The Crowstarver Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  About the Author

  Also by Dick King-Smith

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Crowstarving was the ideal job for Spider – he was on his own – yet never alone, for all around him were animals of one sort or another.

  Discovered as a foundling in a lambing pen, Spider Sparrow grows up surrounded by animals. From sheep and horses to wild otters and foxes, Spider loves them all, even the crows must scare away the newly sown wheat.

  Amazingly, every animal who meets Spider implicitly trusts the young boy. This magical rapport is Spider’s unique gift, but nothing else in his tough life is so easy.

  DICK KING-SMITH

  THE

  CROWSTARVER

  Illustrated by Peter Bailey

  CHAPTER ONE

  Inside the shepherd’s hut, the only sounds were the chinking of small coals settling in the iron stove and the noisy sucking and occasional half-stifled bleats of a motherless lamb. The shepherd held the orphan upon his lap while he fed it from a titty-bottle, an old brown beer-flagon with a teat on the neck of it.

  Outside, in the lambing-pen, there was a constant medley of noise, the crying of lambs mingling with the guttural replies of the ewes, each in her straw-bedded square of hurdles. Accompanying all these sheep sounds was the sough of the wind, a westerly wind that came over the shoulder of the Wiltshire downs and swooped low across the lambing field till it met, and bounded up over, the stout stone wall that protected the lambing-pen.

  Inside this, the ewes that had already given birth and those that the shepherd reckoned were close to their time lay warm and safeguarded from the west wind’s buffeting.

  The shepherd’s hut was a shed-like building with a curved tin roof through which poked a smoking iron chimney, and a small window, golden now from the light of the storm-lantern hung within. The hut was wheeled and shafted, so that it could be drawn from place to place, and in it the shepherd snatched what sleep he could, lying on a rough wooden bunk.

  Now, the orphan lamb’s needs satisfied, the man stretched himself out and closed his eyes, hopeful of a short nap before he must make his next round of the pens. Over his many years of shepherding he had trained himself to sleep for a quarter of an hour or so whenever he could, through the long nights at lambing time. Below the bunk his dog, a wall-eyed collie, blue merle in colour, laid her head upon her paws.

  Beside the lambing-pen was a drove, a rough chalk track that carried all the farm traffic from the road in the valley right up onto the downs, and along this drove a figure walked, striving against the wind. A full moon shone fitfully between scurrying clouds, to show the figure to be that of a young woman, carrying a bundle of some sort.

  Coming level with the five-barred gate that gave into the lambing-pen, she opened it, slipped through, and after a gap of some minutes, came out again to turn back down the drove towards the valley road. Maybe it was the force of the wind, now at her back, but the girl’s figure looked somehow dejected, head bowed, shoulders hunched, her crossed arms bearing no burden.

  Inside his warm hut, Tom Sparrow the shepherd woke suddenly at the sound of his dog’s whines. She stood at the hut door tense and alert, and scratched at it with a forefoot.

  ‘What’s up, Molly?’ said Tom. ‘Fox about, is there?’ He rose and opened the door, and the bitch ran out and along the line of hurdled pens to the far end, nearest the gate.

  As he followed, lantern in hand, the shepherd suddenly heard, amid the high cries of lambs and the deep comforting bleats of ewes, another sound, a quite different sound, a thin wailing. He began to run towards the last pen in the line, beside which Molly stood waiting and wagging.

  On Tom’s previous rounds, this pen had been empty. Now, as he raised the lantern high, he could see, lying in the bed of wheat straw, what looked like a small bundle of some kind of clothing. It was an old, once white, woollen shawl, the shepherd could now see, and from it came the feeble wailing, and within it, he found as he parted it, was a very young baby.

  Quickly Tom picked up the bundle and carried it back to his hut, and laid it in a sack-lined box by the side of the orphan lamb, while he poured milk into an old tin saucepan and put it on top of the stove to heat.

  Then, sitting close beside the warmth, he unwrapped the still wailing baby and laid it across his lap, to examine it, as any good stockman inspects any newborn creature, to note its sex, and its state of health, and generally to determine whether it is strong or weak, normal or malformed.

