Ten of the Best (8 page)

MICHAEL MORPURGO is the author of over sixty books for children including
The Butterfly Lion
, winner of the Smarties Prize, the Writers’ Guild Award and currently being made into a major motion picture.
The Wreck of the Zanzibar
won the Whitbread Award and was the IBBY Honour Book of 1998,
Kensuke’s Kingdom
won The Children’s Book Award, as did
Out of the Ashes
. His other titles include
The Dancing Bear, Farm Boy, Billy the Kid, Toro! Toro
! and
Cool
! Michael and his wife, Clare, established Farms for City Children and were awarded the MBE in recognition of their services to youth through this organisation.

I
still think of the house on the Essex coast where I grew up as my childhood home. But in fact it was my home for just four months of every year. The rest of the time I spent at my boarding school a whole world away, deep in the Sussex countryside. In my home by the sea they called me Michael. In my boarding school I was Morpurgo (or Pongo to my friends), and I became another person. I had two distinctively different lives, and so, in order to survive both, I had to become two very different people. Three times a year I had to make the changeover from home boy to school boy. Going back to school was always an agony of misery, a wretched ritual, a ritual I endured simply because I had to.

Then one evening at the beginning of the autumn term of 1953 I made up my mind that I would not endure it any longer, that I would run away, that I would not stay at my school and be Morpurgo or Pongo any more. I simply wanted to go home where I belonged and be Michael for ever.

The agony began, as it always began, about ten days before the end of the holidays – in this case, the summer holidays. For eight blessed weeks I had been at home. We lived in a large and rambling old house in the centre of a village called Bradwell-juxta-mare (near the sea). The house was called ‘New Hall’ –
new
being mostly seventeenth century, with lots of beams and red bricks. It had a handsome Georgian front, with great sash windows, and one or two windows that weren’t real windows at all but painted on – to save the window tax, I was told. House and garden lay hidden and protected behind a high brick wall.

Cycling out of the gate, as I often did, I turned left on to the village street towards Bradwell quay and the sea, right towards the church, and the American air base, and then out over the marshes towards the ancient Saxon chapel of St Peter’s near the sea wall itself. Climb the sea wall and there was the great brown soupy North Sea and always a wild wet wind blowing. I felt always that this place was a part of me, that I belonged here.

My stepfather worked at his writing in his study, wreathed in a fog of tobacco smoke, with a bust of Napoleon and a Confederate flag on his leather-topped desk, whilst my mother tried her very best to tame the house and the garden and us, mostly on her own. We children were never as much help as we should have been, I’m ashamed to say. There were great inglenook fireplaces that devoured logs. So there were always logs for us to fetch in. Then there were the Bramley apples to pick and lay out in the old Nissen huts in the orchard. And if there was nothing that had to be harvested, or dug over or weeded, then there was the jungle of nettles and brambles that had to be beaten back before it overwhelmed us completely. Above all we had not to disturb our stepfather. When he emerged, his work done for the day, we would play cricket on the front lawn, an apple box for a wicket – it was six if you hit it over the wall into the village street. If it rained, we moved into the big vaulted barn where owls and bats and rats and spiders lived, and played fast and furious ping-pong till suppertime.

I slept up in the attic with my elder brother. We had a candle factory up there, melting down the ends of used-up candles on top of a paraffin stove and pouring the wax into jelly moulds. At night we could climb out of our dormer windows and sit and listen to the owls screeching over the marshes, and to the sound of the surging sea beyond. There always seemed to be butterflies in and out of the house – red admirals, peacocks. I collected dead ones in a biscuit tin, laid them out on cotton wool. I kept a wren’s nest by my bed, so soft with moss, so beautifully crafted.

My days and nights were filled with the familiarity of the place and its people and of my family. This isn’t to say I loved it all. The house was numbingly cold at times. My stepfather could be irritable, rigid and harsh, my mother anxious, tired and sad, my younger siblings intrusive and quarrelsome, and the villagers sometimes very aggressive. What haunted me most though were stories of a house ghost, told for fun, I’m sure, but nonetheless, that ghost terrified me so much that I dreaded going upstairs at night on my own. But all this was home. Haunted or not, this was my place. I belonged.

