Free On Loving Josiah by Olivia Fane Page B

them was too interested in the views through the filthy windows; rather they waited, eyes locked ahead, in mute anticipation of what was to come. At the stop beyond Wilbraham, they would begin an hour’s walk deep into the fen. On the way out Josiah would sit on his father’s shoulders until they were well out of sight from the road, and then Josiah would help him fill two large sacks of the richest fen soil, chosen by the feel of it sticking to their fingers. Gibson showed his son how to feel the soil, and understand the consistency of it. ‘A good wetness’, he used to say, when satisfied.
    That a seed should contain so much within it and yet be so small and tight and dry, and that he, Josiah, should be the medium by which it might receive life, lovingly separating the seed from its brothers and laying it in its own private bed, filled him with a sense of gratitude and mystery. How his assessors were to mis-diagnose thecontempt on his six-year-old face when they showed him how sand runs through the spokes of a plastic windmill! And how those same assessors, with their eye solely on Eve’s spectacular performances, were to miss the one true centre of Josiah’s existence.  
    For how dull they all found Gibson! And how extraordinary that Eve should have married him! Amongst each other (but not in their reports) they discussed the possible sex-life these two might have, and those who bothered to read up on the beginnings of the case found themselves hugely drawn to Roger Bolt’s thesis that Eve’s psychiatrist had used Gibson to cover an illicit affair, and indeed Gibson wasn’t Josiah’s father at all. How sympathetic they felt towards Bolt when they learnt of his demise, how angry they felt on his behalf when they read how the BMA had refused a paternity test, how aggrieved they were that the courts had never been involved… though of course, even if they had been, these kind of people always closed rank when it mattered. Even if Fothering had been proved to be the father, some paternalistic law of some bygone age would have been summoned to protect him. The injustice of it all, the unprofessionalism!
    And meanwhile, poor, poor Gibson. ‘Heavy-going’ wrote one; ‘never says a word’ wrote another; ‘kind’ wrote a Mrs Bird, who was a kind woman herself. But Mrs Bird took herself off the case after she’d foolishly consented to Eve reading tarot cards for her; inevitably, Mrs Bird discovered that she was soon to meet death after strangulation by a snake, which didn’t do her joie de vivre much good a week before setting out on safari to Kenya to celebrate her silver wedding.  
    No-one was ever sure whether to offer help or deliver threats to the Nelson family; no-one was ever sure whether Eve was mad or pretending to be mad. Manipulative, yes; provocative, yes; uncooperative, a million times yes: but the social work ‘team’ could never agree upon a strategy to pull the Nelson family into line. The senior who consideredit her duty to do so was Miss June Briggs; ‘Miss’ despite being married and ‘June’, despite being unmitigatedly frosty. And if Eve was determined not to be defeated, Miss June Briggs was triply determined to defeat her. For she had solemnly watched a veritable army of her ‘team’ marching into the Gibson household, only to withdraw, shaken and bowed, within a few months. So hers was the fury, the determination, the unfinished business; and at last she had observed a breach in the Nelsons’ battle-line: they had repeatedly refused to send their son to school. In other words, they were breaking the law.
    Now, there is also a law of the land which allows parents to deliver an education of their own, and what a great and privileged freedom it is that we should be able to mould and shape our children in our own image; or, more pragmatically put, teach our children to read and write ourselves. But the fly in the ointment is that we have to prove it, we have to prove that our children