  Inside the shawl, the shepherd noticed, was a crumpled sheet of paper. He picked it up and saw, written on it in wavery capital letters, a message. He read this, and then he stuffed the paper into the pocket of his old brown dustcoat, belted around his middle by a length of binder twine.

  The baby was a boy, Tom Sparrow could see, and very young, no more than a few days old, he thought. It was a long thin baby, with none of the healthy pink roundness of the newborn.

  Tom held it up before his face and shook his head. ‘You’m a poor little rat, you are, my lad,’ he said. ‘Bit of a young girl for a mother, I dare say, got pregnant by one of they sojers from the camp, I shouldn’t be surprised, and never dared to tell her family. And now she’s ditched you. We’ll have to try and find her, but first we got to keep you alive.’

  At sight of the titty-bottle, filled now with warm milk, the orphan lamb began to bleat.

  ‘Wait your turn,’ said the shepherd, and applied himself to the task of feeding the human baby. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘get it down you, there’s a good boy.’

  Rather to his surprise, the long thin baby reacted to this order as though it had been understood, and began to suck, gingerly at first and then greedily, at the rubber teat on the neck of the old brown beer bottle held in Tom’s right hand.

  As he looked down on the baby cradled in the crook of his left arm, his own mouth began to move involuntarily at the sight of those little questing lips, that had seemed bluish but now became pinker by the minute.

  The shepherd had no child of his own, much as he and his wife had wanted one. Whose fault it was that she could not conceive they did not know, and now, after fifteen years of marriage, they had given up hope of parenthood.

  But every lambing season Tom, by virtue of his calling, found some unconscious solace in helping to bring into the world so many newcomers, and in saving others, like the lamb bleating in the box beside him, who might otherwise have died. Soon, as soon as one of his ewes dropped a stillborn lamb, he would skin it and fasten the pelt over the orphan, which the ewe, recognizing the smell of her own, would then adopt in place of her dead child. Not only death but the occasional dealing out of merciful death formed part of Tom Sparrow’s life, and when a ewe was very old or sick beyond recovery, he would break her neck, with compassion but without fuss.

  The essence of his trade however was birth, not death, and now, as he looked down at the sucking baby, he allowed himself a thought which he then spoke aloud to the watching dog. ‘Ah dear, Molly,’ said Tom. ‘I shoulda loved a son.’ Gent
ly, tenderly, he touched the palm of one of the baby’s hands with his little finger, dirty as it was and greasy from the ewes’ fleeces, and the tiny fingers curled around his and grasped it.

  Early on the coming day, before the March sun had yet risen, Kathie Sparrow left her cottage at the road’s side. In looks she was very much the archetypal country woman, sturdy, high-coloured, clear-eyed. Oddly, as sometimes happens with man and wife, the Sparrows could have been taken for brother and sister. Each was of middle height, strong-looking, blue-eyed, fair-haired. Now Kathie began to walk up the drove towards the lambing field. She carried a basket in which was her husband’s breakfast – bread and cheese and a thermos flask of sweet tea. There were bully-beef sandwiches too, for his midday meal, and then later in the day, towards dusk, she would come again with his supper.

  Each lambing season they lived apart, she in the cottage, he in the shepherd’s hut, and for them both it was a lonely time, perhaps especially for her, with no child for company. All the other married workers on Outoverdown Farm – the foreman, the horseman, the poultryman, and three of the six farm labourers – had children of their own, as did the farmer himself. Although she was resigned to fate, sometimes Kathie could not stop herself from wishing that she and Tom had been blessed.

  Now, as she walked up the drove in the growing light, she heard the noise of all the young life in the lambing-pen, and she sighed. Oh Tom, she said to herself as she climbed the little steps of the shepherd’s hut and opened its door, and then ‘Oh Tom!’ as she saw her husband sitting by his stove, a smile on his face, a sleeping baby in his arms.

