Lost in the Flames Read Online Free Page B

and Mrs Brailes ladled out another bowl of soup.
    ‘Parsnip,’ she said, then added rather unnecessarily, ‘Not swede.’
    ‘Hedging tomorrow, then, lads,’ said Brailes, ignoring his wife’s sudden verbosity.
    ‘I’ve sharpened up the bill-hook and the slasher,’ said Webster eagerly. He was several years younger than Norman, not quite out of his teens, and having fallen out with his family in Suffolk was eager to please his new boss.
    ‘We’ll get plenty of firewood out of those hedges in the bottom fields. They’ve been left too long,’ said Brailes. ‘You two can take half a cartload each for your fires. The cottages will be cold now.’
    ‘They certainly are,’ said Norman.
    ‘Coalman’s coming on Wednesday,’ continued Brailes. ‘You can have a sack each.’
    He was generous like that, Mr Brailes, thought Norman. A good sort, not like some of the people you meet.
    ‘Marvellous soup, Mrs B,’ said Webster. ‘Is there cabbage in here as well?’
    She smiled at him almost maternally. She had no children of her own.
    ‘No, Webster dear. Only parsnip.’
    ‘I have to see someone about a pig in the morning,’ said Brailes, breaking a momentary silence. ‘Alfred Arbuckle, lives just up the hill there. Norman, come with me. I’d like your opinion. You can have a bit of a lie-in. We’ll leave at eight.’
    Brailes saw the look on Webster’s face.
    ‘Don’t worry, Webster, you can come too. We’ll only be away an hour – you can clean out the hens and do the hedging when we get back.’
    ‘Pork,’ said Mrs Brailes, as she placed a plate in front of each of the men.
    They ate, talking occasionally about the ailments of the animals and the difficulties caused by the recent deterioration in the weather, then Norman and Webster left together to return to their cottages.
    ‘Fancy another beer?’ asked Webster.
    ‘Yes, but I don’t fancy the walk,’ said Norman. The pub was half a mile away across frozen fields, or a mile by road. ‘I’m dog-tired already. I want my bed.’
    Inside his cottage, Norman lit the fire. The logs he had cut from the tree that had come down in the copse behind the house were too long to fit in the grate so he propped one end up on the firedogs to burn and the other end would do for tomorrow. The dogs stretched out on the threadbare rug by the fire and Norman sank himself down into a tatty armchair that Brailes had dredged out of the back of a barn for him. The pigeons had stained the top of it white with their droppings, and its insides had sheltered whole generations of mice, but it was generously proportioned and comfortable and gave off a less powerful smell than most of the people who had ever sat in it. Norman removed his boots and placed them by the fire to dry out so they could get wet again in the morning. They were the ones his father had passed down to him a dozen years before – size 12 Victorian-style ankle boots, tough brown leather that in their early days chaffed the skin off their wearer’s heels and bunions, but were now shaped to Norman’s feet like well-polished gloves. When Norman left County Durham, his mother had jokingly called him Noah, taking things away with him in pairs – two dogs, two boots, twin memories of two half-brothers lost to thegreat farms of Canada and Australia, two broad shoulders to carry the weight of the world, and the chips that life had taken out of each of them. Norman’s earliest concrete memory, at five years old, was of a brown-clod November field beneath a mizzling sky, lashed to a plough and set on his way with a swipe of a stick across the horse’s rump. The horse’s tail swished and little Norman craned his head sideways in a vain attempt to see what lay ahead as the plough surfed wildly across the ground, gouging an irregular furrow from one end of the field to the other as his father, whom he only knew as Mr Bainbridge, rushed along beside him in his chaffing leather boots, shouting encouragement and