THE BOY WITH
NO BOOTS
By the same author:
Solomon’s Tale
Solomon’s Kitten
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2015
A CBS COMPANY
Copyright © Sheila Jeffries, 2015
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.
The right of Sheila Jeffries to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-47113-765-5
EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-47113-766-2
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Goup (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
To my two stars, Pete and Jade, in memory of ‘Grandad’
Contents
Chapter One: THE TREACLE JAR
Chapter Two: LIES
Chapter Three: BROKEN CHINA
Chapter Four: GRANNY BARCUSSY
Chapter Five: A RED RIBBON
Chapter Six: ‘SHADES OF THE PRISON-HOUSE’
Chapter Seven: THE GOLDEN BIRD
Chapter Eight: PLAYING TRUANT
Chapter Nine: THE BONDING
Chapter Ten: THE LONELINESS OF BEING DIFFERENT
Chapter Eleven: HE WHO DARES
Chapter Twelve: FOREVER BLOWING BUBBLES
Chapter Thirteen: THE ‘BEE-LOUD GLADE’
Chapter Fourteen: THE STONE GATEPOST
Chapter Fifteen: THE WATER IS WIDE
Chapter Sixteen: LITTLE BLUE LETTERS
Chapter Seventeen: THE ROAD TO LYNESEND
Chapter Eighteen: FLOATING
Chapter Nineteen: THE TURN OF THE TIDE
Chapter Twenty: TREAD SOFTLY
Chapter Twenty-One: TRUSTING THE DREAM
Chapter Twenty-Two: ONE YEAR LATER
A Note From the Author
Acknowledgements
Chapter One
THE TREACLE JAR
Annie waited at her garden gate, an earthenware jar clutched in her swollen red hands. If she stared deep into the landscape, she sometimes glimpsed the shine of Freddie’s hair as he bobbed along the lane below the tall elm trees. Her face was hot with anxiety. Under the stained apron, Annie’s heart was dark with guilt. A woman of your age, Annie. Dependent on a seven-year-old child! But that’s what she was. And only Freddie knew why.
Freddie had rescued her when she’d been clinging to the railings outside the Post Office, too terrified to move. He’d led her home on her stone feet, plod by plod, and stilled her trembling with his bright unwavering gaze.
On that October afternoon, Freddie’s footsteps were slower and slower as he trudged home from school. His face was purple, half of it a bruise from where Mr Price had thrown a book at him for daydreaming, and the other half a brighter purple from the blackberries he’d been eating. His four pockets bulged with wet beechnuts, and he smelled of autumn. Blisters scorched his small feet from walking a mile to school and a mile home in a pair of wooden clogs.
‘Don’t you dare take them off,’ Annie had warned.
‘No, Mother.’
‘If you do, then you take your socks off, too, and walk barefoot, and I’m not darning them, Freddie. Understand?’
‘Yes, Mother.’
He dreaded being given the job of darning his own socks with the long bodkin threaded with scratchy grey wool, the smooth wooden darning egg, and the hours of misery, weaving and picking and unpicking, and being scolded as he worked in the square of light from the cottage window.
Freddie paused in the lane. He didn’t want to go home. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to see his mother. It was what she would make him do.
The west wind was swishing the elm trees, their oval leaves flickering through the blue air to assemble in thick drifts that filled the lane with gold. Freddie sighed. If only he could paint it. What he longed for most was a paintbox and a brush, but where would he get paper? Tonight he had to do his homework on lavatory paper, a roll of thin tracing paper, shiny one side and dull on the other.
He sat down in his favourite gateway, sinking into the inviting toastiness of fallen leaves. He scruffed them up with his small hands, covering his knees until he had completely buried his legs. Like a Babe in the Wood, an afternoon babe. Perhaps he would nod off to sleep in the drowsy sunshine. Freddie leaned back against the elm trunk and studied the colours on the wooden gate, a glaze of lime green, little hoops of silver, burning blotches of mustard-coloured lichen. This hot and textured colour framed the Somerset landscape with its lines of pollarded willows notating the fields like a page of music dip-dyed in the mystic blue of the Mendip Hills.
Freddie decided to eat ten of his precious beechnuts to fill the ache in his stomach. He counted them out carefully, laying them in a line along the lower bar of the gate. Then he peeled them, the brittle cases gleaming auburn in the sun, and cupped the tiny triangular nuts in his hand. He put them into his mouth all at once. That way they tasted nuttier and made more of a mouthful. Freddie liked autumn. He liked the mellow sun and the apple orchards, and the morning puddles curled with interesting ice. Autumn was full of ripe berries and hazelnuts. One morning Freddie had found a mushroom the size of a dinner plate growing in the field. Annie had fried it in goose fat and seven of them had feasted on it.
He sat for longer than it took to eat the ten beechnuts, licking the crumbs from his teeth, and picking ‘old man’s beard’ from the hedge. His blue inquisitive eyes stared into its tendrils, wondering at the wisps of fluff protecting the clustered dark seeds. He picked a rose hip and twirled its leathery scarlet fruit thoughtfully between his finger and thumb. He noticed that its black top was a perfect pentagon, and Mr Price had drawn a pentagon on the blackboard that day for them to copy on their slates.