Free The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough Page A

fifty thousand! Twice as bad as decimation.
    ‘Why should you go fighting old Mother England’s wars for her? What has she ever done for you, except bleed her colonies white? If you went to England they’d look down their noses at you for being a colonial. En Zed isn’t in any danger, nor is Australia. It might do old Mother England the world of good to be defeated; it’s more than time someone paid her for what she’s done to Ireland. I certainly wouldn’t weep any tears if the Kaiser ended up marching down the Strand.’
    ‘But Daddy, I want to enlist!’
    ‘You can want all you like, Frank, but you aren’t going, so you may as well forget the whole idea. You’re not big enough to be a soldier.’
    Frank’s face flushed, his lips came together; his lack of stature was a very sore point with him. At school he had always been the smallest boy in his class, and fought twice as many battles as anyone else because of it. Of late a terrible doubt had begun to invade his being, for at seventeen he was exactly the same five feet three he had been at fourteen; perhaps he had stopped growing. Only he knew the agonies to which he subjected his body and his spirit, the stretching, the exercises, the fruitless hoping.
    Smithying had given him a strength out of all proportion to his height, however; had Paddy consciously chosen a profession for someone of Frank’s temperament, he could not have chosen better. A small structure of pure power, at seventeen he had never been defeated in a fight and was already famous throughout the Taranaki peninsula. All his anger, frustration and inferiority came into a fight with him, and they were more than the biggest, strongest local could contend with, allied as they were to a body in superb physical condition, an excellent brain, viciousness and indomitable will.
    The bigger and tougher they were, the more Frank wanted to see them humbled in the dust. His peers trod a wide detour around him, for his aggressiveness was well known. Of late he had branched out of the ranks of youths in his search for challenges, and the local men still talked about the day he had beaten Jim Collins to a pulp, though Jim Collins was twenty-two years old, stood six feet four in his socks and could lift horses. With his left arm broken and his ribs cracked, Frank had fought on until Jim Collins was a slobbering mass of bloodied flesh at his feet, and he had to be forcibly restrained from kicking the senseless face in. As soon as the arm healed and the ribs came out of strapping, Frank went into town and lifted a horse, just to show that Jim wasn’t the only one who could, and that it didn’t depend on a man’s size.
    As the sire of this phenomenon, Paddy knew Frank’s reputation very well and understood Frank’s battle to gain respect, though it did not prevent his becoming angry when fighting interfered with the work in the forge. Being a small man himself, Paddy had had his share of fights to prove his courage, but in his part of Ireland he was not diminutive and by the time he arrived in New Zealand, where men were taller, he was a man grown. Thus his size was never the obsession with him it was with Frank.
    Now he watched the boy carefully, trying to understand him and failing; this one had always been the farthest from his heart, no matter how he struggled against discriminating among his children. He knew it grieved Fee, that she worried over the unspoken antagonism between them, but even his love for Fee could not overcome his exasperation with Frank.
    Frank’s short, finely made hands were spread across the open paper defensively, his eyes riveted on Paddy’s face in a curious mixture of pleading and a pride that was too stiff-necked to plead. How alien the face was! No Cleary or Armstrong in it, except perhaps a little look of Fee around the eyes, if Fee’s eyes had been dark and could have snapped and flashed the way Frank’s did on slightest provocation. One thing the lad did not lack, and