  Putting his hand into his pocket, he drew forth the piece of paper that had been in the shawl, smoothed it out, and gave it to his wife. ‘PLEASE SAVE THIS LAMB’ she read.

  CHAPTER TWO

  By that evening everyone on the farm, everyone in the village indeed, knew that the Sparrows were looking after an abandoned baby, and a number of other people living in the valley had heard about it from the postman or the milkman. But no-one had any clues as to the identity of the mother.

  The popular view amongst these country folk was that she must be ‘one o’ they girls from town, no better’n they should be’, and that the father was probably, as Tom had thought, ‘one o’ they squaddies’. It was as though no local boys and girls could possibly be to blame for such a thing.

  At five to seven the next morning, the farm foreman, Percy Pound, was waiting in the cart-horse stables for the men to arrive for work. The carter, or horseman as he liked to call himself, was already busy with brush and shovel and barrow, mucking out. Some of the dung he would, by right, use upon his own garden. Two others, the poultryman and Tom Sparrow, never attended the foreman’s giving out of the day’s orders, for they were largely independent of him.

  Now hooves rang hollowly on the cobbled floor as the horses shifted in their stalls, while Percy Pound waited for the arrival of the six farm labourers. He stood in his usual position, behind the big shire mare Flower, his left arm flung up over her massive rump to ease the weight on one leg. In 1916, on the Somme, a German shell fragment had smashed his left knee, and even now, ten years later, the foreman suffered pain, pain that sometimes made him short-tempered, though he was by nature a kindly man. He pulled from his waistcoat pocket an old half-hunter watch and consulted it. As he did so, three men walked in together through the stable door.

  ‘You’m late,’ growled Percy.

  ‘Come day, go day, God send Sunday,’ said the oldest of the three, a small man with a squeaky voice. ‘If ever I do come through theseyer door of a morning, and you bain’t led on old Flower’s backside, and your old watch bain’t five minutes fast, then the natural world as we knows it will have come to an end.’

  The other two men, brothers by the names of Frank and Phil Butt, smiled at each other at these words. The speaker was their uncle, Billy Butt by name, and he never used one word where three would do, whereas they only spoke if they must.

  ‘You’m late!’ said Percy again, more sharply this time, as the last three members of his workforce came running in, jostling one another and giggling like the schoolboys they had not long since been.

  One, a tall curly-haired lad, was Albie, son of Ephraim Stanhope the horseman. The other two were the sons of Stan Ogle the poultryman, whose love of chickens, alive or on his plate, was a long-standing local joke. Although he and his wife had given their boys perfectly good names, no-one ever used them: Stan’s favourite bird was the Rhode Island Red, and ever since his sons were quite small, the village had always called one Rhode and the other Red. Both, as it happened, had red hair, they were stocky thickset boys as like one another as twins, but easy for the village to tell apart since Rhode was shortsighted and wore spectacles. Now, at the foreman’s sharp words, Albie and Rhode and Red said with one voice ‘Sorry, Mr Pound,’ while looking anything but. Percy Pound gave out the day’s jobs. The three Butts had to strip down and replace a long line of old fencing bordering a distant field. They were to load the fencing stakes and rolls of barbed wire and the tools they would need, crowbar and sledge, wire-strainers, wire-cutters, pliers, hammers, and a supply of staples and nails on to the Scotch cart, and then Ephraim would drive them and their materials up the drove to the downs.

  Rhode and Red were to go thistle-cutting in a piece of rough ground. ‘And I’ll be up later on,’ said the foreman,‘and if I see one single thistle or nettle or dock as you’ve missed, you’m in trouble. As for you, Albie, I want you to go up to the lambing-pen and give Tom a hand. He’s been a bit busy lately, one way or another.’

  ‘I bin on this farm fifty year, man and boy,’ squeaked Billy Butt,‘and I never heerd tell o’ such a thing. Boy-child it is, my missus says.“Poor little bastard,” I says to her. “Billy”, she says, “your language!”“Well, that’s what he is, thees’t know”, I says, “a bastard, no messin”. Call a spade a spade, I says. What d’you reckon will happen to un, Percy? Will Tom and Kathie be let keep un?’

