Free How Dear Is Life by Henry Williamson

between them, a protecting arm given to each.
    “The truth will prevail, the truth will prevail,” she said stalwartly.
    “If only all English people, in the more comfortable classes, could but sec what I have seen, what I see daily, hourly, what Iknow is waiting to leap forth from the maimed minds of children, now grown-up, everywhere, in all classes—but most of all in the poverty classes, since they are most numerous—O, we are doing the Lord’s work, we are, we are.”
    After this confession, uttered in a voice that was so sweetly reasonable that Hetty wondered how anyone could ever gainsay what her dear friend ever said, Dora looked up, and blinking away her tears, saw those in the eyes of her friend, and bending down her head, kissed the hand she held between her own. Then she touched with her lips the reticulated cheek of the old woman beside her.
    “And now,” she said, with a smile, meeting Hetty’s smile, “before I forget—I am not always a wild and wilful woman, you know!—about my little cottage in Lynmouth—how well I remember our wonderful holiday together when my god-son was only three months old!—well, Hetty, my dear, it is for you or Phillip or Dickie to visit and stay in so long as you like, and at any time any of you care to go there. Just send me a line at any time, with a few days’ notice if possible, so that I can be sure of having the place ready for you.”
    “Thank you, Dora dear, thank you very much, it is most kind of you I am sure,” said Hetty, still unhappy that her letter had caused a restraint between them, despite Dora’s gracious manner.
    Hardly had she spoken when two brown-moustached men in straw-yards, jackets and trousers of dark material, and big black boots, got out of a taxicab which had stopped on the drive opposite the seat, and walked to the seat.
    “Are you Theodora Maddison? I have a warrant for your arrest under the Prisoners Temporary Discharge for Ill-health Act, Section 1, subsection 12a. Now then, no trouble, miss, be reasonable, and come along quietly.”
    Hetty and her Aunt Marian were left on the seat.
    *
    Phillip hoped that by the time his friend Desmond Neville came home for the summer holidays the kestrel would be tame and they could take it on the Hill and fly it; but the bird proved intractable. Whenever he opened its cage, it ran out and squatted on the lawn; soon it attracted spadgers, the sooty little cockney sparrows, always quarrelling and chittering, always scrapping for their rights. The spadgers hopped around it,scolding. The kestrel appeared to shrink into its shoulders. The sparrows hopped nearer. Phillip, like the kestrel, remained absolutely still. Then running sideways with unbelievable speed, the fierce, brown-eyed falcon managed to snatch a spadger before it could fly up with the others. Yet this did not, apparently, warn the others; back they came, sooner rather than later, to mob the kestrel. Again the sudden dash on yellow feet, feathered thighs like little pantaloons moving so swiftly that the broken wing had not appeared even to drag. The snatch, the crushing power of a yellow foot with its black claws of sharpest horn, had to be felt on your forearm, through your jacket sleeve, to be realized. The falcon stood on the spadger, squeezed its life out as it crouched there, all the bird’s life and cockiness turned to an escaping scream of terror as it lay gripped shapeless under black claws.
    One evening the kestrel got through the fence, at the end where the post had rotted, and the boards leaned outwards. Phillip let it go—it would not accept him as a friend. He hoped it would manage to live in the long grass, on mice and birds in the Backfield. But that was its own look out.
    *
    The August sun burned down, the tennis courts on the Hill showed worn patches, the band played on Thursdays to thousands of shrill sparrow-like children come up from the old-time marshes around the great ox-bend and eyot in the Thames, called the