Notwithstanding Read Online Free PDF Page B

bung?’
    ‘I found one in the Wey, mister.’
    ‘How about the rod? Is yours up to it?’
    ‘No, mister, but I can’t buy another one. I ain’t got the money.’
    ‘That’s a shame. Do you know what you’re going to do?’
    ‘Yes, mister. I got a plan. I need some line, though.’
    ‘Is it a big pike, young sir?’
    ‘It’s the Girt Pike.’
    ‘The Girt Pike,’ repeated Mr Horne, unenlightened. ‘Well, if it’s the Girt Pike …’ He handed over a fifty-yard reel of thirty-pound line, and said, ‘This’ll hold anything short of a shark.’
    Robert felt the hefty monofilament with his fingers. It was thicker and more stiff than any line he had ever seen before. Mr Horne observed his apprehension and told him, ‘Use the half-blood knot as usual, but wet the line first, or it’ll be hard to draw tight.’
    Robert counted out his money and realised that he was sixpence short. He stared at the coins in his palm, the threepenny bits and the halfpennies, and felt the leaden weight of disappointment in his heart. He looked and looked at his coins, as if looking might conjure up the extra coin that he had to have. Tears came to his eyes, but he mastered them, and slowly he offered back the brown paper bag containing his purchases. ‘I ain’t got enough,’ he said.
    Mr C. F. Horne looked down at him sympathetically, and then he had a brainwave. ‘Let me look at those coins,’ he said, and he took them, turning them over in his hand with a scholarly air. ‘Ah!’ he exclaimed theatrically. ‘Just as I thought!’
    He held out a blackened old penny that bore the all but deleted image of Queen Victoria. ‘See this, young sir? This penny is very rare. In fact, it’s so rare that it’s not even worth a penny.’
    ‘Isn’t it?’ said Robert, fearing that it was so worn out that its value might have been reduced to a halfpenny.
    ‘As luck would have it,’ said Mr Horne gravely, ‘this penny is so rare that it’s worth sixpence, and sixpence is exactly what you owe me.’ He handed back the brown paper bag, saying, ‘Thank you kindly, and good luck with the, er, Girt Pike. And don’t go putting your fingers in its maw until you’re sure that it’s dead.’ He watched Robert leaving the shop, and sighed and shook his head on account of his own foolishness. For months afterwards, Robert was to wonder somewhat ungraciously whether his penny might have been worth even more than sixpence, and half suspected Mr C. F. Horne of having diddled him.
    The following day Robert took a small bowsaw from his father’s shed, and went to the Hurst. It was dark, wet, criss-crossed with inexplicable ditches, and in some places it had been coppiced for centuries. One of the ditches was oozing with the old engine oil emptied into it routinely by the gypsies at the scrapyard, but in those days no one thought anything of it. It was a place of kingcups and bluebells, pheasants, and abandoned iron pans with the bottoms rusted out. Through it ran the old cart track that in former times had been the main road to Chiddingfold and Abbot’s Notwithstanding. Nothing ever grew on it, and it remained a ghost road, or perhaps a road-in-waiting. He soon found a hazel that was in the ideal state, because he had often thought that one day such a wand might come in handy for something.
    Not far off, Polly Wantage, apparelled in plus fours, was banging away at squirrels with her twelve-bore, and Robert worked quickly, with the fear in his breast that she might mistake him for a squirrel and give him a peppering. He whistled out of tune, very loudly, so that she would know he was a boy. His Uncle Dick frequently claimed to have been shot up the backside by irate gamekeepers, and liked to tell Robert that every evening he found lead shot in his underwear, where it had worked its way out of his bum during the day. He would put a hand down into the seat of his trousers, draw it out, and present the boy with pieces of warm swan shot,