The Crowstarver Read Free

then?’
    â€˜Well,’ said Kathie, ‘Tom wants to call him John after his old dad and I want to call him Joe after mine.’
    â€˜You’ll have to toss for it then.’
    â€˜Don’t know as we’ll be let keep him,’ said the shepherd’s wife. ‘After all, tisn’t as though he was a normal baby.’
    â€˜Not normal?’ said Percy. ‘What d’you mean?’
    â€˜I mean we don’t know who he belongs to.’

C HAPTER T HREE
    R ather more than two years later, John Joseph Sparrow was moving rapidly across the postage-stamp-sized lawn at the rear of the shepherd’s cottage. Kathie and Tom worried a little bit that the boy showed no signs of walking, but he got about smartly enough, using his own peculiar method. It could hardly be called a crawl, because his knees did not touch the ground, but on what seemed to be unusually long arms and legs, he scurried about on hands and feet, like a monkey, like a crab, like a spider.
    Kathie Sparrow watched him fondly from her back door. Our little Spider, she said to herself, for that was their nickname for the child that they had finally been able formally to adopt. This had been due in some measure, it seemed, toMister’s influence, for Major Yorke was a magistrate and a power in the district.
    â€˜Spider!’ she called now, and the little boy came scuttling back across the grass towards her. He sat up on his thin backside and stared up at her, smiling a lopsided smile.
    â€˜Who’s a good boy then?’ said Kathie, and Spider, prodding himself in the chest with a forefinger, replied ‘Good un!’ At almost two and a half these were the only intelligible sounds he had thus far uttered, and about this absence of speech Kathie and Tom worried a great deal. Each wanted to ask the other the same question, yet each forbore to do so. Is this a normal child? each parent thought.
    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.
    â€˜Wass think of thik baby of Kath Sparrow’s then?’ would be an opening question, and the replies were varied yet similar.
    â€˜Funny little chap, ain’t he?’
    â€˜Got a funny look about him, thees’t know.’
    â€˜Seems a bit slow.’
    â€˜Don’t say much.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜It’s time for his bed,’ she said. ‘Say goodnight to your dad, Spider.’
    Spider grinned. ‘Good un!’ he said.
    â€˜You and your “good un”’, said Kathie. ‘Say good
night
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