  ‘Depends,’ said the foreman. ‘The mother might come back and claim him, I suppose.’

  Frank and Phil Butt both shook their heads. ‘Never,’ they said.

  ‘Does Mister know about all this?’ said Ephraim the horseman, leaning on his yard-brush.

  ‘Mister’ was how all the workers referred to their employer. Major Yorke was what was known as a gentleman farmer, an appellation to which he took no exception. This meant in effect that, unlike his men, he had no need to get his hands or his boots dirty, though he liked to put in some time at haymaking, driving about the fields in an impressive old Lea-Francis open tourer on the front of which was fixed a haysweep.

  He had been a regular soldier but had left the army on inheriting the farm from a relative. He loved above all things to ride to hounds.

  ‘Yes,’ said Percy in answer to the horseman’s question.‘He knows. T’will all have to go through the proper channels of course, but if Tom and Kathie decide to adopt the babbie, well, good luck to ’em, Mister said.’

  Percy Pound and Major Yorke might almost have belonged to separate races, so different were their life-styles, but Percy respected his employer simply because they alone had been through the War. Billy and Ephraim and Stan had been too old, Frank and Phil too young, and as for the other three, they had hardly been born when the Armistice was signed. Tom had joined up but the War ended before he had seen action.

  ‘What they going to call the baby, Mr Pound?’ asked Albie Stanhope.

  ‘I got no idea, boy,’ growled the foreman (thinking about the War had made his knee ache), ‘but I know what I’m going to call you if you don’t get to work. Go on, off you go, and you two, Rhode and Red, don’t forget to take a whetstone. You can’t cut thistles with a blunt sickle.’

  Later, while the fencing party was loading the Scotch cart, Percy walked with his distinctive limp, for his left knee was locked stiff, out of the farmyard and up the road to the Sparrows’ cottage. He knocked on the door with his stick,
and Kathie came to it, carrying the baby.

  ‘Morning, Kath,’ said the foreman. ‘How’s it going then? Anything we can do to help?’

  ‘It’s all right, thanks, Percy,’ Kathie said.

  The foreman looked carefully into the face of the foundling. No beauty, he thought, and he doesn’t look strong.

  ‘He’s beautiful, isn’t he?’ said Kathie.

  ‘What you going to call him then?’

  ‘Well,’ said Kathie, ‘Tom wants to call him John after his old dad and I want to call him Joe after mine.’

  ‘You’ll have to toss for it then.’

  ‘Don’t know as we’ll be let keep him,’ said the shepherd’s wife. ‘After all, tisn’t as though he was a normal baby.’

  ‘Not normal?’ said Percy. ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘I mean we don’t know who he belongs to.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  Rather more than two years later, John Joseph Sparrow was moving rapidly across the postage-stamp-sized lawn at the rear of the shepherd’s cottage. Kathie and Tom worried a little bit that the boy showed no signs of walking, but he got about smartly enough, using his own peculiar method. It could hardly be called a crawl, because his knees did not touch the ground, but on what seemed to be unusually long arms and legs, he scurried about on hands and feet, like a monkey, like a crab, like a spider.

  Kathie Sparrow watched him fondly from her back door. Our little Spider, she said to herself, for that was their nickname for the child that they had finally been able formally to adopt. This had been due in some measure, it seemed, to Mister’s influence, for Major Yorke was a magistrate and a power in the district.

  ‘Spider!’ she called now, and the little boy came scuttling back across the grass towards her. He sat up on his thin backside and stared up at her, smiling a lopsided smile.

  ‘Who’s a good boy then?’ said Kathie, and Spider, prodding himself in the chest with a forefinger, replied ‘Good un!’ At almost two and a half these were the only intelligible sounds he had thus far uttered, and about this absence of speech Kathie and Tom worried a great deal. Each wanted to ask the other the same question, yet each forbore to do so. Is this a normal child? each parent thought.