The Boy with No Boots Read Free Page A

walls or feeding on the Michaelmas daisies. Freddie listened. There was hammering
from far away, a robin singing, but no one was talking. Where was his mother? Annie had gone out when she shouldn’t go out. Only Freddie knew that.
    Freddie pulled on his scratchy socks and the heavy clogs. Where would she be? Was it his fault for breaking the treacle jar?
    Levi hesitated outside the schoolroom door. He could smell smoke from the stove, and the only sound was the occasional cough from a child or a creak from the floor-boards. Had
he been inside the schoolroom, he would have heard the steady squeak of thin chalk sticks on little black slates as fourteen children aged from five to twelve years old worked silently at their
arithmetic.
    Once again Levi mentally rehearsed what he intended to say, and how he wasn’t going to be intimidated by the likes of Harry Price. He knocked on the heavily varnished door and pushed it
open, the dented brass knob cold in his hand. Fourteen heads turned to look at him. The children smelled of damp socks and rice pudding. Harry Price sat on a small platform at one end, stuffing
tobacco into a curly pipe.
    ‘Work,’ he barked, and the children’s heads snapped back into position. Levi took off his cap respectfully.
    ‘I’d want a word.’
    Harry Price took a used match from a St Bruno tin on his desk and carried it to the stove, opened the door to a cloud of smoke and lit it from the roaring flames inside. He sucked and puffed at
the pipe, almost disappearing into curling smoke while Levi stood awkwardly. ‘Outside.’ Harry Price wagged a grizzled finger at his class. ‘If anyone moves or speaks, I shall
know.’
    The two men stood in the brown corridor outside, looking squarely at each other’s eyes.
    ‘I’ve took time off work for this,’ Levi said. ‘It’s about my boy.’
    ‘Frederick?’
    ‘Ah, Frederick.’ Levi thought about the bruise he’d seen on the sleeping face of his small son, and the words jostled in his throat. ‘He ain’t strong. And I want to
know why he’s being punished so often. Is he a dunce?’
    ‘A dunce! No. On the contrary he’s clever, very clever.’ Harry Price’s eyes looked uncomfortable. Doctor Stewart had already admonished him for his treatment of Freddie
and he’d disagreed, of course. Boys had to be kept in line. How would Doctor Stewart cope, shut in a room all day with fifteen village kids? No matter how well they behaved, Harry Price could
sense their frustrations and their simmering energy waiting to engulf him if he once slackened his defences. Worse, he sensed their hatred of him, the way they stormed out at home time like a
basket of pigeons released into furious flight. And that Frederick always looking right through him with those eyes, as if he could see right into the secret rooms of his head.
    Once Freddie had said something that had deeply disturbed Harry Price.
    ‘Sir, who is that lovely lady standing next to you?’
    ‘What do you mean, boy? There’s nobody here!’
    ‘Oh but there is, Sir,’ and Freddie had described his late wife, who he’d never seen, with breathtaking accuracy.
    ‘Don’t you dare tell me such lies, Frederick. Sit down and get on with your work or you’ll feel my cane. Shame on you boy!’
    But no amount of shouting and blustering would erase from Harry Price’s mind the clear and startling picture of his late wife. From that day he feared and hated Freddie.
    ‘So what does he do?’ persisted Levi. ‘If it’s just daydreaming, does that warrant such punishment?’
    ‘He does daydream. But . . .’ Harry Price raised his bushy eyebrows at Levi. They were stained yellow from the pipe smoke. ‘I’m sorry to say he tells lies.’
    There was silence while Levi’s blood pressure soared and his expression changed from concern to anger.
    ‘LIES,’ he shouted. ‘My boy tells LIES.’
    ‘Oh yes, daily.’
    Levi could have sworn that Harry Price looked pleased with this information,