Levi got over the wall and walked across the overgrown lawn. He stood looking at the rest of the terrace which consisted of two cottages, each with a garden. Suddenly he could smell the musty interiors, feel the heavy sag of the red tiled roofs, the collapsed chimney at one end and the bulging crop of ivy which housed a colony of sparrows. He peered through one of the dark window panes and saw a room lit by a hole in the roof. On the floor were big puddles, and in the fireplace a group of rats sat up with stiff whiskers looking at him knowingly, as rats do. This is our place. Not yours. It belongs to us rats, and the jackdaws in the chimney watching with their blue eyes, and the ivy tearing the stones apart with sinuous creepers. It belongs to the rain and the wind and the mould and the frost. Don’t think you can change it, human.

Levi’s exuberance was totally eclipsed.

‘What have I done?’ he said to himself. ‘How am I going to cope with all of this? And my money’s all gone. All of it.’

Freddie had a plan for his life.

First he had to endure school until he was fourteen. He did his work diligently in beautiful copperplate writing that he was proud of, he did his arithmetic accurately and with relish, and read the books he was told to read. None of it challenged him now. Sitting in a class whose ages ranged from five to thirteen, he’d heard the same history and geography lessons over and over; he’d sung the same old songs and heard the same old Bible stories. He developed strategies to deal with his boredom, and dreaming was top of the list. He felt useless and imprisoned, except on the rare occasions when Harry Price asked him to help the ‘little ones’ or mark the register or clean the blackboard.

He longed to be fourteen. On his birthday he would leave school forever and learn to be a mechanic. Then when he was sixteen, old enough to drive, he planned to buy a lorry and start a haulage business. And he’d save every penny to buy tools and paints for the art he wanted to do. In his mind he had a queue of pictures waiting to be painted and sculptures waiting to be carved. He grew increasingly resentful of his wasted time in school. At home he had no time to himself at all, always out on errands or helping with the endless tasks that needed to be done. Sometimes he stayed up late in his bedroom making models by candlelight, as quietly as he could. His latest was a model of a queen wasp which he’d found hibernating in a fold of the curtains. He’d caught her under a glass jar and studied every detail of her stripy body, then he’d made a model using an acorn and a hazelnut shell. The face was a tiny triangular piece of wood cut from a clothes peg and drawn in ink, the legs and antenna from bits of wire found in the hedge. The yellow paint he’d begged from the sign-maker’s workshop in the village, a precious spoonful in a tobacco tin, and the brush he made from a chicken feather. The wings were two of Annie’s hairpins.

Annie was thrilled with the model. She made Freddie take it to school, but Harry Price wasn’t interested.

‘So that’s what you waste your time on is it?’ he mocked. ‘Making silly models of wasps.’

Freddie thought carefully about what he was going to say in reply. He tucked the anger away in a corner of his mind, looked Harry Price in the eye, and spoke slowly.

‘I need to practise making models,’ he said calmly, ‘because one day I’m going to make aeroplanes for the war and I think that’s important, don’t you, Sir?’

The mole on Harry Price’s right cheek began to twitch, and the pupils of his dispassionate eyes became small pinheads.

‘Well, Frederick – and what war are we talking about?’ he asked. ‘The war ended years ago, or were you too busy making models to notice?’

Again Freddie allowed a silence to hover as the words dropped into his mind like aniseed balls from a jar.

‘When you are an old man,’ he said, ‘I’ll be a young man, and World War Two will come. And I’m not going to fight. I’m going to make aeroplanes. About the nineteen thirties, I would say.’

‘Oh, and how do you know this? You can see into the future now, can you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes, what?’

‘Sir.’ Freddie searched Harry Price’s eyes and discovered a sea of fear lurking behind a barrage of anger.

‘And stop staring at me like that, boy. Insolent. That’s what you are. And arrogant.’ Then Harry Price lost his temper, as Freddie had known he would, thumping the desk so hard that a tray of pencils jumped in the air and scattered, some rolling onto the wooden floor.

Freddie wasn’t fazed. Quietly he picked up the fallen pencils and put them back.

‘Arrogant. That’s what you are,’ shouted Harry Price. ‘Look at me when I’m talking to you, boy.’

‘Excuse me – Sir –but you just told me to stop looking at you,’ said Freddie quietly, and he strolled back to his desk, lifted the lid and put the model wasp inside.

‘I’ve got better things to do than talk to a boy who thinks he can see into the future.’

Ignoring Harry Price’s blustering and the extravagant curls of smoke that suddenly puffed from his pipe, Freddie opened his copy of Treasure Island and tried to read. He was aware of the other children glancing at him as much as they dared, and he felt a sense of kinship with them. But the words on the page blurred into a mist. All he could see was a vision of a fleet of aeroplanes lined up on a vast airfield in the rain. They weren’t like the ones he had seen. These were small, elegant planes with rounded wing tips and rounded noses lifted towards the eastern sky. The clouds rolled back and he heard the roar of the brave little planes, as they took off one by one into the dawn. And he saw himself, a grown man, standing watching on the airfield, wearing dark blue overalls, a spanner in his hand.

The vision made him feel strong.

When he got home from school, Freddie was surprised to see his father there, sitting under the apple tree. Annie was with him and the two of them were talking animatedly.

‘Now, you sit yourself down, Fred. I got something to tell you,’ said Levi in a rather ominous tone, and Freddie sat down on the grass, and looked at his father, puzzled by the unusual sparkle in his eyes.

‘Now,’ said Levi again. ‘You take this in, Fred. ’Cause this is what your life is gonna be in a few years when you leave school. I got a job, and a business all lined up for you. What do you think of that?’

Freddie didn’t answer. He felt a shadow creeping over his shoulders, the shadow of a great wall which his parents would build to keep him in confinement.

Levi rushed on, anticipating a smile on his son’s face, a light in his eyes, gratitude.

‘I bought a bakery,’ he said proudly. ‘And it’s got all the equipment, the ovens, the recipes, the big bicycle with the basket on front. In town, it is, near the railway. We’re going to live there. There’s a school just down the road you can go to.’

‘And a shop at the front,’ said Annie. ‘You and Levi’s going to be making the bread, and I’ll be behind the counter selling it.’

‘And – I haven’t finished,’ said Levi. ‘It’s got a terrace of two cottages. We’ll live in one, and let the other – just need a lick of paint, they do – and that will bring in some money, plenty of money. What with that, and the bakery, you’ll have a ready-made job to go to when you leave school, Fred, and one day, when you’re old enough, you’ll take over the business.’

A bolt of pain shot through Freddie’s mind. A baker. They wanted him to be a baker.

‘I done it for you, lad, and for your mother,’ continued Levi, puzzled by the way Freddie was staring stonily at the sky.

‘She can’t go out much. Now she won’t have to. There’s work for all three of us, years of work. I done it for you.’

Annie was frowning at Freddie. ‘Say thank you,’ she mouthed.

‘Thank you.’

‘’Tis a risk,’ said Levi. ‘Cost me all my money, it did.’