The Quickening of Tom Turnpike (The Talltrees Trilogy) Read Online Free PDF Page A

infuriating boys who would suck up to mothers and teachers, but, as soon
as their backs were turned, he was a swaggering brute who would sooner give you
a beating than a Detention.
    I
didn’t like Vanderpump at all and I knew that he despised me.  I supposed it
was because his parents were rich, and so he looked down upon boys from more
humble families.  I was one of those boys.  Apparently the fact that my father
had been a solicitor in a nearby town meant that I was, according to Vanderpump,
a “nasty little plebeian” and that I should “crawl back to the gutter I came
from” so that I don’t “infect decent Aryans with rancid poverty” (it was a
woeful day when Vanderpump first got his hands on a thesaurus).  What was worse
was that, as far as many of the Masters were concerned, he could do no wrong
because his father worked for Von Ribbentrop and the Duke of Windsor in
Buckingham Palace.
    We
waited, not moving, while footsteps crunched off back towards the direction of
the school.  Freddie hesitantly peered around as silence descended.  He drew a
breath as if he was about to say something, but the voice we heard was much
deeper.
    “Well,
well!  A pair of parasites up a tree!”  Vanderpump was grinning up at us
menacingly and slapping a hefty stick against his left hand.  “So are you going
to make me come up there or are you going climb down and take your punishment
like men?”
    Neither
of us spoke as Vanderpump stared up at us, becoming redder and redder with
anger.
    “Well?”
he shouted.
    We
continued to stare.
    “Right. 
Enough.  You’re for it now,” he shouted, hauling himself up onto the lower
branches.
    “Let’s
go,” whispered Freddie.
    “Wait,”
I replied.
    Freddie
looked at me urgently as Vanderpump climbed closer and closer towards us.
    “Hang
on...” I whispered. 
    Vanderpump
was right beneath us now, almost within grabbing distance of my ankles.  He
looked up at us, snarling.  “You two are going to regret making me come up
here.  Accidents can happen in the Forest and nobody can hear you...”
    “Now!”
I shouted, just as Vanderpump was about to take a swipe with his stick.
    Freddie
and I launched ourselves off of the branch, clinging to the rope for our lives. 
And then we were in thin air, with the ground plunging towards us.  It was only
then that I realised, forty feet up, that we had never tried out the rope with
two of us at the same time.  I looked up in an instant.  It was still slack
above us, arcing outwards like a bullwhip.  And we were still falling, crashing
through the leaves and branches, straight towards the ground.
    Then,
mercifully, the rope jolted and we were swinging in an exhilarating blur across
a clearing and away from Vanderpump and the Black Dog’s Grave.  The air
whistled through my ears and brought water streaming from my eyes as the Forest
lurched sickeningly past us.  But suddenly something wasn’t right:  Where was
Freddie?
    The
rope slowed and, just before I started to rise too high at the far side of the
clearing, I let go.  I tried to effect a smooth landing, but the momentum
hurled me like a rag-doll into the bushy undergrowth, where I eventually
tripped over a log and sprawled heavily into a patch of stinging nettles.
    I
sat dazed for a moment before the pain set in: grazed knees, a throbbing ankle,
and angry red blotches appearing all over my arms.  Maybe a beating from
Vanderpump would have been a better option, but there was no way I would want him
to have the satisfaction.
    Then
I heard his voice.
    “Thought
you could get away from me, did you, Strange?  Not your lucky day, eh?”
    There
was a muffled moan.  I turned on my hands and knees and crawled forwards to
peer out from the bracken.  Freddie was there, lying on the ground in the middle
of the clearing and I could see that he had caught his shoelace on a protruding
tree-root.  Vanderpump was standing over Freddie with his back to me, still
brandishing the