The Crowstarver Read online

  He sat quite still, even ceasing to chew, as the animal came nearer. Suddenly it saw him and stopped in its tracks, one fore-paw raised.

  Then a truly surprising thing happened. The fox came on, more slowly now, alert but showing no sign of fear, until it was no more than ten feet from the boy, and then it sat down facing him, ears pricked, eyes fixed upon him. It licked its lips.‘Good un!’ said Spider softly, and he broke off a bit of bread and awkwardly, for all his actions tended to be clumsy, tossed it towards this wild animal, which by rights should have fled at the mere sight of him and would surely have done so from any other human being.

  Patently, by some strange instinct, the fox seemed to know that this human was different from others and posed no sort of threat. It moved in a step or two and picked up the bread. It did not gulp it down or make off with it, as it would have done had danger threatened, but ate it delicately, like a cat. The bread finished, fox and boy remained quite still, each gazing into the other’s eyes, and then, unhurriedly, the animal turned and trotted back in the direction from which it had come.

  That night Spider got out his picture book and found a portrait of a fox. Excitedly, he showed it to his parents, grinning and pointing.‘Spider see!’ he said.

  ‘Saw a fox, did you?’ they said.

  ‘Vox!’ said Spider.‘Vox! Good un!’ and he pointed to his mouth and made chewing movements.

  ‘Eating summat, was it?’ asked Tom.

  ‘Or was it when you were eating your lunch?’ asked Kathie. To both questions Spider nodded vigorously, and then he performed a little pantomime for them.

  First, he put a hand to a pocket, pretending to draw something out and break a piece off it. Then he carried one hand to his mouth and, breaking off another imaginary piece, stretched out his arm and offered it to Mollie.

  ‘Spider eat, vox eat,’ he said.

  ‘Sharing his lunch with a fox?’ said Kathie later when Spider had gone to bed.‘Whoever heard tell of such a thing! Dunno what goes on inside his head.’

  ‘Dunno what Mister’d say if t’was true!’ said Tom.‘Only good fox for him is a dead one.’

  ‘What does Mister say about Spider?’ asked Kathie.‘D’you reckon he thinks he’s doing the job all right?’

  ‘Too true,’ said Tom.‘Couple of days after he’d started, I was feeding the rams in that long paddock by the roadside, you know, and I heard a clip-clop and Mister comes riding down the road, and he pulls Sturdiboy up and says to me “How’s that boy of yours getting on, Tom? Mister Pound tells me he’s put him up on Maggs’ Corner. Keeping the birds off, is he?”

  ‘Well, before I could answer, our Spider starts up. Now, Maggs’ Corner’s a good half mile from the rams’ paddock, I reckon, but you could hear him a-hollering and a-banging as though he was tother side of the fence. And we looked up over that way and you could see a great cloud of birds lift off. And Mister looks at me and he grins and he says “He’s doing all right, Tom. That row would wake the dead”.’

  Spider spent a week or so more up at Maggs’ Corner, by which time the wheat was up and getting away strongly and the threat of bird damage had lessened, but on most of those days he came home and acted out his pantomime of feeding the ‘vox’, so that any belief his parents might have had in this story waned and died, and they thought the whole business to be of his imagination.

  Little did they guess that the fox, despite all the racket that Spider made for most of the day, had come again at the boy’s lunch time. Each time it came a little nearer to where he sat, until, on his final day of crowstarving on that particular field, it sat before him.

  Slowly, Spider stretched out his arm and, gently, the fox took the food from his hand.

  CHAPTER TEN

  After that first so exciting ride up to Maggs’ Corner on Percy Pound’s Matchless, Spider had made his own way to the field each day. He had, it seemed, a good sense of direction and an eye for landmarks, so that both his father and the foreman became confident, first that he could find his way to and from his place of work, and second, that having arrived there, he would conscientiously do what he had been told to do without any sort of supervision. He did not own a watch, for he could not tell the time anyway, but he seemed to know exactly when, towards dusk, the croaks would stop work for the day. Then so would he, plodding homewards with that strange gait of his.

