Times of War Collection by Michael Morpurgo Read Free Book Online

Charlie. Day by day I was becoming ever more painfully aware of how far behind them I was. I wasn’t just smaller and slower than they were — I had never liked that, but I was used to it by now. The trouble was that it was becoming evident to me that the gap between us was more serious, and that it was widening. It really began when Molly was moved up into the Bigguns’ class. I was stuck being a Tiddler and they were growing away from me. But whilst we were still at the village school together I didn’t mind all that much because at least I was always near them. We walked to school together, ate our lunch together as we always had — up in the pantry in the vicarage, where the vicar’s wife would bring us lemonade — and then we’d come home together.
    I looked forward all day to that long walk home, the school day done, their other friends not with us, with the fearsome Mr Munnings out of sight and out of mind for another day. We’d hare down the hill to the brook, pull off our great heavy boots and release our aching feet and toes at long last. We’d sit there on the bank wiggling our toes in the blessed cool of the water. We’d lie amongst the grass and buttercups of the water meadows and look up at the cloudsscudding across the sky, at the wind-whipped crows chasing a mewing buzzard. Then we’d follow the brook home, feet squelching in the mud, our toes oozing with it. Strange when I think of it now, but there was a time when I loved mud, the smell of it, the feel of it, the larking about in it. Not any more.
    Then quite suddenly, just after my twelfth birthday, the last of the larking was all over. Charlie and Molly left school and I was alone. I was a Biggun, in Mr Munnings’ class and hating him now even more than I feared him. I woke up dreading every day. Both Charlie and Molly had found work up in the Big House — almost everyone in the village worked up there or on the estate. Molly was under-parlour maid, and Charlie worked in the hunt kennels and in the stables looking after the dogs and the horses, which he loved. Molly didn’t come round to see us nearly so often as before — like Charlie, she worked six days a week. So I hardly saw her.
    Charlie would come home late in the evenings as Father had before him, and he’d hang his coat up on Father’s peg and put his boots outside in the porch where Father’s boots had always been. He warmed his feet in the bottom oven when he came in out of the cold of a winter’s day, just as Father had done. That was the first time in my life I was ever really jealous of Charlie. I wanted to put
my
feet in the oven, and to come home from proper work, to earn money likeCharlie did, to have a voice that didn’t pipe like the little children in Miss McAllister’s class. Most of all though I wanted to be with Molly again. I wanted us to be a threesome again, for everything to be just as it had been. But nothing stays the same. I learnt that then. I know that now.
    At nights as Charlie and I lay in bed together Charlie just slept. We never made up our stories any more. When I did see Molly, and it was only on Sundays now, she was as kind to me as she always had been, but too kind almost, too protective, more like a little mother to me than a friend. I could see that she and Charlie lived in another world now. They talked endlessly about the goings on and scandals up at the Big House, about the prowling Wolfwoman — it was around this time they dropped the “Grandma Wolf” altogether and began to call her “Wolfwoman". That was when I first heard the gossip about the Colonel and the Wolfwoman. Charlie said they’d had a thing going for years — common knowledge. That was why the late “Mrs Colonel” had kicked her out all those years before. And now they were like husband and wife up there, only she wore the trousers. There was talk of the Colonel’s dark moods,