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 Annie complained. So did his father, and Freddie was given a brush which was kept outside for him to brush himself down before being allowed back into the bakery.

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 Annie loading the shelves in the shop or cleaning the window. By 7 a.m. the whole street smelled of fresh bread and Freddie stacked the bicycle basket with loaves for the round he had to do before school. Usually he had breakfast, a big chunk of lardy cake and a cup of cocoa before setting off. Once he’d discovered the station, he took his lardy cake with him to eat while he waited for trains. If he did his bread-round quickly, he managed to be there for the eight o’clock and the eight-thirty trains, and still get to school at nine.

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 Britannica and the works of Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson. Miss Francis told his father Freddie should go to university, but the thought of more study filled him with horror. He wanted to get out there and do real work with engines. He didn’t want to be a baker, and he didn’t want to waste his life sitting in school.

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. Granny Barcussy had appeared to him in a dream, and she was unfolding a piece of drawing paper, holding it up to show him, and it was his picture of the little girl on the Shire horse. Annie had extracted it from Freddie’s wet jacket, ironed it under a cloth and put it in an old picture frame on top of a photo she didn’t like. It hung on the wall halfway up the stairs, and even though Freddie protested that he could now draw much better than that, Annie insisted on keeping it there, as if she wanted to cling to a relic of the child he had been.

In the dream, Granny Barcussy had shown him Monterose station and pointed at the clock. It was ten thirty. She wanted him to be there. So he went, pretending he was going to school as normal, then running round the back of the bakery, through an alleyway and down the hill to the station, his breakfast wrapped in a cloth under his arm. He prayed he wouldn’t be found out. Deceiving his parents wasn’t something he enjoyed, but lately it had become an essential part of his life.

Annie never went out, and Levi spent most of his time working in the bakery. Freddie felt oddly calm about what he was doing. He thought about Miss Francis calling the register at school, questioning why he was absent, but he didn’t care.

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 bonnet open, he would go and ask questions, finding people were usually proud to explain the workings of the engine to him. Freddie’s favourite place was the stonemason’s yard where he sat wistfully on the wall looking at the statues and tombstones being made.

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 gonna spend it on then? Eh?’

‘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.