Morpurgo War Stories

“Yes, Joe,” she went on, her arm around him. “Bertha’s up in Heaven. She’s happy now.”

That evening Big Joe went missing. None of us was that worried, not at first, not while it was still light. Big Joe would often go wandering off on his own from time to time — he’d always done that — but never at night, because Big Joe was frightened of the dark. Our first thought was to look down in the orchard by Bertha’s grave, but he wasn’t there. We called, but he didn’t come. So, as darkness fell and he still had not come home, we knew there was something wrong. Mother sent Charlie and me out in different directions. I went down the lane calling for him all the way. I went as far as the brook where I stood and listened for him, for his heavy stomping tread, for his singing. He sang differently when he was frightened, no tunes or songs, but instead a continuous wailing drone. But there was no drone to be heard, only the running of the brook, which always sounded louder at night. I knew Big Joe must be very frightened for it was by now quite dark. I made my way home, hoping against hope that either Charlie or Mother might have found him.

As I came into the house I could see neither of them had. They looked up hopefully at me as I came in. I shook my head. Out of the silence that followed Mother made up her mind what had to be done. We didn’t have any choice, she said. All that mattered was finding Big Joe, and for that we needed more people. She would go up to the Big House right away to ask for the Colonel’s help. She sent Charlie and me up to the village to raise the alarm. We knew the best place to go was the pub, that half the village would be in The Duke in the evening. They were singing when we got there, Farmer Cox in full voice. The hubbub and the singing took a while to die down as Charlie told them. By the time he had finished they were all listening in absolute silence. Afterwards, not one of them hesitated. They were putting on hats, shrugging on coats and heading homewards to search their farms, gardens and sheds. The vicar said he’d gather everyone he could in the village hall to organise a search around the village itself, and it was agreed the sounding of the church bell would be the signal that Big Joe had been found.

As everyone dispersed into the darkness outside The Duke, Molly came running up. She had just heard the news about Big Joe. It was her idea that he could be somewhere in the churchyard. I don’t know why we hadn’t thought of it before — it was always one of his favourite places. So the three of us made for the churchyard. We called for him. We looked behind every gravestone, up every tree. He was nowhere. All we heard was the wind sighing in the yew trees. All we saw were lights dancing through the village, down along the valley. Beyond, and as far as the dark horizon, the countryside was filled with pinpricks of moving lights. We knew then that Mother must have persuaded the Colonel to mobilise everyone on the estate to join in the search.

By dawn there was still no word of Big Joe, still no sign of him. The Colonel had called in the police, and as time passed everything was pointing towards the same dreadful conclusion. We saw the police searching the ponds and river banks with long poles — everyone knew Big Joe could not swim. That was when I first began to believe that the worst could really have happened. No one dared to voice this fear, but all of us were beginning to feel it, and we felt it in each other too. We were searching over ground we had already searched several times. All other explanations for Big Joe’s disappearance were being discounted one by one. If he had fallen asleep somewhere, surely he must have woken up by now. If he’d gone and got himself lost, surely, with all the hundreds of people out looking, someone would have found him by now. Everyone I met was grey and grim-faced. All tried their best to raise a smile, but no one could look me in the eye. I could see it wasn’t just fear any more. It was worse. There was desperation in those faces, a feeling of complete hopelessness that they could not disguise however hard they tried.

Round about noon, thinking it was just possible Big Joe might somehow have found his way home on his own, we went back to check. We found Mother sitting there alone, clutching the arms of her chair and staring ahead of her. Charlie and I tried to raise her spirits, tried to reassure her as best we could. I don’t think we were at all convincing. Charlie made her a cup of tea but Mother would not touch it. Molly sat at her feet and laid her head in her lap. A ghost of a smile came to Mother’s face then. Molly could give comfort where we could give none.

