The peculiar child. (Part1)

Once upon a time there was a boy born into a God fearing family. Before this child's birth his parents had fled the city and moved to a small country town. The child's father came from a privileged family who enjoyed the trappings of wealth, but to their shame the son married for love a woman from a poor mining family on the wrong side of the railway tracks. The couple, shunned and scorned, moved away to start a family in a small farming community on the country's border. The child born was not the first child, that was a delightful blond headed gem called Katerina, neither was the child under discussion the second born, that privileged bearer of his fathers name was Gregory. No, the boy in question was the third born.
At the time his family was living on the magnificent slopes of the Maggies Valley mountain pass, in between forests of pine, jungle of natural bush, and cultivated orchards of avocados and banana trees. This happy family lived a contented life away from their own families, but knitted closely into community with the generous and hospitable families of the valley.
When this young boy was born, he was a gift of life following two devastating miscarriages. He was the conception of lust and longing and love on the return of his father from the border war that was raging at the north western corner of their paradise land. And his parents named him Claude.

Claude was a peculiar child. His maternal grandmother visited the family in all her pretended Victorian glory...took one look at the squawling child and declared that he would either be a priest of prime minister. And so from his first breathe young Claude was destined by that prophecy of expectation to be above average, and determined to be the leader of the pack, or not at all...