The Boy with No Boots

by Sheila Jeffries

  ‘No you couldn’t,’ Annie replied. She was stripping the grain from the barley sheaf, putting it to soak in a deep bowl.

  ‘I could, Mother. I could make a sailing ship.’ Freddie collected the white and gold curved fragments of cup, holding them up and turning them thoughtfully. He could see in his mind the billowing white sails and the idea of making a model ship excited him. The broken curves of Auntie Flo’s jug would make the base of the ship. He planned to get clay from the streambed and work it into a boat shape. Then he’d set the broken china into it. Or he’d make a bird. An owl with big eyes.

  ‘No Freddie. You’ll cut your hands,’ warned Annie. ‘You put that china in the bin.’

  But Freddie just looked at her. He took the dustpan outside, where he quickly picked out the bits he needed for his sailing ship and his owl and hid them inside a hollow log at the back of the coal shed. He tipped the remainder into the dustbin. When he went back inside, he saw that Annie was touching the empty dresser, and he planned to make the ship and the owl in secret and stand them up there to fill the empty space. He wasn’t going to let his parents stop him.

  After a tea of thick yellow cornbread spread with dripping followed by baked apples, Levi slumped into his fireside chair, looking apprehensive.

  ‘We gotta sort this out.’

  Annie sat on the other side of the bright fire, darning a grubby grey sock with brown wool, and despite her apparent indifference, Freddie was glad of her solid presence as he faced his father. He dreaded another outburst, but Levi was calm now, his voice and eyes flat and defeated.

  ‘Now, Harry Price told me you was clever,’ he began. ‘And I were proud, Freddie. I were proud of you.’ His eyes glistened with disappointment. ‘Then he said you told lies, Freddie. And it weren’t just one lie. Now what have you got to say about that?’

  ‘I don’t tell lies,’ insisted Freddie. He squared his shoulders and directed his candid gaze into Levi’s confused eyes.

  ‘But Harry Price says you do.’ Levi wagged a crusty old finger and put his face closer. ‘He says you told him you saw his wife standing there, and you described her, and she’s dead, Freddie. Dead. So how can you see her? Eh?’

  ‘But I did see her. I can see people who are dead,’ said Freddie.

  Annie gasped and her darning needle paused in mid-air, the long brown strand of wool slowly slipped out of the metal eye and trailed over her lap. Freddie turned and looked at her.

  ‘Can’t I, Mother?’

  Levi looked flummoxed, the colour spreading again from his collar and over his neck.

  Annie leaned forward, the darning needle still in her hand. Her bust heaved with the dilemma she now faced. Pacify Levi, or protect Freddie, or tell the truth? She took a deep breath.

  ‘Levi,’ she said. ‘He’s got the gift.’

  Levi sank back into a confused silence.

  ‘It’s in my family,’ Annie said. ‘My mother had it, and my Nan. Whether you like it or not, Freddie’s got it. He can see people who’ve passed on. It’s a gift, Levi. A gift.’

  ‘Tis wrong,’ shouted Levi. ‘I’m telling ’e. Wrong. Bad, that’s what. And I don’t want no son of mine doing it. I don’t want no fortune-telling or mumbo jumbo in this family. D’you hear? I won’t have it. I might be poor, I might work in a corn mill, but I’m honest. I don’t tell no lies.’

  ‘Tell him, Freddie,’ encouraged Annie. Freddie was edging nearer and nearer to her, backing away from his father, glad of Annie’s warmth and support.

  ‘I do really see people,’ he said. ‘Not all the time. Just now and again. But why is it wrong to see nice people? They aren’t bad just because they’re dead, Dad, are they?’

  Levi didn’t answer. Instead he took out his pipe, tapped it on the hearth and started stuffing a fruity mix of tobacco into it. He lit a dead match from the fire and disappeared into the curls of blue smoke. Then he coughed convulsively, growling and retching. Words had abandoned him again, leaving him spluttering like a clogged engine. Exhaustion, frustration, the war, the corn mill, all of it loomed between him and his longing to be a good father. Levi was fighting his own war, and he wasn’t winning. All he could do was put up barriers of discipline, whether he agreed with it or not.