Charlie and I left them there together and went outside into the garden. Clinging to what little hope we had left we tried to go back in time, to work out what might have been in Big Joe’s mind to make him go off like that. Perhaps it could help us to discover where he had gone if we understood why he had gone. Was he looking for something perhaps, something he’d lost? But what? Had he gone off to see someone? If so, who? There was little doubt in our minds that his sudden disappearance was in some way connected to Bertha’s death. The day before, both Charlie and I had felt like going up to the Big House and killing the Colonel for what he had done. Maybe, we thought, maybe Big Joe was feeling the same. Perhaps he had gone out to avenge Bertha’s death. Perhaps he was skulking up at the Big House, in the attics, in the cellars, just waiting for his opportunity to strike. But we realised, even as we voiced them, that all such ideas were nothing but ridiculous nonsense. Big Joe didn’t have it in him even to think of doing such a thing. He had never in his life been angry at anyone, not even the Wolfwoman — and after all, she’d given him reason enough and plenty. He could be hurt very easily, but he was never angry, and certainly never violent. Time and again Charlie and I would come up with a new scenario, and a different reason for Big Joe’s disappearance. But in the end we had to dismiss every one of them as fanciful.

Then we saw Molly come down the garden towards us. “I was just wondering,” she said, “I was wondering where Big Joe would most want to be.”

“What d’you mean?” Charlie asked.

“Well, I think he’d want to be wherever Bertha is. So he’d want to be in Heaven, wouldn’t he? I mean, he thinks Bertha’s up in Heaven, doesn’t he? I heard your mother telling him. So if he wanted to be with Bertha, then he’d have to go up to Heaven, wouldn’t he?”

I thought for one terrible moment that Molly was suggesting that Big Joe had killed himself so that he could go up to Heaven and be with Bertha. I didn’t want to believe it, but it made a kind of dreadful sense. Then she explained.

“He told me once,” Molly went on, “that your father was up in Heaven and could still see us easily from where he was. He was pointing upwards, I remember, and I didn’t understand exactly what he was trying to tell me, not at first. I thought he was just pointing up at the sky in a general sort of a way, or at the birds maybe. But then he took my hand and made me point with him, to show me. We were pointing up at the church, at the top of the church tower. It sounds silly, but I think Big Joe believes that Heaven is at the top of the church tower. Has anyone looked up there?”

Even as she was speaking I remembered how Big Joe had pointed up the church tower the day we had buried Father, how he’d looked back up at it over his shoulder as he walked away.

“You coming, Tommo?” said Charlie. “Moll, will you stay with Mother? We’ll ring the bell if it’s good news.” We ran down through the orchard, scrambled through a hole in the hedge and set off across the fields towards the brook — it would be the quickest way up to the village. We splashed through the brook and raced across the water meadows and up the hill towards the church. Trying to keep up with Charlie was difficult. I kept looking up at the church tower as I ran, all the while urging my legs to keep going, to take me faster, all the while praying that Big Joe would be up there in his heaven.

Charlie reached the village before I did and was haring up the church path ahead of me when he slipped on the cobbles and fell heavily. He sat there cursing and clutching his leg until I caught up with him. Then he called, and I called, “Joe! Joe! Are you up there?” There was no reply.

“You go, Tommo,” said Charlie, grimacing in agony. “I think I’ve done my ankle in.” I opened the church door and walked into the silent dark of the church. I brushed past the bell ropes, and eased open the little belfry door. I could hear Charlie shouting, “Is he up there? Is he there?” I didn’t answer. I began to climb the winding stairs. I’d been up into the belfry before, a while ago, when I was in Sunday school. I’d even sung up there in the choir one Ascension Day dawn, when I was little.

I dreaded those steps then and I hated them again now. The slit windows let in only occasional light. The walls were slimy about me, and the stairs uneven and slippery. The cold and the damp and the dark closed in on me and chilled me as I felt my way onwards and upwards. As I passed the silent hanging bells I hoped with all my heart that one of them would be ringing soon. Ninety-five steps I knew there were. With every step I was longing to reach the top, to breathe the bright air again, longing to find Big Joe.

