three or four years time?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The years passed and it was lambing time again on the farm. It was also John Joseph Sparrow’s sixth birthday, so quickly does time fly.

  There was of course no knowing the precise date on which he had been born, but Tom reckoned it as being a couple of days before that night when he had found the baby in the straw of the lambing-pen.

  One evening, as the light faded, Kathie and Spider walked up the drove to take the shepherd his supper. It was some time since Spider had graduated from his hands-and-feet scuttle to a walk, though his progress was not like other children’s. He walked in a curious bent-forward manner, long arms hanging, and he was flat-footed, his feet splayed outwards, each one planted deliberately as he went, as though he were crushing some creature at every step, something he would never deliberately have done.

  The village boy
s copied his walk, and often, when Kathie went with him to the shop or the Post Office, there would be two or three children behind them, aping Spider’s action. It was a form of Grandmother’s Footsteps, or Creepmouse as it was locally called, and if Kathie looked round, the boys would instantly revert to a normal walk, giggling and sniggering.

  Amongst the adult villagers, the reactions to Spider as the years passed were as Percy Pound had forecast. Some took little or no notice of the boy, while others showed, by remarks passed or by the mere expression on their faces, that they found the child in some degree repellent. But there were still plenty who would trouble to speak a kind word.

  ‘My, you’ve grown, Spider!’ they might say, and Spider, smiling, would reply ‘Good un!’

  But these were no longer his only words. A stranger listening to the boy talking would realize immediately – as everyone in the village did – that this was no ordinary child. But all the same Spider now had a rudimentary vocabulary of his own. Tom was ‘Dada’, and Kathie was ‘Mum’, and he used a number of other words, chiefly the names of the creatures around him. ‘Molly’ had been the first new word that he had spoken, and, appropriately, ‘sheep’ and ‘lamb’ soon followed.

  Tom and Kathie played on his interest in animals and would repeat their names to him. Once he had connected name and creature, he never forgot them, though sometimes his version differed from the normal. A blackbird, for example, was a ‘birdblack’, a crow was a ‘croak’, and rabbits were ‘barrits’, but one name he always pronounced correctly was ‘sparrow’. He knew his own name now, though this in itself was a little confusing for him so that sometimes he called sparrows spiders and sometimes he would come upon a spider and say,‘Sparrow!’

  Now, as he walked up the drove with his mother, a large flock of lapwings or green plover that had been standing in a field rose as one and lifted away with mournful cries. Spider knew them by the name that was locally used, and he pointed and cried ‘Peewit! Peewit!’