Notwithstanding Read Online Free PDF

reckon I could.’
    ‘How old are you, then?’
    ‘I’m eleven, missus.’
    ‘I think that’s old enough. In fact, I’m sure it is. Would you come and catch my pike?’
    ‘What? The Girt Pike?’ asked Robert incredulously.
    Mrs Rendall lived in the Glebe House, opposite the cattle pound, and it had behind it a rectangular pond that must originally, perhaps a century before, have been a swimming pool. It was quite large, overhung with branches and it was absolutely full of starving tiddlers, as Robert had found out when poaching there from the shelter of a laurel. Robert had always kept an eye out for the Girt Pike, but he had never seen it. Everyone said it was there, and lots of people had claimed to have spotted it, or thought that maybe they might have done, but Robert never had, and he had become sceptical.
    ‘The Girt Pike? Is that what you call it? Why “Girt”?’
    ‘Don’t know, missus. That’s what it’s called, dunno why. It’s there, then, is it? I heard about it, but I wasn’t so sure.’
    ‘It’s there all right. Every year the ducks and the moorhens and the coots hatch out all these gorgeous little fluffy chicks, and that pike just gobbles them up one after the other.’
    Robert’s eyes widened. ‘You seen it, missus?’
    ‘Yes. One after the other! It’s awful! He just opens his mouth and his head comes out of the water, and that’s one more chick, just gone! Every year! He eats all the chicks and there’s never one left to grow up. I do wish you’d come and catch it.’
    ‘You’d let me, then?’ asked Robert, in disbelief.
    ‘Let you? I’d be so grateful that you’d have to run away to stop me kissing you!’
    ‘Gosh,’ said Robert, thinking that he would probably have to run away as a matter of form, even if he did not actually want to. ‘You’d let me, then?’ he asked again.
    ‘Please do come up and catch it. I’ll bring you cups of tea and as many sandwiches as you can eat, I promise.’
    ‘Peanut butter?’ asked Robert, aware that posh people sometimes put truly revolting pastes made of rotten anchovies into their sandwiches.
    ‘Peanut butter or jam, or anything,’ said Mrs Rendall, much amused.
    ‘I’ll come up next week,’ said Robert.
    ‘Just knock at the door, and I’ll make you tea and sandwiches, I promise.’
    ‘Crunchy peanut butter,’ Robert specified, with an intonation of warning in his voice.
    ‘I’ll go and get it now,’ she said, and turned to go back to the Cricket Green Stores. When she drove past him a few minutes later, smiling at the wheel of her green-and-cream Austin Cambridge, she tooted the horn and waved a pot of crunchy peanut butter at him, with its red lid and label. Robert reeled in his line and began to pack up his tackle. His air had become deeply serious and determined. He was about to undertake the greatest task of his life hitherto, and he was gallantly doing it for a beautiful lady. This was what it might be like to be Sir Lancelot.
    Robert had almost none of the equipment that one needs for pike, and he had very little money with which to acquire it. Nonetheless he went to Godalming on the bus, to C. F. Horne’s tackle shop in Bridge Street. Mr C. F. Horne was a very kindly man with a bald top and a brown shop coat. He would mend any little boy’s fishing rod very cheaply and beautifully, and nobody was ever aware, until he was one day found dead on the railway line, that his wife had been mentally ill for years, and that he had been suffering more stress and difficulty than most people could endure.
    ‘I’ve got to catch a pike, mister,’ Robert told him, adding, ‘I’ve got to catch it for a lady.’
    ‘How are you going to catch it, sir?’ asked Mr Horne, playing up to the boy’s earnestness.
    ‘Live bait,’ said Robert.
    ‘Well, then, sir, you’ll need a Jardine snap tackle and a trace.’ He reached under the counter and brought them out, neatly coiled inside cellophane packages. ‘Have you got a