The One I Was Read Online Free

issue with the points. Or the signalling problem at that first junction.
’
    ‘
Leave me alone
,’ he told the voice. ‘
You don’t belong at Fairfleet.
’
    ‘Come on Benny,’ Rainer urged. ‘Help us get this track sorted out.’
    He mumbled an excuse and walked out of the room, carrying his football. On the left of the passage a bright rectangle of light had appeared. A side door to the garden. He hadn’t noticed it before. He slipped through. The door took him out beside the tennis court. Alice Smith was shaking out rugs with a maid.
    She scowled at Benny. ‘That door’s not to be used.’
    ‘I am sorry,’ he said.
    She gave the rug a particularly vicious shake. ‘I just open it once or twice a year to air the basement. You boys don’t half try it on.’
    The peacock strode towards them. Benny heard the rug flicking, Alice shooing it away. It cried at the bad treatment and Benny drove his fingernails into his palms, thinking again of tormented children.
    A large oak stood at the edge of the back lawn. Benny kicked the ball again and again against its rough bark. Every slap of the leather was a slap against his own memory. When he came inside again he felt better. As long as he didn’t have to play with the trains.
    *
    He could be this reborn Benny during the day. But sometimes at night he remembered that he didn’t deserve this fresh chance at Fairfleet, with its soft-carpeted rooms and well-stocked library, its lawns where football could be played. His mind flitted to his old home, its tiledkitchen with pots and pans hanging from a ceiling rack and the stove emitting its constant warmth. He thought of his father, as he had once been, years ago, tumbling him on to the ground and pretending to be a bear, chasing him round the garden. He thought of his mother as she’d been before she became ill, reading him a story before he fell asleep, buying him a bunch of red balloons once when she’d seen him gazing at the man selling them at the park gates.
    Somewhere in his home town, another boy would be lying in bed. Probably not a comfortable bed like this one. That boy would be reviewing the past day: stones whizzing through the air to strike his neck as he walked through the streets, youths in uniform jeering at him.
    ‘
Es tut mir leid
,’ he muttered in the language he’d forbidden himself to use. ‘I’m sorry.’
    He buried his face in the soft, downy pillow and begged sleep to come.

5
    Weeks passed. Benny felt some of the ache inside him fade. Dr Dawes praised his rapid progress in English. And he was the best footballer, that was also clear. This status brought him grudging approval from the older boys. He still kept a slight distance between himself and the others, never hurrying to join them when they gathered for cocoa at break time or trooped downstairs to play table tennis in the basement after supper. Back home, he’d been eager for approval, to be part of the gang. He’d only ever been tolerated, not admired.
    But in England even the older boys seemed to like Benny. And once there was even a near scuffle between Rainer and David about who was going to sit next to him at lunchtime.
    Sometimes, at night, in the room they shared, he’d hear a repressed sob. One of the others was still missing home. Benny still hadn’t wept, too wary to relax enough. Those last days in Germany had numbed his cells. Perhaps gentler memories would eventually ooze through him until he wept like Rainer and David.
    The boys had yet to meet their benefactor. Meet him properly, that was. Dr Dawes assured them that Lord Dorner had indeed travelled to Dovercourt and seen each of them. Benny tried to remember when. Of course, that middle-aged man clutching the bowler hat who’d silently approached him at the breakfast table.
    Someone knocked on the door while they were studying English adjectives. Lord Dorner was dressed more casually this morning, in sleeveless knitted pullover and corduroy trousers. He entered the