‘In here. In the front bedroom.’
Visibly trembling, Annie sat at Freddie’s bedside, a blood-soaked rag in her hand.
‘Calm down, Annie, he’s not dead.’
Numbly she moved back and let the doctor examine her precious son who lay unconscious in his little iron bed with its horsehair mattress and coarse grey and red blanket. He examined Freddie in a methodical silence, frowning over the child’s bruised face and swelling nose. Then he peeled back the blanket and saw the boy’s thin scarred legs and blistered feet.
‘Look at the state of his feet. How did they get like this?’
Annie hung her head. ‘We’ve no shoes for him, Doctor.’
‘These blisters are going septic’
Everything he said sounded like an accusation to Annie. Raising Freddie with the Great War going on had been difficult. She’d wanted a happy childhood for him, wanted him to be rosy-faced and robust like her other children had been, carefree and healthy.
‘Have you got salt in the house, Annie?’
‘Yes, a block in the larder.’
‘You must bathe his feet in warm salty water. Every day. Twice a day.’
‘Yes, Doctor.’
‘And he’s very thin. Undernourished.’
Annie sat absolutely still, afraid that any small movement she made might produce another curt diagnosis. But the fat tears kept on running over her cheeks, and the suppressed need for a good cry manifested a hot pain in her throat.
‘Will you tell me how this happened, Annie?’
She blurted out the story to its bitter end, only omitting the real reason why she had sent Freddie to fetch the treacle.
‘Is he going to die?’ she asked finally.
‘Not yet. But he’s seriously concussed, malnourished and, I would say, exhausted.’
Freddie’s eyelids flickered open. He stared at Doctor Stewart who shook his head and smiled reassuringly.
‘It’s all right. You’ll be fine. Just a bump on the nose and a little cut on your head that bled a lot. You be quiet now, Freddie. I’ll come and see you again in the morning. No school tomorrow.’
‘Mr Price threw a book at my head,’ said Freddie clearly, ‘and it was Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, and it’s got a poem I really like in it. Shall I say it to you? It’s about . . .’
‘That’ll be the Innisfree thing,’ said Annie. ‘He knows it by heart.’
‘No, Freddie. Not now. You go back to sleep.’
Annie sat holding Freddie’s small hand in her red fingers, watching his eyes closing. Doctor Stewart folded his stethoscope into its wooden box. ‘Is it worth a jar of treacle?’ He laid a kindly hand on Annie’s humped shoulder, looking into her face in the October twilight. ‘I’m telling you Annie, you mustn’t expect Freddie to do so much when he’s undernourished.’
‘I know, I know.’ Annie began to rock herself to and fro, the gentle rhythm easing the pain of her guilt.
‘You can go to the shop, Annie. While he’s at school, can’t you?’
Annie nodded, avoiding Doctor Stewart’s probing eyes. Her darkest secret was the terror she felt at going out, the way her heart hammered and the elm trees swayed towards her, and the road spun like a slow spinning top. She wasn’t ill. It was how her mother had been. Housebound. Perpetually afraid. Agoraphobic. But tell the doctor? Never. He’d have her locked up in a mental hospital. Things would have to go on as they were. She’d find a way of giving Freddie more food, and a pair of boots.
Yet Freddie knew about her phobia, though she hadn’t told him. She depended on Freddie, on his inner light, his depth and compassion. He’s only a child, she thought now, a frail child. He might die.
‘Why does he get hit so often at school?’
‘He daydreams, Doctor.’
‘Is that all?’
‘That’s all, as far as I know.’
‘I’ll go and see his teacher. That’s a nasty bruise, too near his eye. Keep him warm and quiet, and let him sleep for as long as he wants. No school tomorrow. And . . .’ Doctor Stewart frowned at Annie, ‘Pull yourself together, Annie.’
She rocked harder. I’m not that kind of woman, she wanted to scream, not a wartime woman, cheerful and heroic. I’m a lump. A frightened housebound lump.
‘I’ll see myself out.’
‘Thank you, Doctor.’
Annie sat with Freddie through the pink of evening watching the changing sky from the square of window. On the deep stone sill were all of Freddie’s possessions. Two books, his collection of stones, conkers and cones, his precious wooden spinning top, three green marbles, and a sepia photograph of his Gran in a tiny silver frame. She thought about how she could make him some shoes by sewing leather onto socks, and the possibilities of making cakes without eggs so he could have a boiled egg for his breakfast. She longed for her girls, Betty and Alice, who were all living in lodgings and working at the glove factory in Yeovil. Only George, her eldest, came to see them on his motorbike. He worked at Petter Engines making shells for the war. Occasionally on a Sunday he brought one of his sisters home in the sidecar.
Levi worked long hours in the corn mill, coming home grumpy and stinking, capable of nothing but sitting by the fire in the rocking chair. He wouldn’t read. He wouldn’t chop firewood. He just sat, staring endlessly into the bright flames.
‘Freddie’s took sick,’ Annie said tonight as he hung his stinking coat on the back of the door.
‘Oh ah, what’s up with him?’
‘The doctor says it’s exhaustion. And he’s undernourished.’
‘Ah.’ Levi stuffed tealeaves into his pipe and gazed into the fire for long minutes before his eyes sparked into life.
‘You had the DOCTOR?’
‘Sally from down the farm sent her son to fetch him. Freddie’s been hit again, a nasty bruise near his eye. For daydreaming.’
‘Ah.’ Another lengthy pause while guilt, anger and helplessness sorted each other in Levi’s mind. ‘He’ll have to learn to pay attention then, won’t he? Or end up useless like me.’
‘You aren’t useless, Levi. Don’t talk like that. Just because they turned you down for the war. It’s not your fault you’ve got arthritis.’
Freddie woke slowly after a long sleep. Bees hummed and fussed outside his window and the smell of cooked apple drifted up the stairs and through his open door. The cottage was strangely silent and Freddie sensed a new emptiness about it. The clock chimes were icy cold in the apple-flavoured air. He counted ten. Ten o’clock! He ought to be in school!
Freddie got up quickly and ran barefoot down the stone stairs where he found his clothes hanging, stiff and crusty by the stove.
‘My beechnuts!’
To his relief she had emptied them into a dish and put it on the table. Next to it was his plate with a slab of yellow cornbread thickly spread with dripping and the unexpected white gleam of an egg, boiled and shelled. A piece of firewood was next to it with ‘Freddie’s breakfast’ written on it in black charcoal. And the broken treacle jar had been pieced together with some kind of glue. Freddie smoothed his fingers over it, doubting that it would hold together for all the journeys it had to make. He climbed into his clothes and sat at the table to eat breakfast hungrily, finishing every single crumb. Then he found his tin mug and filled it with hot water, lifting the heavy kettle with two hands clutching the string-wrapped handle. ‘Mother?’
With his hands around the tin mug, Freddie walked into the scullery, pausing to sip the steaming drink. She wasn’t there. Still barefooted, he padded into the garden. ‘Mother?’
The garden flickered with late butterflies, Red Admirals and Tortoiseshells sunning themselves on the cottage walls or feeding on the Michaelmas daisies. Freddie listened. There was hammering from far away, a robin singing, but no one was talking. Where was his mother? Annie had gone out when she shouldn’t go out. Only Freddie knew that.
Freddie pulled on his scratchy socks and the heavy clogs. Where would she be? Was it his fault for breaking the treacle jar?