  ‘I never seed nobody walk like that afore,’ Billy Butt said to his nephews, ‘never in all my born days which, as you boys do know, are great in number. That Spider, he do put each foot down just as if he was squashing bleddy snails. They won’t need to put the ring-roller over Maggs’ Corner come Spring, the boy’ll have firmed it up lovely with they girt boots of his, and talk about turning his toes out, he walks like a bleddy duck.’

  ‘You don’t want to let Kathie Sparrow catch you talking like that, Uncle Billy,’ said Frank.

  ‘I speaks as I finds,’ said Billy.‘Allus has done even when I were a nipper in school, don’t care who ’tis. I says what I thinks to ’em, old or young, rich or poor, high or low, man or woman. T’would be all the same if I’d met the Queen herself which I never did.’

  ‘Queen Mary, d’you mean?’ asked Phil.‘Or Queen Elizabeth?’

  ‘Queen Victoria of course, you girt hummock,’ said Billy.‘I shoulda spoke my mind to she or to any of they nobs, Lady Bang-me-arse or the Duchess of Muck. The good Lord gave me a tongue and I do use it.’

  ‘You do, Uncle,’ said Frank and Phil.‘You do.’

  Now, Percy set the crowstarver to work on another piece of winter wheat, sown later because of a short spell of wet weather, on a very large field called Slimer’s (though no-one knew who Mr Slimer had been), which lay next to Maggs’ Corner, on the other side of the little spinney.

  Outoverdown Farm was a rough square in shape, a thousand acres in extent, and bisected by the drove which ran north to south. At its northern end it was bounded by the River Wylye that gave the valley its name, and by the road that ran beside it.

  Nearest to river and road were the water-meadows, and, beyond them, a belt of goodish land whereon the arable crops were sown. Then, to one moving southwards, the ground climbed sharply up some rough steeps across which ran lynchets – grassy ridges or terraces which remained from some ancient method of cultivation – until finally, at the top, there was the great sweep of downland that made up the bulk of the farm.

  Between the two wars these downs, thin-soiled above the chalk, never felt the bite of the ploughshare, but soon Mister and others like him would rip up the springy turf to grow wheat and barley and oats in this time of trouble, enough to provide employment for a regiment of crowstarvers.

  But now the solitary one found that life on Slimer’s was a good deal less pleasant than it had been at Maggs’ Corner, for the simple reason that the weather turned even colder, and wet to boot. The first evening Spider came home soaked through, bowed down by the weight of his sodden greatcoat, and Kathie was up in arms.

  ‘If it’s weather like this tomorrow,’ she said to Tom, ‘then he’s not going out and you can tell Percy I said so, don’t care if the birds eat every bit of corn. He gets tired enough as ’tis, when the weather’s good. He’ll catch his death, standing about with nowhere to shelter. What good is it to him earning a few bob a week if we have to use it to pay for his funeral, tell me that!’

  ‘All right, all right,’ said Tom.‘I’ll fix something up for him,’ and next morning he appeared in the stables early and had a word with the foreman before the other men arrived.

  So it was that, a little later, Ephraim put Em’ly to the Scotch cart and loaded on to it an old ricksheet, some hurdles, some stakes, a coil of wire, wirecutters, a sledge hammer and crowbar, an old wooden crate, and Spider.

  They went up the drove and picked up Tom and Molly at the shepherd’s hut, and so on to Slimer’s. Here the two men set to work to build, just inside the spinney, a rough shelter, making post-holes, driving in the stakes, wiring together hurdles
to make a kind of hut, before finally fixing the ricksheet over roof and sides, allowing a flap of it to hang down over the open end to act as a door. Lastly Tom pulled aside the flap and put the wooden crate within, upside down.

  ‘There you are, Spider my son,’ he said.‘Now if it comes on to rain hard, or you get a bit cold, you get in here.’

  ‘You can sit on the box and eat your bit of lunch in there, Spider,’ said Ephraim.

  Spider looked from one to the other, and then at the new construction.‘Spider’s house?’ he said.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Tom.‘Show us what you’re going to do then if it’s raining.’

  Grinning, Spider ducked under the low opening at the front of the shelter and sat down on the crate. Then, as they knew he would, he made his usual approving comment.

