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Mister’d pay him a little wage, Percy says. It’d be pocket money for him, you could buy him something down the shop each week. I’d keep an eye on him, make sure he was all right, and so would the other chaps. He can’t come to no harm, so long as you wrap him up warm, and t’isn’t as though it was hard work, just walking about, shouting and banging.’
    â€˜To frighten the birds away?’ said Kathie.
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜Don’t be daft, Tom. He won’t ever do that. He loves the birds, Spider does, like all the other animals. You remember how he started off when he was little, imitating the owl and the cuckoo. Then as soon as he learned to whistle, it was the lot of ’em – blackbird, thrush, robin, chaffinch, woodpecker – he can do them all.’
    â€˜Well, he won’t be scaring them. Just the croaks, as he calls them, and the rooks and the jackdaws.’
    â€˜He’ll never do it,’ Kathie said.‘He’ll let them eat all the corn they want.’
    The more Tom thought about this, the more he felt his wife might be right. And if Spider couldn’t even do a simple job like crowstarving, Mister wouldn’t bother about trying him at anything else, like helping at lambing for instance.
    But then the next day an idea struck him as he was moving the hurdles to give the ewes a fresh bite of the turnips and kale, and that evening he said to his son,‘Spider, how’d you like to work on the farm, like Dada does?’
    â€˜Sheep?’ said Spider.
    â€˜No, looking after the corn. Mister’s growing a lot of corn now on the farm, wheat it is, to make bread to feed people on in the War, and Albie Stanhope’s gone off to be a sojer, so Mister needs someone else to give a hand,’ said Tom. Though the Lord alone knows how much of all that he understands, he thought.
    Spider looked blank.
    Nothing, thought Tom. Let’s try again. ‘See here, Spider my son,’ he said. ‘After the ground’s ploughed and worked down and all ready forsowing the corn, then along comes Frank Butt on the Fordson tractor and his brother Phil riding the seed-drill, and they puts the wheat in the ground. But then a whole lot of birds come along and start to eat up the wheat. Your job’s going to be to frighten the birds away, you don’t have to hurt them, just scare them.’
    Spider frowned, looking unhappy. ‘Spider frighten birds?’ he said.
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜Sparrows?’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜Birdblacks?’
    â€˜Well these birds are black but no, they’re not the nice little birds we’ve got in the garden. These are croaks.’
    â€˜Croaks bad?’ said Spider.
    Sorry, all you rooks and jackdaws and crows, said Tom to himself, I’m going to blacken your names, and to Spider he said ‘You remember that time when those boys pushed you over? In the cow-muck?’
    â€˜Bad boys!’ said Spider.
    â€˜Yes. Well now, the croaks are bad birds, stealing Mister’s corn, and he wants you to scare ’em off. You’re going to be a kind of a sojer, like Albie. He’s gone to fight the Germans and you’vegot to frighten the croaks, marching up and down, just like a sojer, and making a good old row, so that the bad croaks all fly away.’
    Throughout this recital, Tom saw, the boy was becoming increasingly excited, hopping from one splay foot to the other and swinging his arms up and down. Now he cried loudly ‘Spider sojer?’
    Tom nodded. ‘What d’you think?’ he said.
    â€˜Good un!’ shouted Spider.

C HAPTER E IGHT
    T he following Monday was to be Spider’s first day at work. It was quite a cold morning, and Kathie had sent him off properly dressed against the weather. He wore an old army greatcoat that had belonged to Tom in his brief days of soldiering and was a good deal too big and long for his son. It reached down to