The Boy with No Boots (17 page)

Kate began to sing, and Polly flicked her ears back to listen, and her hoof beats clip-clopped to the music. When she started on ‘Danny Boy’, Freddie found himself joining in,
surprised by the new depth and texture of his voice, and surprised at the joy it gave him and the feeling of camaraderie with Kate.

But when they reached the woods at the foot of the hills, a different feeling lulled them into silence. Polly slowed to a walk as they entered the luminous green flickering twilight, the
beeches, limes and oaks towering like the pillars of a temple. Cool and smelling sweetly of leaves and moss, the woods whispered around them, Polly’s hoof beats were muffled and the wheels of
the cart crackled softly on the pink brown layer of calyx fallen from buds and blossom.

‘Stop,’ said Freddie suddenly.

Kate glanced at him, her startled eyes bright in the shadowy wood. She pulled Polly’s reins gently and the pony stopped and stood motionless, listening, the cart creaking a little as the
wheels became still.

‘What is it?’ Kate asked in a whisper.

‘Listen!’ said Freddie in an electrifying tone.

Kate froze and they were totally still together. They were in a wide glade surrounded by trees, the ground thickly covered in the stripy leaves and black seed-heads of dead bluebells. The sound
of the glade filtered into Freddie’s consciousness, stirring a distant memory. Above the clink of Polly’s harness and the occasional chuck-chuck of the woodpeckers, was a humming,
droning sound, at first high among the leaves, then close, then distant again. He looked deep into the woodland flora and saw the sunlight glisten on the zig-zagging bodies of dozens of bees.
Honeybees, bumbles and tiny hoverflies, and the bright gold of a queen hornet buzzing through the nettles and campion.

He looked at Kate and her face was like that of a startled child, listening to the unexpected symphony of silence.

‘The bees,’ whispered Freddie. ‘Can you hear them?’

She nodded, her mouth open in surprise, and the sunlight glinted through the trees onto her cream silk dress and the gloss of her dark hair.

‘Magic,’ she whispered.

They listened together.

‘It’s the bee-loud glade,’ whispered Freddie. ‘From Innisfree.’

‘What?’

‘It’s a poem I used to like.’

‘Ooh – tell me. I want to hear it.’

Freddie hesitated, embarrassed. And as soon as the embarrassment came, the magic disappeared and the bees melted away into the emerald light.

‘Why are we whispering?’ whispered Kate and her eyes danced with amusement. Polly gave a reverberating whinny, her harness jingled and the cart trembled and creaked. Kate broke into
one of her peals of laughter. She picked up the reins again and Polly moved on, up the sloping lane through the shady wood.

‘You’re going to tell me that poem, when we’re having our picnic,’ Kate said bossily. ‘I shan’t let you have one of my cucumber sandwiches until you’ve
told me.’

The spell was broken, but Freddie felt as if she had opened a door to a part of his mind that had lain forgotten for years. Hearing the bees, then the sound of Kate’s bell-like laughter
ringing through the woods, he felt a sense of restored happiness, a wild precious freedom he’d only experienced with Granny Barcussy.

Kate pulled Polly to a halt again.

‘We must walk with her from here, Freddie,’ she said. ‘It’s too steep for her to pull us as well.’

They plodded one on each side of Polly as the gradient increased and the ground wound upwards into the hills. At every bend the view across the Somerset Levels grew bluer and more panoramic, the
tall trees gave way to dense hazel copses, gnarled hawthorn bushes and field maples festooned with bunches of pale green winged seeds. Freddie was quiet, feeling he wanted to drink deeply of the
beauty around him, and Kate chattered like a bubbling stream. Only when he linked his index finger with hers in Polly’s hot mane did she become quiet. The touch was charged with a gentle
energy like the tip of a candle flame which had the potential to ignite into a hungry fire.

Finally they reached the top of the Poldens, the lane undulating into the distance. Kate steered Polly through a gap in the hedge. She unhitched her from the cart and tied her under the shade of
an oak tree.

‘Now for the best bit,’ she said, her eyes shining. ‘Let’s walk up the ridge and see the view. Then we’ll choose a place for our picnic’

Before them stretched a ridge of hill against the sky. Freddie and Kate walked up towards it, winding their way through enormous anthills, patches of wild thyme, and domes of yellow trefoil.

