Some children scuttled past him, rolling hoops of rusty metal. Freddie grabbed at a boy’s coat.
‘What’s happening?’ he asked.
The boy gave Freddie a wild toothy grin.
‘Don’t you know?’ he said. ‘The war is over.’ He clenched his fists and shouted at the sky, ‘The war is OVER.’
Freddie absorbed this information in silence. He didn’t know how to dance and celebrate and throw his hat in the air like the boy was doing.
‘Do you know where the faggot man is?’ he asked.
‘The faggot man? I dunno. Ask me mum,’ said the boy, and his eyes lit up. ‘We ain’t gonna need no faggot man now. No more queuing, see? They’ll be shops, proper shops with things in ’em. Want a go with my hoop?’
Freddie shook his head, looking at the metal hoop the boy held out to him. He’d never played with a hoop. In fact he’d never played at all, except with Granny Barcussy. He’d never even had a friend.
‘Come on, Jack!’ yelled another boy further along the road.
‘Gotta go.’ With another toothy smile, the boy ran off to join his friends.
The war was over.
And suddenly it hit Freddie. The loneliness. The overwhelming loneliness. The hard work, the hunger, the long cold walks to school, the worrying about his mother. What difference did it make to him that the war was over?
Freddie slid to the ground, wrapped his arms around his knees and hid his face from the world. An old and merciless sensation was erupting from the middle of his chest into his throat like boiling water. He hadn’t cried since he was very little, and Annie had reprimanded him for it. ‘Stop that noise,’ she’d barked, and he’d learned how to swallow the sobs deep into his being. But they were still in there. All that crying he hadn’t done, and now he couldn’t stop. It was massive. Stone after stone, shaking his thin body like a bombardment. The autumn sun was warm on his hair, he could hear the bells and the cheering, but all he wanted to do was cry. He cried and cried until his body felt boneless like a fungus clinging there against the wall.
‘What’s the matter with me? I’m useless,’ he said aloud, and then Levi’s words came marching into his mind. ‘Don’t you EVER be like me’ and he’d said, ‘I won’t be.’ But was he?
The following Wednesday at school, Freddie realised the effect the end of the war was having on everyone. Even Harry Price. A stiff smile had cracked his leather face, and he had a cardboard box on his desk with sweets in it.
‘The war is over!’ Harry Price had bellowed, and he’d seized a handful of sweets and flung them at the children.
‘Well go on. Eat them,’ he’d laughed as the children sat in stunned silence, not daring to touch the sweets that twinkled tantalisingly. ‘If you don’t want them I’ll take them back.’ Harry Price took a step forward, his eyes mischievous, and the children moved, scrabbling for the sweets. Freddie had three of them, a boiled raspberry, a striped humbug, and a toffee. He didn’t dare eat them but stuffed them quickly into his pocket to look at later.
‘Now,’ said Harry Price when the excitement had died down, ‘it’s time for the art lesson. And just this once, only once, mind, you can do any picture you like.’
Freddie’s heart soared. He took his rectangle of clean white paper and smoothed it on his desk in disbelief.
‘And you can use these crayons,’ Harry Price was saying, ‘I’ve been saving these for a long time.’
A battered tobacco tin appeared on Freddie’s desk with stubs of wax crayons inside.
‘Work carefully. And don’t break them. And don’t get the paper sticky. And don’t . . .’
Freddie heard no more. For the next hour he was completely engrossed in his picture. He did the Shire horse first, starting with its head, and even though Daisy had only been wearing a halter, he drew an elaborate bridle with studs and curly patterns on the leather. He did her eyes black, leaving a tiny crescent of white to make them look shiny. He did a set of horse brasses dangling down her chest, each one different and intricate. He drew her four enormous legs with the long skirts of hair, and her orangey-gold hooves peeping out. He drew the metal shoes with the little triangle at the front, and the seven nails hammered in and bent over each hoof.
Harry Price strolled around, smoking his pipe and making observations on the children’s drawings.
‘I’m surprised,’ he kept saying, ‘surprised what you can do.’ When he came to Freddie he stood for a long time in silence, and Freddie tensed, but he went on drawing confidently, working his way round the Shire horse, making its body rounded and sleek, drawing each crinkly hair of its mane and tail.
‘A horse is the hardest thing to draw,’ said Harry Price, and he picked up Freddie’s picture and held it up. ‘Look what Freddie’s done.’
The whole class gasped, and suddenly Freddie was the centre of attention; children who had teased him were smiling at him admiringly.
‘I haven’t finished it yet, Sir,’ he said anxiously, and Harry Price put the picture down and moved on.
‘Only quarter of an hour left,’ he said, and the children groaned.
Freddie got to work again. Could he draw the little girl with the red ribbon in such a short time? His pencil moved swiftly, surely, as if an invisible hand was guiding him. Freddie started to tingle with excitement. His grandfather was there again. He was holding his hand over Freddie’s small one, steering the pencil, drawing the little girl’s vivid face, her long hair flowing in the wind, the curls of it, the red ribbon fluttering. Then her straight back, the ruffles on her pinafore, her leg gripping the horse’s back. Freddie rubbed out part of the back so that she would look real, as if she was really sitting there. He paused to see what he had drawn, and was unexpectedly overwhelmed by it. Had he really drawn it? It was good. He had captured something precious. And he wanted to keep it.
Harry Price loomed. He always collected the children’s artwork and they never saw it again. Freddie wanted his picture to keep forever, to show Granny Barcussy and his parents. He wanted it on his bedroom wall to look at before he went to sleep. He thought quickly. Waited until Harry Price walked away. Then he picked up his picture, crept past the hot stove, right to the door, opened it stealthily with one hand, and made a run for it.
It was raining hard. He tucked the picture under his jacket and ran with his heart pounding at his ribs, across the wet playground, splashing through muddy puddles.
‘COME BACK HERE, BOY,’ he heard Harry Price roar after him.
Freddie struggled with the iron latch of the gate, throwing it open with a squeak of hinges. He bounded down the steps and ran hard, feeling the picture crumpling against his body, the rain plastering his hair, the puddles filling his boots.
And he knew he could never go back.
Nor could he go home.
Panting, he paused under the shelter of the lych gate by the cemetery. It had two benches inside and he sat on one, ready for flight if anyone came chasing after him. He was steaming hot and his breath rasped painfully. But he had the picture. He took it out and looked at it, thrilled; it made him smile. Where could he hide it? And how could he keep it dry? Already it was puckered and limp. Reluctantly he folded it into four, then once more, and stuffed it in his jacket pocket.
Harry Price would complain to his dad again, and Levi would go into a fury. He’d make Freddie take the picture back and apologise. The injustice of it stung. The only option was to hide it and pretend he hadn’t got it, and take it out years later when everyone had forgotten about his crime. There was only one person he could trust. Granny Barcussy.
Freddie set off on the two-mile walk in the pouring rain. Mud sucked at his boots, his socks hung round his ankles like sodden sponges, and the water seeped down the back of his neck and trickled inside his jacket. He kept his hand over the pocket where his picture was, trying to keep it dry as he walked and ran alternately, across the squelching sheep fields and into the wood. Imagining Granny Barcussy’s face when she saw the picture kept him going. She’d give him soup and dry his clothes and let him tell her what had happened. And she’d hide the picture for him in a secret drawer she had in her bureau.