  ‘Now you listen to me,’ he drew Freddie close again, noticing the torn shirt and yesterday’s bruises. ‘I forbid you ever to speak of this again. D’you hear? If you do see people, as you say, then you are not to speak of it. Not to me, or your mother, your sisters and brother, or Harry Price.’

  ‘And not Doctor Stewart either,’ added Annie.

  ‘Or the vicar.’

  Freddie studied their frowning faces in the firelight. From now on his life would be ring-fenced. Secret. A secret life. That’s what he would have. He’d say yes and no, and go to school, and stand in the queue for the shop, and carry his dreams in a secret golden box inside his head. But when I’m grown up, he thought, things will be different. No one will tell me what to do and what not to do.

  Chapter Four

  GRANNY BARCUSSY

  Twice a year Freddie was sent on ‘his holiday’, a mile across the fields to where Levi’s mother lived alone in her farmhouse. He didn’t have much to pack, a few matchboxes, a pencil, a tobacco tin and a precious fishing net. This time he had something extra.

  ‘When you give a present, you wrap it up in something,’ Annie had said. ‘Brown paper and string, and sealing wax. But we haven’t got any of that now the war is on. Wretched war. I’ll be glad when it comes to an end.’ She rummaged in the kitchen cupboard and fished out a piece of butter muslin. ‘Here you are. Roll it up in that.’

  Freddie took the soft butter muslin and wrapped the present for Granny Barcussy, and tied it round with a frayed blue ribbon.

  ‘I used to wear that in my hair, when I was a girl,’ said Annie, taking the ribbon and tying it in a bow. ‘There. That looks like a present now. But don’t you let your father see it. He’ll . . .’

  Freddie nodded. ‘I know.’

  ‘What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over,’ said Annie, and she packed it into the old carpetbag with Freddie’s pyjamas, and a dead pigeon.

  ‘Do I have to carry that?’ asked Freddie, looking at the iridescent greens and purples in the pigeon’s neck, and its head flopped sideways, the eyes closed under white lids.

  ‘’Course you do. Don’t be so silly. I’ve got to send something for you to eat. Granny will make a pigeon pie.’

  Freddie looked at his mother anxiously.

  ‘How are you going to go out, Mother? When I’m not here.’

  ‘I shan’t need to.’

  ‘But what if you do?’

  ‘I’ll manage. Now don’t you worry, Freddie. You like going to Granny don’t you? Just remember she’s eighty-one. You get the wood in for her and feed the chickens – and don’t go playing by the river – and don’t loiter about daydreaming. Go straight there.’

  Freddie still worried about his mother as he waved goodbye and set off across the fields which were wet and squishy underfoot. He knew the way well. Over the sheep pastures, through the woods and down towards the river valley. The baby lambs and the song thrushes cheered him up, and the thought of a holiday, and the present tucked in his carpetbag under the wings of the dead pigeon. And he had another surprise, hidden in one of his matchboxes.

  He was climbing the stile into the woods when a strange feeling crept over him like a warm wind blowing on his skin. Something, or someone, was inside the woods, waiting for him to jump down from the stile. Freddie perched on the rail, the carpetbag clutched in his hands looking, searching the flickering twilight of the woods. He could smell the primroses and the moss, and he could smell the person who was waiting. He smelled of sweet meadow hay and boot polish.

  Freddie got down from the stile and started to walk over soft pine needles on hushed footsteps. It was silent under the tall conifers, but he could hear the whisper of soft-treading feet padding beside him, and th
e swish of a cloak brushing his skin. He stopped under a lime tree, and the other feet stopped. But still he couldn’t see anyone, even when he sat down against the cool trunk of the lime tree, and searched the space with his eyes.

  The sun had gone behind a cloud and the lights of the wood vanished into translucent gloom. Around his legs were the amber spirals of young ferns uncurling from dark leaf mould, and pale mounds of primroses which seemed to shine with a light of their own. The light that appeared in front of Freddie was primrose-coloured, a tall shimmering shape. He reached out and touched it, and it felt like velvet, indescribably smooth and lingering, a sensation that infused his skin with secret energy.

  Freddie closed his eyes and visualised the space around him, something he practised doing often. The scene came instantly to life. First he saw the energy of the sap rising from the tree roots below the soil like fountains of glistening light, green gold and lemon gold, branching into thousands and thousands of arteries that trickled through the new young stalks and leaves. He listened and he could hear the subtle high-pitched music of growth; each tree sang with a different voice, the voice of its growing. The sky between the leaves rang with the hum of honeybees in the lime flowers.