‘Tom Thumbs,’ said Kate, picking one of the tiny pea-like flowers, ‘– and ORCHIDS! Look Freddie – orchids. They smell divine.’

‘Butterfly orchids,’ said Freddie. ‘That’s what those white ones are – and look, here’s a bee orchid.’ He bent to touch the complex flower which had a
petal resembling a small bumblebee.

Kate looked at him in surprise.

‘Fancy you knowing that, Freddie.’

‘I grew up in the country, not far from here,’ he said. ‘And I had a granny who taught me a lot about nature, and what she didn’t teach me, I learned from watching. I
know all these butterflies.’

‘I thought you only loved engines,’ said Kate. ‘You never told me.’

‘Well,’ Freddie considered what he wanted to say, and decided against it. He didn’t want to risk upsetting her.

She looked up at him with a searching, caring gaze. ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘I’ve done all the talking, haven’t I? I know I’m a chatterbox but I do want to know
about your life, and your hopes and dreams, Freddie – oh, don’t look so serious! Come on, I’ll race you up to the ridge.’ She kicked off her red shoes and ran, grinning
wickedly back at him, her hair and dress flying.

Freddie watched the two red shoes land far apart in the grass, then he ran after her in long strides, the money jingling in his pockets. He felt like an old man who wasn’t used to running,
and he felt like a young man who hadn’t discovered himself. As soon as Kate heard his big creaky shoes thudding after her and his pockets jingling, she started to giggle.

It was like running up to the sky, being an aeroplane that could reach the ridge and take off into the air. At the top Kate stretched her arms, twirled around and stood barefoot, waiting for
him.

‘I love it up here,’ she cried. ‘Look at this view.’

The vast landscape stunned them both into silence, even distracting Freddie from wanting to stare at Kate who looked so free and alive standing beside him with her bare toes in the wiry
grass.

‘That’s Glastonbury Tor,’ she said pointing to a steep green mound with a tower at the top. ‘And the Mendips. Don’t they look blue? Turquoise blue like a
peacock.’

The Levels stretched below them like a chessboard of black peat fields and hay meadows of buttercup and sorrel, the rhynes shining silver, on and on into the distance where a tiny steam train
was puffing its way along the track from Glastonbury to Burnham-on-Sea.

‘What are those hills down there?’ asked Freddie, pointing south.

‘The Quantocks,’ said Kate. ‘And Exmoor beyond. Then you can nearly see the sea at Burnham, the Bristol Channel and sometimes you can see into WALES and see the
MOUNTAINS.’

Freddie kept quiet. He’d never seen the sea, or a mountain. Kate knew a lot more than he did about their own land. Did it matter? No, he reasoned. He loved Kate, and he hoped that one day
she would love him, but while that love was growing he felt he had to be quiet and respectful. He’d heard other men boasting and laughing about what they had done with girls. It sickened
Freddie, and so did the girls he saw wearing lipstick and strutting around in silly clothes, or dressing up in breeches and boots, riding motorbikes, smoking fags. Kate was like a secret jewel he
had discovered, he was going to keep her close to his heart, and under wraps.

It occurred to him that he hadn’t given her a compliment yet, so he opted for a safe one. ‘That’s a beautiful dress you’re wearing.’

‘I’m glad you like it. I made it myself,’ explained Kate, sitting down on the soft grass and leaning back on both arms. She looked at him expectantly. ‘Now – I want
to hear that poem.’

‘Do you? What do you want to hear that for?’

‘Please,’ she pleaded.

So Freddie recited ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, his quiet voice shaking a little with emotion, especially when he came to the last verse.

‘I can see it means a lot to you,’ said Kate. ‘I’m not very good at poetry so can you explain it to me?’

‘Well – I’ll try to.’ Freddie stared out across the Levels, gathering words from corners of his childhood, the beechnuts, the gleaned barley grains, the broken china.
‘When I was a boy I never had time to play. We were poor. I had to walk a mile to school and a mile home in a pair of wooden clogs, and when I got home I had to run errands for my mother
– she couldn’t go out, see? And I was always hungry, I used to live on beechnuts and hazelnuts, like a squirrel I was.’

Kate’s eyes were wide and solemn, her mouth open as she listened to his story, so different from her own.

