The Crowstarver (10 page)

He lowered the pitchfork.

Oh dear God, he thought, he looks so much like our Henry.

T
he war in the air played quite a part in the life of Outoverdown Farm that September, as the Battle of Britain was fought. Hardly had the wrecked Messerschmitt been removed than another official telegram arrived, this time for Major and Mrs Yorke. Mercifully, it was not news of death, but of capture.

Their only son, Pilot Officer Hugh Yorke, had been shot down over the French coast. In a kind of mirror-image of the incident on the farm, he had managed to land his stricken Hurricane and had been taken prisoner.

‘First Percy's boy, now Mister's boy,' said Tom to Kathie. ‘These things often come in threes. Will it be Albie Stanhope next, d'you think?'

‘He was home on leave not long ago,
wasn't he?' said Kathie.

‘Yes, he's stationed up in the north of the county, I think, not all that far away,' said Tom.

‘How's your Albie then?' said the shepherd to the horseman when next they met.

‘Oh, he's fallen on his feet, he has,' said Ephraim.‘They've gone mechanized, his lot have, thees know, riding on Bren carriers instead of horses, but our Albie's C.O., he's a hunting man, like Mister, and he keeps a couple of horses and gets a day out now and again, and what d'you think?'

‘I bet I know,' said Tom. ‘Albie's got the job of looking after them.'

Ephraim nodded.

‘Rides 'em out, what's more.'

‘Cushy young devil,' said Tom.‘Wass think about Mister's boy then?'

‘He's alive, any road,' said Ephraim. Unlike Percy's son, each man thought.

‘One thing,' said the horseman.‘Your lad's safe, whatever happens.'

Tom of course had no means of knowing how close Spider had been to death in the path of the stricken plane, and Spider had no means of telling him.

Afterwards, he had spread his arms wide and
run clumsily towards Tom, making swooshing noises, but he had not the powers of speech to describe what had happened.

On any farm at any time there are of course hazards that a boy might have to face, but in general Spider was kept well away from machinery and not allowed to handle sharp tools. As to dangers from livestock no-one worried overly, because of the boy's strange empathy with all living creatures.

Only recently he had been out with Tom when they passed near a bunch of the Irish heifers with their bull. Percy Pound had come roaring up the drove on his motorbike and had stopped to talk to the shepherd. Looking round after Percy had gone, Tom saw that Spider had walked in among the cattle and was making directly for the Aberdeen Angus bull. Hornless and placid-natured the animal might be, but that great heavy head could do a power of damage if swung at the boy in anger or irritation.

But no, before Tom could say or do anything, Spider reached the bull and began to pat and stroke it, while the big black animal stood stock-still, apparently enjoying this attention. To cap it all, Spider took hold of the brass ring in the bull's
nose and led it over to his father and halted before him.

‘He's a good un, Dada,' he said.

‘Never seen anything like it,' said Tom to Percy later.‘I said to him “Come on now, Spider, bulls is dangerous, you know”, so he lets go of the ring and comes on along of me. But then as we went on across the field, there's the old bull walking along a couple of paces behind us, just like a big dog following his master, wanting a pat.'

But the danger into which Spider was shortly to fall was one that Tom and Kathie had never considered. The River Wylye was a gently-flowing chalk-stream that meandered its way through the meadows, spanned here and there by pretty stone bridges that carried the road back and forth across it. The waters of the stream were clear, bedded with gravel and festooned with waving weed, and in them were trout and perch and roach and rudd and the occasional predatory pike.

The Wylye formed one boundary, the northern, of Outoverdown Farm, and near the village there were a couple of pools where some of the children bathed on hot summer days. Spider did not of course. Neither Tom nor Kathie could swim, so the idea of teaching Spider to do so
never occurred to them. There was no reason for him to go into the water.

But Spider in his free time often walked by the river. He liked to look at the wild birds there, the swans and ducks, the moorhens and dabchicks, the brilliant flashing kingfishers, all of which accepted his quiet presence without worry. He liked to watch the water voles swimming across, and one day he was fortunate enough to set eyes upon a creature he'd never seen before, a sleek brown animal with a round catlike head and a long ruddery tail. He was leaning on the parapet of a bridge when he saw it, twisting and twirling beneath the clear water as it chased a fish.

He found its picture in his book that evening and showed it to his parents.

‘What that?' he said.

‘That's an otter,' they said.‘Did you see one?'

Spider nodded rapidly, excitedly. He spent a long time staring at the picture and tracing the outline of the creature with a finger, and mouthing to himself. Passing close to him, Kathie heard him saying, ‘Hotter. Good un. Hotter. Good un. Good hotter.'

For Percy Pound the foreman, the River Wylye held a special magic. He had been born by it, in
a village some miles further downstream, and, apart from those grim years of fighting in France, had lived near it all his life.

Percy was not a churchgoing man. The peace of God passed his understanding (though he had called upon His name often enough in the trenches), but every Sunday morning he would leave his house and walk past the farmyard and then down a grassy lane, till he reached the banks of the Wylye. Here, standing beside its rippling tranquillity, looking into its clear depths, and listening to its gentle song, he drew strength and solace. Without ever setting foot in the river, he felt nonetheless that he could immerse himself in it and wash away all stress and worry.

