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

hair had darkened a little. She looked at his long fingers. ‘You’ve got
hands like your dad. Do you know what he wanted to do when he was young?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘He wanted to be a jeweller.’
    ‘A jeweller?’ Freddie stared at her in surprise. ‘Why wasn’t he, then? What stopped him?’
    ‘His hands were too big. He couldn’t do the delicate work, so he had to give up his dream. Just as I had to give up my dream.’
    ‘Your dream? You had a dream? What was it?’
    ‘I wanted to be florist – to grow flowers and make them up into bouquets and wreaths. I was good at it. But then the family came along, needed me to do the washing and the baking and
the scrubbing and the nursing, and then the war came. We’ve all had to make do, and do things we don’t want, Freddie. And you will too. This bakery idea, it’s perfect for your
father. He won’t have to go out in the cold and the wet with his arthritis, he can work at home in a warm dry bakery. It’s perfect. We’ve gotta help him, Freddie. Give it a
chance.’
    Freddie sighed.
    ‘But all my life I’ve been doing things I don’t want to do.’
    ‘I know,’ said Annie kindly. ‘But your turn will come. You’ll see.’
    ‘It hasn’t so far.’
    Freddie looked gloomily at his mother. Her grey curly hair was scattered with apple blossom petals, her red cheeks shining with excitement. The hope in her dark blue eyes was underlaid with
layers and layers of old fear and old pain going deep into the distances of her soul, and right at the far end was a little child full of love who only wanted to pick flowers. He felt sorry for
her.
    ‘You’ve had a hard life,’ he said.
    She nodded slowly. ‘But the hardest thing,’ she said, ‘is my fear, Freddie. Night and day it’s with me. I’m a strong woman, got to be, but that fear is stronger
than me. It’s like an illness, but it’s invisible. No one knows, Freddie, only you. No one knows what I go through.’
    ‘Isn’t there a medicine for it?’ Freddie asked.
    Annie shook her head vigorously. ‘Even if there was, I daren’t tell the doctor, daren’t ask for it.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Because – he’ll think I’m mad, and they lock you up, in these terrible places. Asylums, they call them. I’m not going to one of those, ever. I’d rather be
dead,’ she said fiercely, wagging her finger at Freddie. ‘And don’t you let them take me.’
    ‘’Course I won’t. I’ll take care of you,’ said Freddie, now feeling the weight of the shadow that hung over his shoulders, darker and denser as he thought about
what was to come. A shadow over his dreams. Instead of making aeroplanes he was expected to be a baker and he couldn’t bear the thought of standing there making bread, shut away from the
world. Instead of marrying a brave bright girl, like the girl on the horse, he’d have to be his mother’s guardian. For how long?
    People kept telling him the war had been fought, and all those soldiers had given their lives, so that he, Frederick Barcussy, could be free. But he wasn’t free. He wondered if God had got
it wrong.
    He undid his school satchel and took out a piece of paper which he unrolled and showed to his mother.
    ‘We had to copy this poem,’ he said. ‘It’s a long poem but we’ve got to learn this verse of it by heart and say it to Mr Price. Shall I read it to you?’
    ‘Yes please. You know I like poetry.’
    Annie sat back to listen. She loved to hear Freddie read.
    ‘This is another William,’ he said. ‘William Wordsworth.’
    ‘Oh – Daffodils?’
    ‘No. This is different. Listen.’
    Freddie spread the paper out and began to read, the words falling like the apple blossom petals into Annie’s troubled mind. But as he read on, he got tense and emotional, hardly able to
read at all.
    ‘Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
    The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star
    Hath had elsewhere its setting
    And cometh from afar;
    Not in entire forge