Read Online The Boy with No Boots by Sheila Jeffries - Free Book Online

the village, a precious spoonful
in a tobacco tin, and the brush he made from a chicken feather. The wings were two of Annie’s hairpins.
    Annie was thrilled with the model. She made Freddie take it to school, but Harry Price wasn’t interested.
    ‘So that’s what you waste your time on is it?’ he mocked. ‘Making silly models of wasps.’
    Freddie thought carefully about what he was going to say in reply. He tucked the anger away in a corner of his mind, looked Harry Price in the eye, and spoke slowly.
    ‘I need to practise making models,’ he said calmly, ‘because one day I’m going to make aeroplanes for the war and I think that’s important, don’t you,
Sir?’
    The mole on Harry Price’s right cheek began to twitch, and the pupils of his dispassionate eyes became small pinheads.
    ‘Well, Frederick – and what war are we talking about?’ he asked. ‘The war ended years ago, or were you too busy making models to notice?’
    Again Freddie allowed a silence to hover as the words dropped into his mind like aniseed balls from a jar.
    ‘When you are an old man,’ he said, ‘I’ll be a young man, and World War Two will come. And I’m not going to fight. I’m going to make aeroplanes. About the
nineteen thirties, I would say.’
    ‘Oh, and how do you know this? You can see into the future now, can you?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Yes, what?’
    ‘Sir.’ Freddie searched Harry Price’s eyes and discovered a sea of fear lurking behind a barrage of anger.
    ‘And stop staring at me like that, boy. Insolent. That’s what you are. And arrogant.’ Then Harry Price lost his temper, as Freddie had known he would, thumping the desk so hard
that a tray of pencils jumped in the air and scattered, some rolling onto the wooden floor.
    Freddie wasn’t fazed. Quietly he picked up the fallen pencils and put them back.
    ‘Arrogant. That’s what you are,’ shouted Harry Price. ‘Look at me when I’m talking to you, boy.’
    ‘Excuse me – Sir –but you just told me to stop looking at you,’ said Freddie quietly, and he strolled back to his desk, lifted the lid and put the model wasp inside.
    ‘I’ve got better things to do than talk to a boy who thinks he can see into the future.’
    Ignoring Harry Price’s blustering and the extravagant curls of smoke that suddenly puffed from his pipe, Freddie opened his copy of
Treasure Island
and tried to read. He was aware
of the other children glancing at him as much as they dared, and he felt a sense of kinship with them. But the words on the page blurred into a mist. All he could see was a vision of a fleet of
aeroplanes lined up on a vast airfield in the rain. They weren’t like the ones he had seen. These were small, elegant planes with rounded wing tips and rounded noses lifted towards the
eastern sky. The clouds rolled back and he heard the roar of the brave little planes, as they took off one by one into the dawn. And he saw himself, a grown man, standing watching on the airfield,
wearing dark blue overalls, a spanner in his hand.
    The vision made him feel strong.
    When he got home from school, Freddie was surprised to see his father there, sitting under the apple tree. Annie was with him and the two of them were talking animatedly.
    ‘Now, you sit yourself down, Fred. I got something to tell you,’ said Levi in a rather ominous tone, and Freddie sat down on the grass, and looked at his father, puzzled by the
unusual sparkle in his eyes.
    ‘Now,’ said Levi again. ‘You take this in, Fred. ’Cause this is what your life is gonna be in a few years when you leave school. I got a job, and a business all lined up
for you. What do you think of that?’
    Freddie didn’t answer. He felt a shadow creeping over his shoulders, the shadow of a great wall which his parents would build to keep him in confinement.
    Levi rushed on, anticipating a smile on his son’s face, a light in his eyes, gratitude.
    ‘I bought a bakery,’ he said proudly. ‘And it’s got