Goodnight Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian Page B

the gate and climbed up on to it. Mrs Padfield was hanging out washing.
    ‘Hello!’ she said. ‘Where are you all off to?’
    ‘Blackberryin’,’ said George.
    Lucy caught sight of Willie. Her eyes slowly expanded.
    ‘’Ullo,’ she said shyly to him.
    Willie shuffled with embarrassment and avoided her large gaze.
    Stupid girls, he thought angrily to himself. Stupid, stupid girls.
    ‘Fred and Harry are doin’ a bit this afternoon. They’se helpin’ their Dad at the moment seein’ as there’s no school fer a bit. Best not to go to your patch. Be nothin’ left,’ and she smiled and carried on with her work.
    ‘We’ll drop some into you,’ said Carrie, ‘won’t we, Ginnie?’
    Ginnie nodded.
    ‘Have a good day then.’
    Lucy watched them going down the lane. She would dearly have loved to have joined them but they were all older. They wouldn’t want someone as little as her. She felt a tug at her dress.
    ‘Come on,’ said Grace impatiently. ‘I want to play.’
    The others veered round a corner and came to a large field. The girls walked off in one direction to some hedges on the far side, leaving George with Willie and Zach.
    ‘Who’s in the doghouse, then?’ asked Zach. ‘You or us?’
    George gave a smile.
    ‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘I’ll find you a good spot.’ He pointed to some bushes. ‘See them red berries?’
    ‘Rather,’ said Zach. ‘They look delumptious.’
    ‘De-what?’
    ‘Delumptious. That’s a mixture of delicious and scrumptious.’
    ‘Well, anyways,’ continued George, undaunted by Zach’s interruption, ‘if you eats any of them you’ll die. Them’s poisonous. Don’t eat nothin’ till you’ve shown me. Look, there’s a good ’un,’ he said, pointing to a hedgerow dripping with blackberries. ‘You pick there. I’m off to find a patch of me own.’
    An hour later, after scratching their arms and legs and staining their hands and mouths with juice, they sat down in the grass and passed a bottle of lemonade around. The girls looked a little less sulky and stared at the two townees. Willie was embarrassed. Zach, however, enjoyed the attention.
    ‘How’d you do that?’ asked Carrie, pointing to Willie’s leg. He paled for an instant, thinking perhaps that his socks had slid down, but they hadn’t. She was referring to the graze on his knee.
    ‘I fell,’ he whispered.
    ‘Looks nasty,’ said Ginnie.
    Willie glanced at her and looked hurriedly away. When they had quenched their thirst a little, they returned to the bushes to pick more berries, staying a little closer to each other. Slowly, they started to talk, except for Willie who only listened. Mum had said that if he made himself invisible people would like him and he wanted that very much.
    He learnt that Carrie liked reading books, climbing trees and exploring, that Ginnie liked naming and pressing wild flowers, knitting and sewing, and that they both liked swimming. George was keen on fishing and his mother had, on three occasions, cooked fish that he had caught. If they were tiddlers he always threw them back. He liked swimming too and in the summer had built a raft, but it had disintegrated in the middle of the river while he and the twins had been sitting on it. He also played cricket, and had already earned himself a bad reputation by smashing two windows in the village.
    Zach said he liked acting, and reading adventure books and poetry. He also liked swimming and cycling. He said that he wrote stories, though he had to admit that he had never got further than the first two pages.
    Willie, meanwhile, not only remained silent during these conversations, but picked his berries slowly so that they might forget that he was there, but he reckoned without Zach.
    ‘Will!’ he said, suddenly entering into his silence. ‘What do you like?’
    He was just about to shrug off the question with ‘I dunno’ when he noticed that George and the twins were looking at him for an answer. He sucked a bit of