Thrush Green by Miss Read Page B

neck caused him to drop his legs, climb off the bed and wander to the window.
    The school playground was empty and he wondered what his friends were doing under the red-tiled roof of the village school. A pigeon rattled out from the chestnut tree nearby and flew across to the school, its coral claws gripping the ridge of tiles as it landed. Paul caught his breath with envy. To be able to fly—just like that! Could anything be more wonderful than flying from roof to roof, from wood to wood, over fields and rivers, looking down upon Thrush Green and the whole of Lulling's chimney pots? Why, if that pigeon peeped through a crack by his curling claws he might see all the children at their lessons!
    It was a pleasant thought, and Paul turned it about in his mind as busily as his fingers were now twisting and untwisting the bone acorn which hung at the end of the window blind's cord.
    He would like to be a giant bird, decided Paul, as he watched the pigeon. He would be so strong that he could lift the roofs right off all the houses in Lulling and then fly over the town and see everything that was happening inside. Aunt Ruth had read him the story of "The Princess and the Swineherd" and he remembered the magic saucepan which allowed the princess to know just what was cooking in every house in the kingdom. Paul thought his idea was a better one. Much better to see than to smell, decided Paul, twirling the blind cord. He would lift the school roof, first.
    Down below him he would see the round heads of his friends, black and brown and yellow, with here and there a bright hair ribbon. He would see the long wooden desk lids and the plaited wicker circle which was the top of the wastepaper basket, and Miss Watson, curiously foreshortened, standing by the blackboard. It must be past ten o'clock Paul reckoned, so that she would be taking a geography lesson on this particular morning. The map would be hanging over the easel, giving out that faint oily smell which always emanated from it as soon as it rolled, released, from its bright pink tapes. From his lofty vantage point he would listen to the far-off classroom sounds—the scuffling of fidgeting feet, an occasional cough, the lilt of Miss Watson's voice and the tap-tap of her pointer against the map. He would replace the roof, silently, magically, as easily as slipping the lid back onto a box, and fly over to St. Andrew's Church.
    What would he find there, Paul wondered, gazing through the bedroom window to the building which loomed large behind the clustering caravans, against the dazzle of the morning sky. Probably only Mr. Piggott would be in the church at this time. How small he would look from such a high roof! Paul could see him, in his mind's eye, shuffling slowly up and down the long nave with the pews stretching in neat lines on each side, like rulings on the two pages of an exercise book, one each side of the central fold, with hassocks like little blobs of red ink here and there. He would be no bigger than a black beetle, and so far away that his grumblings and snufflings would be lost in mid-air long before they reached the vast heights where the lone Paul-bird hovered unseen.
    He would swoop next, down and down, to lift Mrs. Curdle's painted roof. Paul thrilled at the thought of it. He would touch it very gently, he told himself, for it was as old as it was beautiful, and as awe-inspiring as it was gay. Molly had told him all about Mrs. Curdle and gypsies' ways. She would be standing by her glittering stove cooking hedgehogs, Paul had no doubt. He had once, fearfully, climbed the three steps to Mrs. Curdle's caravan and had gazed, fascinated, at the glory within; the half-door had been shut, but by standing on tiptoe he had seen the shelves, the tiny drawers, the cupboards, the gleaming brass and copper and the rows of vivid painted plates as breath-takingly lovely to the child as the bright birds which he had seen the week before at the zoo, sitting motionless upon their