As a younger man, he came alone on these Sunday pilgrimages, but then, once his son Henry was old enough, they would go together. Now he was always alone again by the riverside, and at the end of one week he stood at a favourite spot, gazing down a favourite reach towards a stone bridge beneath whose arch the Wylye softly ran and on whose parapet he and his son had so often leaned and looked down at the trout lying in the limpid water, heads pointing upstream, each fish's fins and tail working gently to hold station against the gentle current.

Now, as Percy looked, he saw that there was a figure that appeared to be sitting upon the parapet of the bridge, and he felt an actual pain in his heart at the knowledge that it was not Henry, that it could never again be Henry.

Spider had walked to the bridge that Sunday in hope that he might there see again the ‘hotter'. For a while he leaned upon the low stone wall, looking down into the water, and seeing fish but no mammal. A moorhen swam out of the bank-side reeds, and Spider called to it in its own voice ‘Prrruk!' and ‘Kik! Kik! Kik!' and it answered. Then he took from his pocket his knife with its stag's horn handle and began to whittle at a stick he was carrying, remembering to cut away from himself. For comfort, he swung his legs (clumsily of course) over the wall and sat upon it, legs dangling above the water. There was a knot in the piece of wood that resisted the knife-blade, and as he cut harder at it, the blade suddenly sliced through the obstruction and Spider almost lost his balance.

Striving to regain it, he dropped the knife. It hit the water with a small splash and sank, the silver of its blade flashing, fishlike, as it fell to the river bed, here some six feet deep, and settled upon the gravelled bottom.

Spider, leaning far out over the parapet in anguish at the loss of his treasure, then lost his balance completely and fell, all anyhow, into the river.

Percy, watching, saw the sudden fall from the bridge of the unknown figure, and then heard a loud yell, a yell of fear, a yell that would have frightened any ‘croak' but was now coming, the foreman recognized, from the throat of the crowstarver himself.

As Percy hurried along the bank as fast as his crippled knee would allow, he heard the noise stop and saw the struggling figure submerge, and then surface again and let out a further strangled shout. Percy was no swimmer, but by some mercy (the mercy perhaps of Him, whom at that very moment other villagers were worshipping) he was carrying the long blackthorn thumbstick he always took on his Sunday walk, and now he managed to wade in far enough to hold out the stick for the boy to grasp.

‘Hold on, Spider, hold on tight!' gasped the breathless foreman, and Spider, whose last breath could not have been far off, somehow found strength to obey.

Had the current been strong things might have gone badly, but the Wylye, as it mostly did,
flowed slowly, and Percy managed to grab the boy by his coat collar and drag him to the bank. Spider promptly sicked up a great deal of water and then lay gasping, his breathing fast and shallow, his eyes wide in remembered terror.

‘Oh Percy, you saved his life!' cried Kathie later.‘Oh, how grateful we are to you!'

‘We are,' said Tom.‘I hope Spider was. He thanked you, did he?'

‘Well, not at first,' said Percy.‘Once he got his voice and his breath back, all he could say was “knife”. I didn't know what he was on about, but then after a bit he takes my hand and pulls me up onto the bridge and points down into the water and says,“Knife! Knife!” He must have dropped it in.'

‘We'll get him another,' said Tom. It's only a knife that's lost, he thought, we've still got our son. Not like poor old Percy, and then he saw the foreman smile at him, tiredly, and realized that he knew what that thought was.

‘It's all right, Tom,' said Percy.‘It's all right.'

I
n fact, Tom did not have to buy a replacement knife for Spider. The very next day he was walking up the drove towards his hut, his new puppy at heel. He was remembering walking thus once and speaking to Molly, telling her that nothing else mattered as long as Spider was happy. He suspected then that the days of his old dog – and she was very old – were numbered, for she had bad arthritis and was in pain, and indeed shortly afterwards Tom had had her put to sleep. Explaining it to Spider had been difficult, but Molly's replacement, a dog puppy that Tom called Moss, soon took her place in the boy's affections.

Now, the shepherd heard the clop of hooves and saw his employer riding down the drove towards him.

‘Morning, Tom,' said Mister as he reined in Sturdiboy.‘How's the new puppy doing?'

‘He'll be all right, sir,' Tom said. ‘He's got a lot to learn, but he's learning it.'

‘And that boy of yours?'

That boy of mine, thought Tom, is lucky to be alive today, and he told Mister the tale of yesterday's drama.

‘Mr Pound rescued him, you say?' said Major Yorke. ‘Damn good show! No harm done then, in the end?'

‘No, sir. The boy lost his precious knife, that's all, but I'll get him another one.'

‘Why not let me buy him one?' said Mister. ‘I'd like to. What was it like, this knife?'

‘Matter of fact you can see it, sir, on your way home, if you're going by the little bridge. You can see it, led in the bottom, clear as can be, but it's in deepish water, no way of getting it out.'

As well as being a hunting man, Major Yorke was a keen fisherman. Ten minutes later, crossing the bridge, he leaned out of his saddle and looked down and saw the knife. It had, he was pleased to see, a little ring at one end, a ring in which, with a lot of luck and a great deal of patience, a hook might catch. Need a biggish hook, he thought,
like the one I use for pike, and he rode on home to fetch a rod.

Later that day, Kathie was giving Tom and Spider their tea when there was a knock at the cottage door at which Moss barked. She went to open it, to find the farmer standing outside in the darkness. ‘May I come in?' he said. ‘I have a surprise for your boy,' and, once inside, he took from his pocket something wrapped in a piece of rag, something that he had oiled, something at sight of which Spider's jaw dropped.