Charlie is finding the hill up into the village hard going. I can see the church tower and below it the roof of the school. My mouth is dry with fear. I cling on tighter.
“First day’s the worst, Tommo,” Charlie’s saying, breathing hard. “It’s not so bad. Honest.” Whenever Charlie says “honest”, I know it’s not true. “Anyway I’ll look after you.”
That I do believe, because he always has. He does look after me too, setting me down, and walking me through all the boisterous banter of the school yard, his hand on my shoulder, comforting me, protecting me.
The school bell rings and we line up in two silent rows, about twenty children in each. I recognise some of them from Sunday school. I look around and realise that Charlie is no longer beside me. He’s in the other line, and he’s winking at me. I blink back and he laughs. I can’t wink with one eye, not yet. Charlie always thinks that’s very funny. Then I see Mr Munnings standing on the school steps cracking his knuckles in the suddenly silent school yard. He has tufty cheeks and a big belly under his waistcoat. He has a gold watch open in his hand. It’s his eyes that are frightening and I know they are searching me out.
“Aha!” he cries, pointing right at me. Everyone has turned to look. “A new boy, a new boy to add to my trials and tribulations. Was not one Peaceful enough? What have I done to deserve another one? First a Charlie Peaceful, and now a Thomas Peaceful. Is there no end to my woes? Understand this, Thomas Peaceful, that here I am your lord and master. You do what I say when I say it. You do not cheat, you do not lie, you do not blaspheme. You do not come to school in bare feet. And your hands will be clean. These are my commandments. Do I make myself absolutely clear?”
“Yes sir,” I whisper, surprised I can find my voice at all.
We file in past him, hands behind our backs. Charlie smiles across at me as the two lines part: “Tiddlers” into my classroom, “Bigguns” into his. I’m the littlest of the Tiddlers. Most of the Bigguns are even bigger than Charlie, fourteen years old some of them. I watch him until the door closes behind him and he’s gone. Until this moment I have never known what it is to feel truly alone.
My bootlaces are undone. I can’t tie laces. Charlie can, but he’s not here. I hear Mr Munnings’ thunderous voice next door calling the roll and I am so glad we have Miss McAllister. She may speak with a strange accent, but at least she smiles, and at least she’s not Mr Munnings.
“Thomas,” she tells me, “you will be sitting there, next to Molly. And your laces are undone.”
Everyone seems to be tittering at me as I take my place. All I want to do is to escape, to run, but I don’t dare do it. All I can do is cry. I hang my head so they can’t see my tears coming.
“Crying won’t do your laces up, you know,” Miss McAllister says.
“I can’t, Miss,” I tell her.
“Can’t is not a word we use in my class, Thomas Peaceful,” she says. “We shall just have to teach you to tie your bootlaces. That’s what we’re all here for, Thomas, to learn. That’s why we come to school, don’t we? You show him, Molly. Molly’s the oldest girl in my class, Thomas, and my best pupil. She’ll help you.”
So while she calls the roll Molly kneels down in front of me and does up my laces. She ties laces very differently from Charlie, delicately, more slowly, in a great loopy double knot. She doesn’t look up at me while she’s doing it, not once, and I wish she would. She has hair the same colour as Billyboy, Father’s old horse – chestnut brown and shining – and I want to reach out and touch it. Then she looks up at me at last and smiles. It’s all I need. Suddenly I no longer want to run home. I want to stay here with Molly. I know I have a friend.
In playtime, in the school yard, I want to go over and talk to her, but I can’t because she’s always surrounded by a gaggle of giggling girls. They keep looking at me over their shoulders and laughing. I look for Charlie, but Charlie’s splitting conkers open with his friends, all of them Bigguns. I go to sit on an old tree stump. I undo my bootlaces and try to do them up again remembering how Molly did it. I try again and again. After only a short while I find I can do it. It’s untidy, and it’s loose, but I can do it. Best of all, from across the school yard Molly sees I can do it, and smiles at me.
At home we don’t wear boots, except for church. Mother does of course, and Father always wore his great hobnail boots, the boots he died in. When the tree came down I was there in the wood with him, just the two of us. Before I ever went to school he’d often take me off to work with him, to keep me out of mischief, he said. I’d ride up behind him on Billyboy and hang on round his waist, my face pressed into his back. Whenever Billyboy broke into a gallop I’d love it. We galloped all the way that morning, up the hill, up through Ford’s Cleave Wood. I was still giggling when he lifted me down.
“Off you go, you scallywag, you,” he said. “Enjoy yourself.”
I hardly needed to be told. There were badger holes and fox holes to peer into, deer prints to follow perhaps, flowers to pick, or butterflies to chase. But that morning I found a mouse, a dead mouse. I buried it under a pile of leaves. I was making a wooden cross for it. Father was chopping away rhythmically nearby, grunting and groaning at every stroke as he always did. It sounded at first as if Father was just groaning a bit louder. That’s what I thought it was. But then, strangely, the sound seemed to be coming not from where he was, but from somewhere high up in the branches.
I looked up to see the great tree above me swaying when all the other trees were standing still. It was creaking while all the other trees were silent. Only slowly did I realise it was coming down, and that when it fell it would fall right on top of me, that I was going to die and there was nothing I could do about it. I stood and stared, mesmerised at the gradual fall of it, my legs frozen under me, quite incapable of movement.
I hear Father shouting: “Tommo! Tommo! Run, Tommo!” But I can’t. I see Father running towards me through the trees, his shirt flailing. I feel him catch me up and toss me aside in one movement, like a wheat sheaf. There is a roaring thunder in my ears and then no more.
When I wake I see Father at once, see the soles of his boots with their worn nails. I crawl over to where he is lying, pinned to the ground under the leafy crown of the great tree. He is on his back, his face turned away from me as if he doesn’t want me to see. One arm is outstretched towards me, his glove fallen off, his finger pointing at me. There is blood coming from his nose, dropping on the leaves. His eyes are open, but I know at once they are not seeing me. He is not breathing. When I shout at him, when I shake him, he does not wake up. I pick up his glove.
In the church we’re sitting side by side in the front row, Mother, Big Joe, Charlie and me. We’ve never in our lives sat in the front row before. It’s where the Colonel and his family always sit. The coffin rests on trestles, my father inside in his Sunday suit. A swallow swoops over our heads all through the prayers, all through the hymns, flitting from window to window, from the belfry to the altar, looking for some way out. And I know for certain it is Father trying to escape. I know it because he told us more than once that in his next life he’d like to be a bird, so he could fly free wherever he wanted.
Big Joe keeps pointing up at the swallow. Then without any warning he gets up and walks to the back of the church where he opens the door. When he gets back he explains to Mother what he’s done in his loud voice, and Grandma Wolf, sitting beside us in her black bonnet, scowls at him, at all of us. I know then what I never understood before, that she is ashamed to be one of us.