The day and the moment came always as a shock. So absorbing was this home life of mine, that I’d quite forgotten the existence of my other life. Suddenly I’d find my mother dragging out my school trunk from under the stairs. From that moment on my stomach started to churn. As my trunk filled, I was counting the days, the hours. The process of packing was relentless. Ironing, mending, counting, marking: eight pairs of grey socks, three pairs of blue rugby shorts, two green rugby shirts, two red rugby shirts, green tie, best blazer – red, green and white striped. Evenings were spent watching my mother and my two spinster aunts sewing on nametapes. Every one they sewed on seemed to be cementing the inevitability of my impending expulsion from home. The nametapes read: M.A.B. Morpurgo. Soon, very soon now, I would be Morpurgo again. Once everything was checked and stitched and darned, the checklist finally ticked off and the trunk ready to go, we drove it to the station to be sent on ahead – luggage in advance, they called it. Where that trunk was going I would surely follow. The next time I’d see it would be only a few days away now, and I’d be back at school. I’d be Morpurgo again.

Those last days hurried by so fast. A last cycle ride to St Peter’s, a last walk along the sea wall, the endless goodbyes in the village. ‘Cheer up, Michael, you’ll be home soon.’ A last supper, shepherd’s pie, my favourite. But by this time the condemned boy was not eating at all heartily. A last night of fitful sleep, dreading to wake and face the day ahead. I could not look up at my aunts when I said goodbye for fear they would notice the tears and tell me I was ‘a big boy and should have grown out of all this by now’. I braved their whiskery embraces and suddenly my mother and I were driving out of the gates, the last chimneys of home disappearing from me behind the trees.

We drove to the station at Southminster. Then we were in London and on the way to Victoria Station on the Underground. She held my hand now, as we sat silently side by side. We’d done this so many times before. She knew better than to talk to me. My mouth was dry and I felt sick to my stomach. My school uniform, fresh on that morning, was itchy everywhere and constricting. My stepfather had tightened my tie too tight before he said his stiff goodbye, and pulled my cap down so hard that it made my ears stick out even more than they usually did.

Going up the escalator into the bustling smoky concourse of Victoria Station was as I imagined it might be going up the steps on to the scaffold to face my executioner. I never wanted to reach the top because I knew only too well what would be waiting for me. And sure enough, there it was, the first green, white and red cap, the first familiar face. It was Sim, Simpson, my best friend, but I still didn’t want to see him. ‘Hello Pongo,’ he said cheerily. And then to his mother as they walked away: ‘That’s Morpurgo. I told you about him, remember Mum? He’s in my form.’

‘There,’ my mother said, in a last desperate effort to console me. ‘That’s your friend. That’s Sim, isn’t it? It’s not so bad, is it?’

What she couldn’t know was that it was just about as bad as it could be. Sim was like the others, full of the same hearty cheeriness that would, I know, soon reduce me to tears in the railway carriage.

The caps and the faces multiplied as we neared the platform. There was the master, ticking the names off his list, Mr Stevens (Maths, Geography and Woodwork) who rarely smiled at all at school, but did so now as he greeted me. I knew even then that the smile was not for me, but rather for the benefit of my mother. ‘Good to see you back, Morpurgo. He’s grown, Mrs Morpurgo. What’ve you been feeding him?’ And they laughed together over my head. The train stood waiting, breathing, hissing, longing – it seemed – to be gone, longing to take me away.

My mother did not wait, as other mothers did, to wave me off She knew that to do so would simply be prolonging my agony. Maybe it prolonged hers too. She kissed me all too briefly, and left me with her face powder on my cheek and the lingering smell of her. I watched her walk away until I could not see her anymore through my tears. I hoped she would turn around and wave one last time, but she didn’t. I had a sudden surging impulse to go after her and cling to her and beg her to take me home. But I hadn’t the courage to do it.

‘Still the dreamer, Morpurgo, I see,’ said Mr Stevens. ‘You’d better get on, or the train’ll go without you.’