‘Then, when the war ended, Dad bought the bakery in Monterose. He wanted me to be a baker, see? He thought that would be a fine life for me. But – I didn’t want it, and I had
to do it, Kate. Can you understand that?’ He paused, reassured by the way she was listening so attentively. ‘Then for the rest of my life I had to get up at five in the morning, every
morning, help make the bread, then load it into the bike and do the delivery round, all that before school – oh and I used to go down the station to carry luggage – so that poem, where
it says “I shall have some peace there,” and “live alone in the bee-loud glade”, it used to give me peace, just saying it, or thinking it. When we moved to Monterose, I
missed the countryside, but no one ever knew that. I never told anyone. But that last verse, about “standing on the pavements grey” and “feeling it in the deep earth’s
core” – I understood that feeling so well . . .’

‘Oh Freddie.’ Kate reached out and touched the back of his wrist, looking into his face with compassion. ‘Go on.’

‘’Tis a miserable story,’ Freddie said, suddenly afraid that he had caused a cloud to drift over their summer picnic. ‘You don’t want to hear all that.’

‘I do,’ said Kate, and her eyes never left his face.

‘Well – I’m coming to a better bit now.’ Freddie remembered the storytelling tradition in his family, the exaggerations, the silences, and the laughter. He wanted to do
that for Kate, turn his miserable tale into something entertaining and positive. ‘I’ll tell you how I got that lorry. Well, one frosty night in the middle of February – hard as
diamonds the frost was – I gets up, quiet as a mouse . . .’

Kate sat spellbound, not moving a muscle as she listened to his story, holding her breath in the silences. She let go of Freddie’s wrist so that he could gesticulate with his long fingers,
his eyes beginning to twinkle, his voice still slow and quiet. Then he came to the part where he had escaped down the steep dark street on his bike.

‘The bike had no brakes, see? So I went whizzing down there, in the pitch dark, with my legs stuck out straight and sparks flying from my boots . . .’

He was rewarded with a scream of laughter. Kate doubled over, clutching her stomach with one hand and wiping her eyes with the other. She laughed and laughed as if she would never stop, and
Freddie managed to stay po-faced.

‘Well ’tis true,’ he said, and that set her off again. Secretly pleased, he continued his story, restraining himself from smiles as he related how he had paid his money into
the bank.

‘As soon as the doors opened, I went in with my flour sack, dragging it along the floor. Then I stood at the counter taking out the old socks full of money and some of them blue and
mouldy, and the hankies, all dusty they were and bursting with coins. And the bank clerk, he didn’t like it. He looked me up and down as if I was a tramp, and he said, “You can’t
bring that dirty old stuff in here.” So I looked him in the eye and said – quite politely – “Excuse me Sir, but I can, I’m sixteen and this is legal tender,” and
he didn’t like it, but he had to count it all. Took him three quarters of an hour jingling and cussing, and there was a queue behind me right out the door, and they were all grumbling. But I
had the last laugh. I came out of there with my money in crisp new bank notes, then I went flying down to the motor yard on me bread bike, and I had that Scammell lorry.’

He paused to take a breath, and saw that Kate was wanting to say something.

‘What a WONDERFUL story, Freddie,’ she said passionately, ‘so funny, and inspiring. Tell me again. I loved it.’

‘Well ’tis true. True as I’m sitting here,’ said Freddie, and his smile stretched right to the edges of his face.

‘I love to see you smile,’ said Kate and she kissed him impulsively on his smiling cheek.

Startled and moved by her response, Freddie slipped his arm around her shoulders, feeling the silky dress and her warmth underneath, and she put her hand on his shoulder. For a moment they were
both still, feeling each other’s heartbeat, and Freddie buried his chin in the soft lustre of her dark hair. The moment filled with light and stretched into infinity as if it had registered
in some ethereal archive.

He held her in a shell-like hug, afraid of his own strength and of the sudden rush of energy through his body. His pulse wanted to race like a wild horse, yet his mind stayed calm, his inner
voice telling him to slow down and savour the intoxicating feel of her satin dress, the way her dark curls were hot from the sunshine as they slipped over his bare arm.

‘This is only the beginning,’ he heard himself whisper, but he held back from speaking the words that echoed in his heart, words that Granny Barcussy had fed into his soul.
‘When you love, you must love wisely and slowly.’ Nothing in his life had felt so exquisitely precious as the warm bright silk of Kate in his arms.

A flock of small birds came bobbing and bouncing out of the woods, their voices tinkling like bells, and the grass around them came alive with fluttering wings.