  ‘That’s all right then,’ said Tom.‘Now then, you can give us a hand with this stuff,’ and between them they loaded onto the Scotch cart the leftover hurdles and stakes and wire, and the tools.

  ‘Now then, sojer,’ said Tom.‘Off you go and bang your drum and frighten they croaks,’ and the two men watched as Spider stumped off down the field, banging and shouting. He did not look back to see if they were watching, as an ordinary boy might have done, for he was already intent upon his job. What’s more, they heard, he had enlarged his repertoire of sounds.

  No longer was it just ‘Geddoff croaks! Bad uns!’ He also made strange noises designed to strike fear into a croak’s breast – a donkey-like ‘Ee-orr!’, a high wailing ‘Oo-ah! Oo-ah!’ like a siren, and lastly, they heard, he barked.

  ‘Listen to that!’ said the horseman.‘Anyone didn’t know would swear that were a dog.’

  ‘Ar, but not any dog, Eph,’ said Tom.‘That’s Molly’s bark,’ and indeed as Molly sat listening, she shivered and whined a little at the mystery of hearing her own voice.

  ‘It’s all right, Moll,’ said Tom.‘Jump up now,’ and they got up on the cart, and Ephraim laid the reins across Em’ly’s back.

  ‘He don’t mind then,’ he said,‘being stuck up here all by himself?’

  ‘No,’ said Tom.‘He’s happy as a pig in muck. Keeps on about a fox as comes to see him.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Yes. He feeds it, he says. Job to believe that though, really.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Ephraim.‘He’s got a gift with animals. I told you, didn’t I, how he was with my horses? He trusted them, they trusted him.’

  On the way back to the shepherd’s hut they could hear the crowstarver, but then he stopped for a while, and they caught a distant, very different sound. It came from the far side of the River Wylye, but the North wind brought it clearly to their ears.

  ‘Talk of foxes,’ said Tom.

  It was the music of hounds.

  At the sound Em’ly pricked her ears and danced a little in an elderly stiff-jointed way.

  ‘Come up, you silly old mare,’ said Ephraim, tugging at the reins, ‘’Tis a main few year since you went hunting.’

  He pulled her to a halt and they listened. From the downlands on the opposite side of the valley the wind carried the sound clearly, the unmistakable sound of a pack of hounds in full cry on a hot scent.

  ‘Mister’ll be out then,’ said Tom.

  ‘Oh ar,’ said Ephraim.‘They’m hunting over someone else’s land, see,’ for though Major Yorke loved above all to ride to hounds, he was not keen to invite the local hunt to Outoverdown Farm, because of his sheep and, now, the new-sown corn.

  Then Em’ly stopped her fidgeting as the distant noise ceased abruptly, and Ephraim clicked his tongue at her and they moved on.

  On Slimer’s, Spider too, quiet for a moment after putting the croaks to flight, heard the noise start and then stop, but thought little about it.

  At midday he went into his new house and sat on the box and took his food from his pocket. But he did not eat it straightaway, waiting for his friend to come and claim a share as usual. But no-one came. He could not possibly know that the cry of the pack had ceased so suddenly because hounds had overrun and broken up their fox, Spider’s fox.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Once the wheat on Slimer’s was too well established for further worry about bird damage, Spider’s days as a crowstarver were, for the time being, over.

  ‘The boy did very well, sir,’ Percy Pound told Mister.‘D’you want me to see if I can find him some other work that he could manage?’

  ‘By all means, Percy,’ Mister said. ‘There won’t be any crowstarving for him before Spring, but any time you can give him something to do, well, I’ll pay the lad on a piecework basis. Have you any idea what he does with his weekly ten shillings?’

  ‘He gives it all to Kathie,’ said Percy,‘and she buys him his favourite sweets out of it, liquorice allsorts, never anything else.’

  Percy talked it over with Tom and they agreed that it would be a good idea to let the boy try his hand at a number of different jobs, to see where he could be most useful.

  The first week after Spider came off Slimer’s, Percy put him with his father. But Tom soon found that there was not a lot that Spider could do to help him at that time of year, comparatively slack from a shepherd’s viewpoint. More, Tom, in making the rounds of his sheep, had to accommodate his long stride to the boy’s plod, or else Spider would become breathless. He noted though that, whereas the flock would bunch or run before him or the dog, they seemed to treat Spider as an honorary sheep, and would stand quiet and allow him to walk in among them and even to stroke individual animals.