Hauling my suitcase after me I walked along the corridor searching for a window seat that was still empty. Above everything now I needed a window seat so that I could turn away, so they couldn’t see my face. Luckily I found something even better, a completely empty carriage. I had it all to myself for just a few precious moments before they came. They came all at once, in a pack, piling in on top of one another, ‘bagging’ seats, throwing suitcases, full of boisterous jollity. Simpson was there, and Gibbins, Murphy, Sanchez, Webster, Swan, Colman. I did my best to smile at them, but had to look away quickly. They weren’t fooled. They’d spotted it. ‘Aren’t you pleased to see us, Morpurgo?’ ‘Don’t blub, Pongo.’ ‘It’s only school.’ ‘He wants his mummy wummy.’ Then Simpson said, ‘Leave him alone.’ One thing I had learned was never to rise to the bait. They would stop in time, when they tired of it. And so they did.

As the train pulled out of the station, chuffing and clanking, the talk was all of what they’d done in the ‘hols’, where they’d been, what new Hornby train set someone had been given on his birthday. By East Croydon, it was all the old jokes: ‘Why did the submarine blush?’ ‘Because it saw Queen Mary’s bottom!’ ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’ ‘For some
fowl
reason!’ And the carriage rocked with raucous laughter. I looked hard out of my rain-streaked window at the grey green of the Sussex countryside, and cried, silently so that no one would know. But soon enough they did know. ‘God, Morpurgo, you go on like that and you’ll flood the carriage.’ All pretence now abandoned I ran to the toilet where I could grieve privately and loudly.

At East Grinstead station there was the green Southdown coach waiting to take us to school, barely half an hour away. It went by in a minute. Suddenly we were turning in through the great iron gateway and down the gravel drive towards the school. And there it was, looming out of the trees, the dark and forbidding Victorian mansion that would be my prison for fourteen long weeks. With the light on in the front porch it looked as if the school was some great dark monster with a gaping orange mouth that would swallow me up for ever. The Headmaster and his wife were there to greet us, both smiling like crocodiles.

Up in my dormitory I found my bed, my name written on it on sticking plaster – Morpurgo. I was back. I sat down feeling its sagging squeakiness for the first time. That was the moment the idea first came into my head, that I should run away. I began unpacking my suitcase contemplating all the while the dreadful prospect of fourteen weeks away from home. It seemed like I had a life sentence stretching ahead of me with no prospect of remission. Downstairs, outside the Dining Hall, as we lined up for supper and for the prefects’ hand inspection I felt suddenly overcome by the claustrophobic smell of the place – floor polish and boiled cabbage. Even then I was still only thinking of running away. I had no real intention of doing it, not yet.

It was the rice pudding that made me do it. Major Philips (Latin and Rugby) sitting at the end of my table told me I had to finish the slimy rice pudding skin I’d hidden under my spoon. To swallow while I was crying was almost impossible, but somehow I managed it, only to retch it up almost at once. Major Philips told me not to be ‘childish’. I swallowed again and this time kept it down. This was the moment I made up my mind that I’d had enough, that I was going to run away, that nothing and no one would stop me.

‘Please sir,’ I asked. ‘Can I go to the toilet, successful?’ (Successful, in this context, was school code for number twos. If you declared it before you went, you were allowed longer in the toilet and so were not expected back as soon.) But I didn’t go to the toilet, successful or otherwise. Once out of the Dining Hall, I ran for it. Down the brown painted corridor between the framed team photos on both walls, past the banter and clatter and clanging of the kitchens, and out of the back door into the courtyard. It was raining hard under a darkening sky as I sprinted down the gravel drive and out through the great iron gates. I had done it! I was free!

I was thinking out my escape plan as I was running, and trying to control my sobbing at the same time. I would run the two or three miles to Forest Row, hitch a lift or catch a bus to East Grinstead, and then catch the train home. I still had my term’s pocket money with me, a ten-shilling note. I could be home in a few hours. I’d just walk in and tell everyone I was never ever going back to that school, that I would never be Morpurgo ever again.

I had gone a mile or so, still running, still sobbing, when a car came by. I had been so busy planning in my head that I hadn’t heard the car until it was almost alongside me. My first instinct was to dash off into the fields, for I was sure some master must have seen me escaping and had come after me. I knew full well what would happen if I was caught. It would mean a visit to the Headmaster’s study and a caning, six strokes at least; but worse still it would mean capture, back to prison, to rice pudding skin and cabbage, and squeaky beds and Maths and cross-country runs. One glance at the car though told me this was not a master in hot pursuit after all, but a silver-haired old lady in a little black car. She slowed down in front of me and stopped. So I did too. She wound down her window.