The Ice

By Kenneth Steven

The story of a boy returning home for Christmas after his first term at boarding school. The previous year he lost his mother, and through the last months he has been bullied mercilessly. He comes home miserable and unable to share that misery. But his grandmother tells him that if it's a real winter the ice will form on the little pond on the estate and he and his brother can spend Christmas there with their cousin Winnie. The boy all but prays for sufficient frost, and to his utter joy, it happens as he had dreamed it might. This is the story of that Christmas, the most wonderful - and yet the most terrible - he has ever known.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kenneth Steven
• Release date: Aug 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310440618

Kenneth Steven

Kenneth Steven is a successful poet, novelist and children’s writer who has published some 25 books. His BBC Radio 4 documentary on the island of St Kilda won him a Sony Award. His previous novel, The Well of the North Wind (SPCK, 2016), was a spiritual tale set on 6th-century Iona, whilst Beneath the Ice (Saraband, 2016) tells the story of the Arctic Sami people. He grew up in Highland Perthshire in the heart of Scotland, and now lives in Argyll on the country’s west coast; it’s these landscapes that have inspired the lion’s share of both his poetry and prose.

Book preview

The Ice

a novel by

Kenneth Steven

I certify that I am the authjor of this work and all copyright resides with me

Kenneth Steven

THE ICE

For the last three miles of the drive, once they were on the Hallion estate proper, Lewis felt as though he wasn’t there. Perhaps it was the motion of the car on the bumpy track, and the warmth of the vehicle with its steamed-up windows; it felt as though his hands and feet were melting away completely, and all he heard from far away was the hum of the engine.

Harry didn’t say anything either. He’d asked the odd thing when he met the boy at the station; quizzed him about bags and boxes and what could go where in the boot. But somehow he sensed there was no point asking more, about what Glenellen was like and how the first term had passed. Lewis sat there with his eyes fixed straight ahead, his crumpled coat still held under his right arm, there and yet not there at all.

It was only when suddenly they came through the dark forest of rhododendron and swung round to the left into a wide bend that the boy seemed to come alive. There was a glint of silver in the trees, through the birches, and he was wiping the misted window, making a hole to see.

‘Woodpeckers this morning,’ Harry said, filling the silence.’Two of them down at the feeders behind the Lodge.’

But Lewis was looking away left, through the thinning trees to the grey expanse of water. He was there and yet he wasn’t there, and when all of a sudden they bounded over a last bump and the tall white walls of the Lodge were finally visible, he unclipped the seatbelt and opened the door before Harry had properly stopped.

‘Will you wait!’ he exclaimed, but there was no point. The boy was running down between tree roots and rusted clumps of bracken towards the water. The engine fluttered and died. A scattering of mallard close to the shore took fright, scrabbled into the air, complaining. Harry sat there still, listening to the silence, watching the silhouette of the boy against the grey-white water, as the back door of the Lodge banged and a tall man in a tweed jacket started over the gravel towards the car. Harry got out in a hurry, began pulling out the boy’s luggage.

‘I’d like you to have a look at the fence above Croft Hill, Harry. The deer must be getting through again. Have you time?’

A violin in its dark case was the last thing to be brought out and put down upright onto the track.

‘Yes, sir, I’ll go once I’ve seen to the track. The water’s made quite a mess of it. A real crater.’

Suddenly the man looked down towards the water. The boy was still there, small and dark against the pale surface of the lake. Far out, over towards the opposite shore,