The door to the tower was stiff and would not open. I pushed it hard, too hard, and it flew open, the wind catching it suddenly. I stepped out into the welcome warmth of day, dazzled by the light. At first glance I could see nothing. But then there he was. Big Joe was lying curled up under the shade of the parapet. He seemed fast asleep, his thumb in his mouth as usual. I didn’t want to wake him too suddenly. When I touched his hand he did not wake. When I shook him gently by the shoulder he did not move. He was cold to my touch, and pale, deathly pale. I couldn’t tell if he was breathing or not, and Charlie was calling up at me from below. I shook him again, hard this time, and screamed at him in my fear and panic. “Wake up, Joe. For God’s sake, wake up!” I knew then that he wouldn’t, that he’d come up here to die. He knew you had to die to go to Heaven, and Heaven was where he wanted to be, to be with Bertha again, with Father too.

When he stirred a moment later, I could hardly believe it. He opened his eyes. He smiled. “Ha, Tommo,” he said. “Ungwee. Ungwee.” They were the most beautiful words I’d ever heard. I sprang to my feet and leaned out over the parapet. Charlie was down there on the church path looking up at me.

“We’ve found him, Charlie,” I called down. “We’ve got him. He’s up here. He’s all right.”

Charlie punched the air and yahooed again and again. He yahooed even louder when he saw Big Joe standing beside me and waving. “Charie!” he cried. “Charie!”

Charlie hopped and limped into the church, and only moments later the great tenor bell rang out over the village, scattering the roosting pigeons from the tower, and sending them wheeling out over the houses, over the fields. Like the pigeons, Big Joe and I were shocked at the violence of the sound. It blasted our ears, sent a tremor through the tower that we felt through the soles of our feet. Alarmed at all this thunderous clanging, Big Joe looked suddenly anxious, his hands clapped over his ears. But when he saw me laughing, he did the same. Then he hugged me, hugged me so right I thought he was squeezing me half to death. And when he began singing his Oranges and Lemons, I joined in, crying and singing at the same time.

I wanted him to come down with me, but Big Joe wanted to stay. He wanted to wave at everyone from the parapet. People were coming from all over: Mr Munnings, Miss McAllister and all the children were streaming out through the school yard and up towards the church. We saw the Colonel, coming down the road in his car, and could just make out the Wolfwoman’s bonnet beside him. Best of all we saw Mother and Molly on bicycles racing up the hill, waving at us. Still Charlie rang the bell and I could hear him yahooing down below between each dong, and imagined him hanging on to the rope and riding with it up in the air. Still Big Joe sang his song. And the swifts soared and swooped and screamed all around us, in the sheer joy of being alive, and celebrating, it seemed to me, that Big Joe was alive too.

I was once told in Sunday school that a church tower reaches up skywards because it is a promise of Heaven. Church towers are different in France. It was the first thing I noticed when I came here, when I changed my world of home for my world of war. In comparison the church towers at home seem almost squat, hiding themselves away in the folds of the fields. Here there are no folds in the fields, only wide open plains, scarcely a hill in sight. And instead of church towers they have spires that thrust themselves skywards like a child putting his hand up in class, longing to be noticed. But God, if there is one, notices nothing here. He has long since abandoned this place and all of us who live in it. There are not many steeples left now. I have seen the one in Albert, hanging down like a broken promise.

Now I come to think of it, it was a broken promise that brought me here, to France, and now to this barn. The mouse is back again. That’s good.

There was a brief time just after we’d found Big Joe when all old hurts and grudges seemed suddenly to be forgiven and forgotten. Forgotten too was all talk of the war in France. No one spoke of anything that day except our search for Big Joe and its happy outcome. Even the Colonel and the Wolfwoman were celebrating with the rest of us up in The Duke. Molly’s mother and father were there too, celebrating with everyone else, and smiling — though being strict chapel people, they didn’t touch a drop of drink. I’d never seen Molly’s mother smile before that. And then the Colonel announced that he was paying for all the drinks. It wasn’t long — it only took a couple of pints — before Farmer Cox began singing. He was still singing when we left; some of the songs were getting a bit rude by then. I was there outside The Duke when Mother went up and thanked the Colonel for his help. He offered us all a lift home in his Rolls Royce! The Peacefuls in the back of the Colonel’s car, and the Wolfwoman in the front, being friendly! We couldn’t believe it, not after all the bad blood between us over the years.

