The Crowstarver Read Free Page A

a good boy,’ but the child only pointed to himself and repeated his catchphrase.
    â€˜Sleep well, my son,’ said Tom. ‘Pleasant dreams.’
    â€˜I suppose he does dream?’ said Kathie. ‘He sleeps so sound. I don’t think he’s ever woke us.’
    â€˜He’s contented, that’s why,’ said Tom. I hope, he thought as he watched them go back up the path to the cottage. I hope he’s content, poor little chap, because of one thing I’m certain now – he’s simple. I don’t know how Kath will take it when she realizes.
    Upstairs, Kathie tucked Spider up in bed. She bent to kiss him and he smiled his twisted smile, and then shut his eyes as though he would be asleep in an instant.
    Which he will be, thought Kathie as she left the room. He don’t never complain nor grizzle like most babies do, some time or another. Don’t cry neither, hardly ever heard him cry. Yet when I come in in the morning, he’ll be lying there with his eyes wide open just as if he’d been awake all night. He’s not like a normal baby.
    Suddenly, at this last thought, a suspicion that Kathie Sparrow had harboured for some time but had ruthlessly suppressed became a certainty.‘He’s
not
a normal baby,’ she said quietly to herself. ‘Thank the Lord Tom doesn’t realize.’
    That night she woke some time in the small hours to hear an owl hooting. Beside her, Tom snored softly. The owl, she could hear, was on his usual perch, in the old Bramley-apple tree at the bottom of the garden. She waited, half asleep again, for the bird to hoot once more, but when he did, it sounded much much closer. It sounded in fact as though it came from the room next door. Spider’s room.

C HAPTER F OUR
    K athie lay wide awake, tense, listening intently, but the night was silent again. She slipped out of bed, switched on the landing light, and peered round Spider’s bedroom door. He lay still, eyes closed. I must have dreamed it, she thought.
    Next morning she said nothing to Tom about the matter, but she could not get it out of her mind. Later, she was hanging out washing on the clothes-line when she saw a blue-grey bird fly low across the nearby field. Its flight was hawk-like, and it was being followed by a mob of small birds. As she walked back up the path carrying her clothes-basket and peg-bag, she heard the cuckoo begin calling from a little spinney at the bottom of the field.
    The kitchen window looked out onto the back garden of the cottage, conveniently, in that Kathie could keep an eye on her child as he sat on the little lawn or scuttled about it in his strange way. Now, she saw, he was quite still, looking away from her, in the direction from which the cuckoo’s calls were still coming. They ceased, but after a little while she heard a loud ‘Cuckoo!’ from the lawn. Spider turned and saw her watching him.
    â€˜Cuckoo!’ he cried again. It was a perfect imitation. Then he came scuttling towards her, sat beneath the open kitchen window, and cuckooed once more. He looked up at her, smiling. ‘Good un!’ he said.
    â€˜It
was
you last night then,’ said Kathie. ‘Oh Spider, there’s clever you are!’
    Other children his age couldn’t do that, she thought, copying the hoot of an owl and the call of a cuckoo, so exactly too. Maybe I’m wrong, thinking he’s not normal, maybe he’s going to be cleverer than other children, it’s just he’s a bit slow learning to walk and talk, maybe he’ll not only catch them up, he’ll pass them.
    Later that morning Kathie heard a cat miaowing. The Sparrows did not have a cat, but the Stanhopes, who lived in the next farm cottagealong the road, had a big ginger tom, a ragged-eared, half-wild old creature that sometimes paid a visit. Kathie looked out now and there he was, sitting on the garden wall. She was looking directly at the cat when the next