  ‘He might be some use to me come lambing,’ Tom said to Percy, ‘but not right now.’

  ‘I’ll give him a week up with Stan,’ said the foreman.

  ‘I don’t think he’ll be strong enough to help shift they fold units,’ said Tom.

  ‘Well, he can help collect the eggs,’ said Percy.

  So Spider rode up with Stan Ogle in his little rubber-tyred tub-cart loaded with chicken-feed and pulled by Pony. But he was indeed not strong enough to help in moving the heavy folds to fresh ground each morning, and only got in the way of Red and Rhode as they helped their father. The Ogle boys were not particularly kindhearted, and they made sly jokes about Spider which he did not understand, and laughed at him.

  Stan Ogle did, on Percy’s instructions, allow Spider to give a hand in collecting the eggs from his huge flock of hens, but not before he’d given the boy a stern warning about possible breakages. This meant that Spider picked up each egg with such painful care that it took him an age to clear one nest-box, and then, to cap it all, he tripped, carrying a full tray of eggs, and smashed the lot.

  ‘Send un somewheres else, Percy, for the Lord’s sake,’ said the poultryman after a few days.

  So next morning, after the rest had left the stables, the foreman said to Spider ‘How’d you like to stop in here today? You like the horses, don’t you?’

  Spider nodded.

  ‘Good uns,’ he said softly.

  ‘Well, you bide here along of Ephraim and he’ll find you summat to do.’

  The horseman gave Spider a long-handled four-tined fork – four-grain prong a Wiltshire-man would call it – and told him to muck out Pony’s empty stall, but he could soon see that the boy was not able to handle the implement properly but perfectly capable of doing himself an injury. Because of his clumsy way of getting about and the enthusiasm with which he drove his fork into the straw, Ephraim could see it was only a matter of time before he should spear himself through the foot.

  ‘Leave that for now, Spider,’ he said, and he took him down to the far end of the long cobbled stables.

  Here, hung upon pegs in the wall, was all the tack for the work horses – the big straw-stuffed headcollars, the slim brass hames that fitted round those collars, the reins, the blinkered headpieces, the heavy ridged saddles, the breechings, the girths. There were in all eight sets, of varying sizes, for Flower the shire mare, for the two retired heavyweight hunters Em’ly and Jack
, for the four hairy-heeled carthorses of doubtful breeding – halfway horses, Ephraim called them – and for the pony, Pony.

  All this saddlery had to be kept clean and in good working order, Ephraim knew only too well, for it was he who had to do it all, apart from some occasional help from his son Albie and now that was no longer forthcoming.

  All the brasswork – the hames, all the rings and buckles of the harness, the metal plates set in the saddles – had to be burnished. All the leather parts of the saddlery had to be kept supple, with saddle soap and wax polish. Ephraim took down a pair of hames, slender and curved, with a little brass ball on the tip of each, and from a shelf he took a tin of Brasso and some cloths. He sat down on a bench and beckoned Spider to sit beside him.

  ‘Now watch me,’ he said, and he shook some Brasso onto a cloth and began to rub it into a short length of the metal with little circular motions. Then he took a clean cloth and buffed the metal till it shone.‘Reckon you could do that, Spider?’ he asked.

  Spider nodded eagerly.

  ‘You got to keep on doing that, all over theseyer hames, till the pair of ’em is shining bright. Take your time. I’ll be down the other end mucking out, if you wants me.’

  Spider did indeed take his time. He was painfully slow, partly because of his innate clumsiness, partly because he was obviously determined to do the job well. And he did.

  At the end of the week, the horseman took Percy Pound to show him the shining brasswork and well-polished leather of one of the eight sets of saddlery.‘Guess who done that, Percy,’ he said.

  The foreman looked at Spider.‘Did you do that?’ he said.

  Spider gave his lopsided grin, nodding his head a great many times and hopping from foot to foot.

  ‘Good boy!’ said Percy, and he put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a sixpence.

  ‘Here,’ he said.‘Get yourself a few extra allsorts.’