The Colonel broke the spell on the way home, talking about the war, and how the army should be using more cavalry over in France.

“Horses and guns,” he said, “in that order. That’s how we beat the Boers in South Africa. That’s what they should be doing. If I were younger, I’d go myself. They’ll soon be needing every horse they can find, Mrs Peaceful, and every man, too. It’s not going at all well out there.”

Mother thanked him again as he helped us out of the car outside our gate. The Colonel touched his hat and smiled. “Don’t you go running off again, young man,” he said to Big Joe. “You gave us all a terrible fright.” And even the Wolfwoman waved at us almost cheerily as they drove off.

That night Big Joe began coughing. He’d caught a chill and it had gone to his lungs. He was in bed with a fever for weeks afterwards, and Mother hardly left his side, she was so worried.

By the time he was better, the whole episode of his disappearance had been forgotten, overtaken by news in the papers of a great and terrible battle on the Marne, where our armies were fighting the Germans to a standstill, trying desperately to halt their advance through France.

One evening, Charlie and I arrived home from work a little late, having stopped on the way for a drink at The Duke as we often did. In those days, I remember, I had to pretend I liked the beer. The truth was I hated the stuff, but I loved the company. Charlie might have bossed me about on the farm, but after work, up at The Duke, he never treated me like the fifteen-year-old I was, though some of the others did. I couldn’t have them knowing that I hated beer. So I’d force down a couple of pints with Charlie, and often left The Duke a little befuddled in the head. That was why I was woozy when we came home that evening. When I opened the door and saw Molly, sitting there on the floor with her head on Mother’s lap, it seemed I was suddenly back to the day Big Joe had gone missing. Molly looked up at us, and I could see that she had been crying, and that this time it was Mother doing the comforting.

“What is it?” Charlie asked. “What’s happened?”

“You may well ask, Charlie Peaceful,” Mother said. She didn’t sound at all pleased to see us. I wondered at first if she had seen we’d been drinking. Then I noticed a leather suitcase under the windowsill, and Molly’s coat over the back of Father’s fireside chair.

“Molly’s come to stay,” Mother went on. “They’ve thrown her out, Charlie. Her mother and father have thrown her out, and it’s your fault.”

“No!” Molly cried. “Don’t say that. It isn’t his fault. It’s no one’s fault.” She ran over to Charlie and threw herself into his arms.

“What’s happened, Moll?” asked Charlie. “What’s going on?”

Molly was shaking her head as she wept uncontrollably now on his shoulder. He looked at Mother.

“What’s going on, Charlie, is that she’s going to have your baby,” she said. “They packed her case, put her out of the door and told her never to come back. They never want to see her again. She had nowhere else to go, Charlie. I said she was family, that she belongs with us now, that she can stay as long as she likes.”

It seemed an age before Charlie said anything. I saw his face go through all manner of emotions: incomprehension, bewilderment, outrage, through all these at once, and then at last to resolve. He held Molly away from him now and brushed away her tears with his thumb as he looked steadily into her eyes. When he spoke at last, it wasn’t to Molly, but to Mother. “You shouldn’t have said that to Moll, Mother,” he spoke slowly, almost sternly. Then he began to smile. “That was for me to say. It’s our baby, my baby, and Moll’s my girl. So I should have said it. But I’m glad you said it all the same.”

After that Molly became even more one of us than she had been before. I was both overjoyed and miserable at the same time. Molly and Charlie knew how I must have felt, I think, but they never spoke of it and neither did I.

They were married up in the church a short time later. It was a very empty church. There was no one there except the vicar and the four of us, and the vicar’s wife sitting at the back. Everyone knew about Molly’s baby by now, and because of that the vicar had agreed to marry them only on certain conditions: that no bells were to be rung and no hymns to be sung. He rushed through the marriage service as if he wanted to be somewhere else. There was no wedding feast afterwards, only a cup of tea and some fruit cake when we got home.