  ‘The bee-loud glade,’ Freddie thought, remembering the poem he had learned at school. ‘This is like Innisfree. I’ll live alone in the bee-loud glade.’ He loved the poem because to him it was about a man who wanted to live alone where no one could tell him what to do.

  With his eyes still closed, and believing himself to be alone, Freddie decided to say the whole poem aloud, say it to the singing trees and the dancing lights of the wood that were coming alive in his vision. He took a deep breath and began:

  ‘I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree

  And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

  Nine bean rows will I have there, and a hive for the honeybee

  And live alone in the bee-loud glade.’

  Preoccupied with his recital and his vision, Freddie didn’t hear the very real footsteps coming through the wood. Softly and briskly they came, winding between the ferns, a long black skirt swinging, snagging on brambles, a forked hazel stick hooking them away. A person so small and light inside the black skirt and shawl, she could move over the ground like a whisper, not shaking it. She could pause like a hoverfly over a flower, and listen undiscovered to Freddie’s clear boyish voice under the canopy of the lime tree. With a benevolent swish she sat down on the other side of the tree trunk and waited.

  Freddie emerged from his dream very slowly. To be slow was real luxury, and he could only do it when he was quite alone. Even now, Annie’s words were hammering insistently in his head. No loitering around daydreaming. Or Harry Price’s barking voice. Wake up, boy. Wake up.

  But now he was on holiday, under a lime tree. A time to stretch and yawn out loud, and open his eyes a slit at a time, allowing the rich colours of mosses and tree roots to come in gently. The backs of his knees were embossed with the patterns of twigs and grass, and he rubbed them back to life, brushing leaves and scraps of bark from his socks. Then his hand touched a different fabric, a fabric that wasn’t his, smooth and cottony, draped over the tree roots. His eyes opened wide, following the swirl of black fabric round the tree.

  ‘Granny Barcussy!’

  ‘My Fred.’

  She never called him Freddie. Too babyish, she declared, for an old soul like her grandson.

  ‘How are you, Granny?’ said Freddie politely.

  ‘Eighty-one, and still dancing, my luvvy.’

  Granny Barcussy only had three teeth, one at the top and two randomly spaced at the bottom, but her eyes more than compensated for the dark cave of a smile. Eyes that danced with secret knowledge, eyes that made Freddie feel grown up and trusted, and loved. He studied the pattern of wrinkles on her face and saw her as a line drawing, if only he had a sharp enough pencil and a clean square of paper.

  ‘I got you a present,’ he said.

  ‘A present! And it ’tidn’t me birthday, Fred.’

  Shoving the dead pigeon aside, Freddie extracted the butter muslin parcel from the carpetbag. His heart began to thud excitedly as he put it into her hands.

  ‘Ooh. ’Tis a cheese,’ she cried, sniffing it.

  ‘No,’ said Freddie. ‘Unwrap it. Go on.’

  ‘’Tis heavy. What can it be?’ She looked at him sideways under her silver eyebrows. ‘What have you been up to?’

  Freddie was so excited he felt his stomach trembling as she slowly untied the blue ribbon and he watched her old hands unrolling the muslin parcel in the woodland sunlight. At last it was out, and he saw it again, the owl he had made from the broken china.

  Granny Barcussy gasped. Speechless, she stared down at the owl. Its eyes, ringed with two gold cup handles, winked back at her, cleverly made with black and white china flowers. Its breast feathers, set in the clay, were made from the splinters of Annie’s china cups, the wings from fragments of a brown and cream jug, the feet from more curly bits of handle.

  ‘Where did this come from, Fred?’

  ‘I made it. For you.’

  Now he’d said it. Freddie had looked forward to this moment all the winter. He’d worked on the owl in secret, digging clay from the streambed, moulding it and rolling it, keeping it wet and pressing the china into it. Some of his blood was in it too; he’d cut his fingers and got into trouble for it, but he wouldn’t be stopped, and he’d kept the owl hidden under a loose floorboard in his bedroom. And each time he took it out he’d imagined how Granny Barcussy’s eyes would shine when she saw it. He wasn’t disappointed.

