Devotion. Louisa Young

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       Chapter One

       An English school, July 1928

      Tom Locke, twelve, tall for his age, goose-pimpled and shivering, practically naked in his knitted bathers, was hopping about under the trees at the end of the lake. They were about to be put through swimming, and Tom felt there was a genuine opportunity to disappear up one of the larches and avoid this frankly absurd dunking, the last of term. Yesterday the Beaks had carpeted him because he’d been swimming – well, yes, without permission – and after dark, but so what, he’d wanted to observe the nocturnal bird life and lake-life, he’d explained it perfectly clearly – or would have, if they’d given him a chance – and now they were forcing him in when it was cold and he didn’t feel like it. This morning the lake looked like a lake which might give a chap pneumonia.

      Soft needles cushioned his feet; grey-black water gleamed in front of him. The other boys, squawking, slapped their hard faded towels at each other. A bit of dank sun slid through the branches above.

      Tom had goggles and a phenomenal lung capacity for such a skinny boy. He would go under gracefully and glide through the greenest murk, slipping between spirals of slime, hardly disturbing whoever lurked down there. It was like flying through water. Surfacing, he would go eye to gelatinous eye with half-submerged toads, breathe a little, and sink again. Underwater was lovely to him. But today he didn’t feel like it. He flung two quick arms up, grabbed, pulled and slithered, and was up, on a scratchy branch, in the shadows of the shaggy heart of the larch, where cobwebs and grey ghosts of old growth hung in the remnants of winter.

      It was bloody cold up there too. Must be some kind of meteorological front, he thought, and glanced around for birds’ nests, insects, lichens.