Shortly afterwards, Mother received a letter from the Wolfwoman saying it had been a marriage of shame; how she had thought of dismissing Molly and only decided against it because, whilst Molly was clearly a weak and immoral girl, she felt she could not in all conscience punish Molly for something that she was sure was much more Charlie’s fault than hers, and that anyway Molly had already been punished enough for her wickedness. Mother read the letter out loud to all of us, then scrunched it up and threw it into the fire — where it belonged, she said.

I moved into Big Joe’s room and slept with him in his bed, which wasn’t easy because he was big and the bed very narrow. He muttered to himself loudly in his dreams, and tossed and turned almost constantly. But, as I lay awake at nights, that was not what troubled me most. In the next room slept the two people I most loved in all the world who, in finding each other, had deserted me. Sometimes, in the dead of night, I thought of them lying in each other’s arms and I wanted to hate them. But I couldn’t. All I knew was that I had no place at home any more, that I would be better off away, and away from them in particular.

I tried never to be alone with Molly for I did not know what to say to her any more. I didn’t stop to drink with Charlie any more at The Duke, for the same reason. On the farm, I took every opportunity that came my way to work on my own, so as to be nowhere near him. I volunteered for any fetching and carrying that had to be done away from the farm. Farmer Cox seemed more than happy for me to do that. He was always sending me off with the horse and cart on some errand or other: bringing back feed from the merchants maybe, fetching the seed potatoes, or perhaps taking a pig to market to sell for him. Whatever it was, I took my time about it and Farmer Cox never seemed to notice. But Charlie did. He said I was skiving off work, but he knew that all I was doing was avoiding him. We knew each other so well. We never argued, not really; perhaps it was because neither of us wanted to hurt the other. We both knew enough hurt had been done already, that more would only widen the rift between us and neither of us wanted that.

It was while I was off “skiving” in Hatherleigh market one morning that I came face to face with the war for the first time, a war that until now had seemed unreal and distant to all of us, a war only in newspapers and on posters. I’d just sold Farmer Cox’s two old rams, and got a good price for them too, when I heard the sound of a band coming down the High Street, drums pounding, bugles blaring. Everyone in the market went running, and so did I.

As I came round the corner I saw them. Behind the band there must have been a couple of dozen soldiers, splendid in their scarlet uniforms. They marched past me, arms swinging in perfect time, buttons and boots shining, the sun glinting on their bayonets. They were singing along with the band: It’s a long way to Tipperary, it’s a long way to go. And I remember thinking it was a good thing Big Joe wasn’t there, because he’d have been bound to join in with his Oranges and Lemons. Children were stomping alongside them, some in paper hats, some with wooden sticks over their shoulders. And there were women throwing flowers, roses mostly, that were falling at the soldiers’ feet. But one of them landed on a soldier’s tunic and somehow stuck there. I saw him smile at that.

Like everyone else, I followed them round the town and up into the square. The band played God Save the King and then, with the Union Jack fluttering behind him, the first sergeant major I’d ever set eyes on got up on to the steps of the cross, slipped his stick smartly under his arm, and spoke to us, his voice unlike any voice I’d heard before: rasping, commanding.

“I shan’t beat about the bush, ladies and gentlemen,” he began. “I shan’t tell you it’s all tickety–boo out there in France — there’s been too much of that nonsense already in my view. I’ve been there. I’ve seen it for myself. So I’ll tell you straight. It’s no picnic. It’s hard slog, that’s what it is, hard slog. Only one question to ask yourself about this war. Who would you rather see marching through your streets? Us lot or the Hun? Make up your minds. Because, mark my words, ladies and gentlemen, if we don’t stop them out in France the Germans will be here, right here in Hatherleigh, right here on your doorstep.”

I could feel the silence all around.

“They’ll come marching through here burning your houses, killing your children, and yes, violating your women. They’ve beaten brave little Belgium, swallowed her up in one gulp. And now they’ve taken a fair slice of France too. I’m here to tell you that unless we beat them at their own game, they’ll gobble us up as well.” His eyes raked over us. “Well? Do you want the Hun here? Do you?”

“No!” came the shout, and I was shouting along with them.

“Shall we knock the stuffing out of them then?”

“Yes!” we roared in unison.