  ‘Oh, but ’tis beautiful. Beautiful,’ she murmured, the words surfacing from somewhere deep in her chest. ‘You made this. You clever, clever boy.’

  Freddie soaked up the praise. It was something he so rarely had, and he stored the feeling away to sustain him in harder times. He’d made a treasure out of a disaster. But Levi wouldn’t see it like that. It would stir up guilt and shame, and Annie had deemed it wiser not to show it to him.

  ‘It’s got some of my blood in it,’ he said cheekily and Granny Barcussy laughed out loud and gave him a hug.

  ‘Then I shall love it all the more,’ she declared, and her eyes looked at him shrewdly. ‘And don’t think I don’t know where this broken china came from. Enough said. Come on now, Fred. I’ve got our dinner ready. We’re having BACON and potatoes.’

  Granny Barcussy’s place was full of chickens. They sat up on the back of the old leather sofa, and on top of the oak sideboard plumped together in sociable little groups, coming and going as they pleased through the square-window which was always open. They weren’t allowed in the kitchen.

  ‘I’ve only got nine left,’ she said. ‘That old fox had my lovely cockerel; lovely bird he was, used to boss the hens about, rush them inside if the buzzard came over. They don’t lay many eggs now, now he’s gone. Fox had him in broad daylight. Now, mind you don’t sit on an egg, Fred. They lays them in funny places. You might hatch it!’ Granny cackled with laughter as if she was a chicken herself. She darted around the cottage, talking non-stop.

  Freddie was quiet. He had found Millie, a glossy black chicken who would sit on his shoulder, or settle on his lap like a cat. He loved the warmth of her on him, the mysterious depth of her plumage, the motherly crooning sounds she made in her throat. And he loved being allowed to just sit there on the sofa and watch the life of the cottage. Sparrows came in and out with the chickens, and high on one of the beams were two corpulent spiders who had been there for years and their webs were old and dust-covered, festooned with the flies they had caught and wrapped in gossamer. Now one of them had a pale orange cocoon attached to the wall. Freddie watched her fussing over it and wondered what it was.

  ‘That’s her family,’ said Granny Barcussy. ‘All her hundreds of children in there. Waiting for the right moment to be born.’

  ‘How are they born?’ asked Freddie, fascinated.

  �
��The cocoon explodes, not like a gun, gently over a few hours, and the baby spiders float out the window on long strings of gossamer. ’Tis a miracle, I think.’ Her eyes were alight with the magic of it. ‘Spiders are so organised,’ she continued. ‘We can learn a thing or two from them.’

  While she was talking, Freddie was absorbed with stroking Millie and looking at her bright eyes and orange beak. He imagined himself in a cocoon, and Granny Barcussy’s voice was wrapping threads around and around him until he was again in his own special sanctuary. The dark interior of the farmhouse grew bright, a hazy, primrose yellow light drifted in through the wall and settled itself right in front of Freddie. He smelled it – sweet meadow hay and boot polish, and suddenly a man stood there in a cream robe, the man who had walked beside him through the wood. The glow of his brown eyes was hypnotic. The man came close and sat himself down on the sofa next to Freddie, and Millie cocked her head to look at him.

  ‘Are you real?’ asked Freddie.

  ‘’Course I’m real. What a funny question,’ said Granny Barcussy sharply.

  ‘I wasn’t talking to you,’ said Freddie. ‘I was talking to him.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The man sitting next to me.’

  ‘What man?’ Granny Barcussy dragged a rickety music stool across the floor and sat on it, staring intently at her grandson. ‘Describe him, can you?’

  Freddie looked at the man carefully. ‘He’s got brown eyes, and a moustache, and he’s wearing—’ He was going to say ‘a long cream dress’ but as he looked deeper into the shining robe he saw the man’s clothes. ‘He’s got shiny brown boots and breeches with buttons up the side of his knees, and a tweed jacket like the one Dad’s got, and a white shirt, and a waistcoat with one button missing, and he’s got a watch in his pocket on a gold chain. And . . .’

  ‘Go on.’ Granny Barcussy’s cheeks were wet with tears. The tears ran into the deep wrinkles and made her skin glisten.

  ‘Don’t cry, Gran.’ Freddie was alarmed. What had he done? Then he remembered he wasn’t supposed to talk about the spirit people he saw. His father had forbidden it. ‘I’m not allowed to—’