‘Like a haystack,’ he’d said. ‘A pentagon. Like a haystack.’ That was before he threw the Palgrave’s Golden Treasury at Freddie’s head.

‘Stupid boy – daydreaming again! Is that how you’re going to live your life?’

The bruise ached and his eye hurt when he blinked. The longer he sat buried in the golden elm leaves, the drowsier Freddie became. The bees buzzed deeper, and the starlings began their four o’clock twittering, filling the half-bare poplars with a black rippling as if someone had scattered them into the light. Freddie listened, and through the mosaic of the starlings’ song, he could hear Annie calling him.

‘Freddie! Fred!’

A little wind-blown voice from such a huge woman, the cry was a blend of anger and genuine desperate need. Freddie sighed and shoved his feet into the hated clogs.

‘Coming.’

He clumped down the lane, hearing the church clock striking four. Why was he late? He could see the cottage now with its sagging thatch. He heard the chickens muttering and smelled the coke oven. Tiredness draped its threadbare cloak over his small shoulder blades. He longed to go inside and creep to the brown corner by the window and read his brown book, and disappear into the brown comfort of home.

But his mother was there, as he knew she would be, standing at the wicket gate, brandishing the dreaded jar. She was like the earthenware jar, solid as fired clay, but old, the glaze cracked, the smile chipped, the knowledge gone stale inside. In that moment, Freddie felt glad he had a mother to soak up his tiredness. He leaned on her, his cheek against the heavy damp apron, which smelled of cheese. He could sometimes make her be a proper mother, even when she didn’t want to be. He made cracks in her earthenware armour.

She pushed him away.

‘Get on down the shop,’ she said. ‘They’ve got some treacle.’

‘I want a drink.’ Freddie turned on the garden tap and guzzled the cold bright water.

‘Hurry up. The queue will be long. Don’t come back until you’ve got some.’

It was no use appealing. Freddie digested Annie’s expression as he took the jar with both hands. He saw the frustration in her eyes. Then a spark, a frown of concern.

‘Freddie?’

‘Yes Mother.’

‘What happened to your face?’

‘Mr Price threw a book at me.’

‘What for?’

‘Daydreaming.’

‘Serves you right. You go on now and get that treacle.’

Freddie turned and walked off as smartly as he could, his little back square with anger. Not again. Please not again, Mother. Every day I have to stand in that queue. Why me? I’m tired out from school. I’m starving hungry. I get cold in the queue. Do I have to? Why can’t I have boots? Why is there a war? I didn’t want the war, did I?

The sunlight was lengthening bars of amber gold as Freddie reached the village. He walked past the blue-lias cottages with their scrubbed hamstone sills, past the church with its monster yew tree covered in mistle thrushes squabbling over the berries. The street was full of leaves. Freddie could hear the queue even before he saw it, an aggrieved babbling. It was long, wrapped around the market cross like a knobbly scarf, mostly women in long skirts and shawls, a few children. There was no playing, but only queuing, and shuffling forward.

Between shuffles, Freddie ate beechnuts, leaving a trail of husks behind him. He stood there frozen for what seemed like hours, but the church clock was striking five by the time he reached the shop, terrified it would close and send him home shamefaced with an empty jar.

He could see the Hessian sacks on the floor of the shop, and the shadowed eyes of Mrs Borden as she ladled the gleaming sepia-dark treacle into people’s jars. She was reaching deeper and deeper into the barrel, and counting the queue as she looked out of the shop. People were grumbling as they came away with less and less treacle. Freddie knew why his mother wanted it so much. Black treacle was the only kind of sugar you could get in the 1914–18 war. She used it to sweeten the baking, and for making hot drinks, or for something to spread on the thick yellow cornbread. It was as bitter as the cornbread was bland, but better than nothing. Freddie felt those words had been stamped on his head the day he was born. Better than nothing.

‘There’s just a spoonful left, Freddie.’ Mrs Borden looked at him with a face like a squashed apple. ‘It’s so difficult to judge it right, and you were last in the queue.’

‘I can help you scrape it.’ Freddie leaned over to look in the barrel, his heart already pounding with anxiety about how to face his mother with nothing.

Mrs Borden handed him a wooden spatula and he reached into the barrel and scraped the dark streaks from the sides.

‘Don’t get it in your hair, dear. Such lovely blond hair you’ve got.’

Together they scraped the ladle, and the handle of the ladle, and around the lip of the barrel. Finally he had a pathetic dollop of treacle, which hardly covered the base of the earthenware jar.

‘Better than nothing.’

‘Yes. Better than nothing, Freddie. Come earlier tomorrow, dear. We’ve got corn meal coming in.’

Freddie nodded. He couldn’t speak. Mrs Borden patted him on the shoulder with a hand deeply ingrained with dark treacle, and smiled at him kindly. He backed away in case he cried. It seemed to Freddie that no one was allowed to cry because of the war. Everyone beamed stoically, especially the women.

His tiredness deepened as he trudged home, as if he dragged its cloak through heavy mud. The afternoon had darkened and the sky shone like the inside of a saucepan lid. Flocks of yellow hammers fluttered along the hedges, and barn owls circled low across the fields, their plumage cream and silent.

Freddie felt giddy with hunger and anxiety as he pushed open the door of the cottage. Annie was stoking the coke oven, her huge arms glistening in the firelight. On the table was a bowl of something she had mixed, waiting for the treacle. Freddie stood in the doorway, close to the heavy curtain, its fusty folds comfortingly dark. Suddenly the firelit room rocked like a boat. He fell forward onto the stone floor. The earthenware jar smashed, and so did his head. He heard Annie’s scream fly past him and disappear into the whirling darkness.

Chapter Two

LIES

Doctor Stewart threw his bike against the hedge, unlatched the wicket gate and reached Annie’s cottage door in brisk strides. Sparrows chirruped in the thick ivy that covered the walls, its tendrils catching in his shock of white hair as he pushed open the door. He was used to this place. In his younger days he had delivered all four of Annie’s children in the polished attic bedroom, and he’d spent some rowdy evenings playing cards with Freddie’s dad, Levi, the two of them hunched over a green baize table while Annie pounded dough in the kitchen.

Delivering Freddie had been memorably different from most of the births Doctor Stewart had managed. The first song thrush was singing on a crystal morning in February when Freddie had emerged easily and quickly.

‘An angel,’ Annie had gasped when Freddie was put in her arms, not crying, but staring into her soul with eyes the colour of blue cornflowers. And when Levi held his new baby son for the first time and stroked the quiff of blond hair with a gentle, grime-encrusted finger, Freddie’s intense gaze had moved the giant of a man to tears.

‘He’s – different,’ he’d mumbled. ‘Different from the others. He’s . . .’ Levi had wanted to say ‘heaven-sent’ but it seemed an unmanly sort of comment. Gruffly he handed the baby back to his beaming wife.

‘I got to work now.’ Then he’d gone out and flung his hat high up into the morning sun. ‘A boy! A boy! After two girls, I got a boy!’