Страница 16 из 54
Kate felt that Ethie wanted to drag her off the bed, the fierce jealousy in Ethie’s eyes made her uncomfortable. She smiled, but the smile only made Ethie look even more draconian. Kate wanted to keep the peace, so she got off the bed and kissed her father on the cheek.
‘I’m going to pack right now,’ she said, ‘and I’m going to enjoy it.’
Chapter Eight
PLAYING TRUANT
Monterose was a small Somerset market town, centred around the railway which curved its way through cuttings in the hills and over viaducts and embankments. The town was half on a hill and half in a river valley, the lower part of it flooded for much of the winter. Boats were rowed along the streets and wild swans, ducks and geese swam in and out of gardens and cottages where the occupants lived upstairs from November to March. The top half of the town had a busy market square and a capacious church with the loudest bells in the county.
The railway station was a magnet for Freddie. The thrilling power of the steam engines fired him up as if he had swallowed a furnace. When he wasn’t making bread or going to school he ran down the street to the station and hung around watching coal being shovelled, wild-eyed cattle being loaded into trucks, and the spectacular cauliflowers of steam erupting from the saddle-back engine as it shunted to and fro. He was fascinated by the fire inside it and the glimpses of sooty-faced men working in the cab, the white gleam of their eyes as they shovelled and shouted. Freddie spent so much time there that his clothes started to smell of coal, and A
He soon discovered there was money to be earned at the station by carrying luggage over the cream and brown footbridge. Passengers put their hands in their pockets and gave him tuppence, or thruppence. Freddie made friends with the other boys who went racing down the hill after school to earn money at the station. At first he watched and listened, soon figuring out that it wasn’t always the pushy boy who got asked to carry luggage. It was the cleanest ones, the strongest-looking and most respectful. Freddie soon learned how to doff his cap and call people ‘Sir’ and ‘Madam’, and how to look after his money. He memorised the times of trains and found out which trains would have the wealthiest passengers.
Every morning he rose at 5 a.m. to help bake the bread. By then Levi was taking the first batch out of the three coke ovens and A
He liked the teacher, Miss Francis, but despite being in the top class there seemed to be very little for him to learn. He was far ahead of the rest of the class in reading, writing and maths and there were no workbooks to take him further. Sitting at the back of the class, Freddie spent a lot of time daydreaming, drawing, and reading his way through a set of Encyclopaedia Brita
One September morning he decided not to go. He’d be there for the ten-thirty train to Weymouth. It wasn’t a decision he’d taken by himself. Gra
In the dream, Gra
A
He was a tall boy now, taller than anyone in his class, and he felt awkward at school. Living in Monterose had been his education. At weekends and holidays, when he escaped from the bakery, Freddie had hung around watching men at work. He watched the wheelwrights and was allowed to help occasionally, and he learned everything he could about motorcars. If he saw one with the bo
In long strides he headed for the station, thinking there were two other trains due, and he’d have no competition. He felt jaunty and independent, a new feeling in his life, one that he wanted to cultivate.
With one and fourpence safely in his pocket from the two early trains, Freddie climbed up the grassy embankment and sat there to eat his lardy cake peacefully in the morning sun.
‘Shouldn’t you be in school, lad?’ the stationmaster, Charlie, paused to shout up to him.
Freddie shrugged.
‘Playing truant, eh?’ asked Charlie with a wink.
‘I’m too big for school,’ said Freddie. ‘And I need to earn a bit of cash.’
‘What you go
‘A lorry.’
Charlie laughed loudly. ‘Ah, you’ll be buying a whole load of trouble. I don’t like those petrol lorries. Stinking things. I suppose you’ll be meeting the ten-thirty Weymouth train today? They’ll be plenty of wealthy folk putting the precious daughters on there, sending ’em off to that posh boarding school.’
Ethie had always been savagely jealous of Kate. From the moment Kate had been born, Ethie had felt unwanted and her sadness had curdled into a thundercloud lurking over her life. Sally had tried to treat her two girls exactly the same, but the contrast between Kate’s exuberance and Ethie’s negativity made such an ideal impossible.
Today Ethie felt smug that she, not Kate, had been asked to stay at home and run the farm while her father was ill. She hoped Kate would have a hard time, as she had done, starting at boarding school on her own. Ethie felt creepily adult as she headed off to catch the pony and harness her into the cart, proud that her parents trusted her to take Kate to the train.
The bay pony, Polly, was known to be ‘cussèd’. Once caught and harnessed she behaved beautifully, trotting with her neck arched and her toes pointed like a dancer. Loose in the field, Polly was reluctant to relinquish her freedom. She didn’t much like Ethie, so that morning Polly chose to be awkward. Round and round the field she trotted, snorting, her nose in the air. She came close and snatched the square of bread Ethie held out to her, then spun around and galloped off.