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Of Lions and Unicorns: A Lifetime of Tales from the Master Storyteller
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, the 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 always came 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 name tapes. Every one they sewed on seemed to be cementing the inevitability of my impending expulsion from home. The name tapes 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 knew, 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 any more 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 arrived. 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 learnt 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 a 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.
“Are you all right, dear?”
“No,” I sobbed.
“You’re soaking wet! You’ll catch your death!” And then: “You’re from that school up the road, aren’t you? You’re running away, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Where to?”
“Home.”
“Where’s home, dear?”
“Essex. By the sea.”
“But that’s a hundred miles away. Why don’t you get in the car, dear? I’ll take you home with me. Would you like a sticky bun and some nice hot tea?” And she opened the door for me. There was something about her I trusted at once, the gentleness of her smile perhaps, the softness of her voice. That was why I got in, I think. Or maybe it was for the sticky bun. The truth was that I’d suddenly lost heart, suddenly had enough of my great escape. I was cold and wet, and home seemed as far away as the moon, and just as inaccessible.
The car was warm inside, and smelt of leather and dog.
“It’s not far, dear. Half a mile, that’s all. Just in the village. Oh, and this is Jack. He’s perfectly friendly.” And by way of introducing himself, the dog in the back began to snuffle the back of my neck. He was a spaniel with long dangly ears and sad bloodshot eyes. And he dribbled a lot.
All the way back to the village, the old lady talked on, about Jack mostly. Jack was ten, in dog years, she told me. If you multiplied by seven, exactly the same age as she was. “One of the windscreen wipers,” she said, “only works when it feels like it, and it never feels like it when it’s raining.”
I sat and listened and had my neck washed from ear to ear by Jack. It tickled and made me smile. “That’s better, dear,” she said. “Happier now?”
She gave me more than she’d promised – a whole plate of sticky buns and several cups of tea. She put my soaking wet shoes in the oven to dry and hung my blazer on the clothes horse by the stove, and she talked all the time, telling me all about herself, how she lived alone these days, how she missed company. Her husband had been killed on the Somme in 1916, in the First World War. “Jimmy was a Grenadier Guardsman,” she said proudly. “Six foot three in his socks.” She showed me his photo on the mantelpiece. He had a moustache and lots of medals. “Loved his fishing,” she went on. “Loved the sea. We went to the sea whenever we could. Brighton. Lovely place.” On and on she rambled, talking me through her life with Jimmy, and how she’d stayed on in the village after he’d been killed because it was the place they’d known together, how she’d taught in the village school for years before she retired. When the sticky buns were all finished and my shoes were out of the oven and dry at last, she sat back, clapped her hands on her knees, and said:
“Now, dear, what are we going to do with you?”
“I don’t know,” I replied.
“Shall I telephone your father and mother?”
“No!” I cried. The thought appalled me. They’d be so disappointed in me, so ashamed to know that I’d tried to run away.
“Well then, shall I ring the headmaster?”
“No! Please don’t.” That would be worse still. I’d be up the red-carpeted stairs into his study. I’d been there before all too often. I’d bent over the leather armchair and watched him pull out the cane from behind his desk. I’d waited for the swish and whack, felt the hot searing pain, the stinging eyes, and counted to six. I’d stood up, trembling, to shake his hand and murmured, “Thank you, sir,” through my weeping mouth. No, not that. Please, not that.
“Maybe,” said the old lady. “Maybe there’s a way round this. You can’t have been gone long, an hour or so at most. What if I take you back and drop you off at the top of the school drive? It’s nearly dark now. No one would see you, not if you were careful. And with a bit of luck no one would have missed you just yet. You could sneak in and no one would ever know you’ve run away at all. What d’you think?”
I could have hugged her.
Jack came in the car with us in the back seat, licking my neck and my ears all the way. The old lady was unusually silent for a while. Then she said: “There’s something Jimmy once told me not long before he was killed, when he was home on leave for the last time. He never talked much about the war and the trenches, but he did tell me once how scared he was all the time, how scared they all were. So I asked him what made him go on, why he didn’t just run away. And he said: ‘Because of my pals. We’re in this together. We look after each other.’ You’ve got pals, haven’t you, dear?”
“Yes,” I replied, “but they like coming back to school. They love it.”
“I wonder if they really do,” she said. “Maybe they just pretend better than you.”
I was still thinking about that when the car came to a stop.
“I won’t go any nearer than this, dear. It wouldn’t do for anyone to see you getting out, would it now? Off you go then. And chin up, like my Jimmy.”
Jack gave me a goodbye lick as I turned to him, on my nose.
“Thanks for the sticky buns,” I said.
She smiled at me and I got out. I watched her drive away into the gloom and vanish. To this day I have no idea who she was. I never saw her again.
I ran down through the rhododendrons and out into the deserted courtyard at the back of the school. The lights were on all over the building, and the place was alive with the sound of children. I knew I needed time to compose myself before I met anyone, so I opened the chapel door and slipped into its enveloping darkness. There I sat and prayed, prayed that I hadn’t been found out, that I wouldn’t have to face the red-carpeted stairs and the headmaster’s study and the leather chair. I hadn’t been in there for more than a few minutes when the door opened and the lights went on.
“Ah, there you are, Morpurgo.” It was Mr Morgan (French and music, and the choirmaster too). “We’ve been looking all over for you.” As he came up the aisle towards me, I knew my prayers had been answered. Mr Morgan was much liked by all of us, because he was invariably kind, and always thought the best of us – rare in that school.
“Bit homesick, are you, Morpurgo?”
“Yes, sir.”
“It’ll pass. You’ll see.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “You’d better get yourself upstairs with the others. If you don’t get your trunk unpacked by lights out, Matron will eat you alive, and we don’t want that, do we?”
“No, sir.”
And so I left Mr Morgan and the chapel and went upstairs to my dormitory.
“Where’ve you been? I thought you’d scarpered, run away,” said Simpson, unpacking his truck on the bed next to mine.
“I just felt a bit sick,” I said. Then I opened my trunk. On the top of my clothes was a note and three bars of Cadbury’s chocolate. The note read: Have a good term. Love Mum.
Simpson spotted the chocolate, and pounced. Suddenly everyone in the dormitory was around me, and at my chocolate, like gannets. I managed to keep a little back for myself, which I hid under my pillow, and ate late that night as I listened to the bell in the clock tower chiming midnight. As it finished I heard Simpson crying to himself, as silently as he could.
“You all right, Sim?” I whispered.
“Fine,” he sniffed. And then: “Pongo, did you scarper?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Next time you go, take me with you. Promise?”
“Promise,” I replied.
But I never did scarper again. Perhaps I never again plucked up the courage; perhaps I listened to the old lady’s advice. I’ve certainly never forgotten it. It was my one and only great escape.
Michael doesn’t remember his father, an RAF pilot lost in the war. But his Auntie Snowdrop gives him a medal, and then a photograph, and a story begins to unfold …
“He looks pleased to see you, chéri,” she said.
When Auntie Pish fell asleep soon after, we crept out of her room and drove home. I sat in the car with the parcel on my lap all the way back to London, opening up the wrapping from time to time to look at Papa.
“I’ll polish that frame when we get home,” Maman said.
“I’ll do it,” I told her.
In the end Maman and I did it together, on the kitchen table, with Jasper up on a chair beside us, watching. Maman did the hard work, putting the polish on, and rubbing the tarnish off. It took some doing. Then I had the satisfaction of shining it up, breathing and polishing till it gleamed. Once it was done I took it up to my bedroom and stood it up on my desk. I sat there and stared at Papa. That was when Auntie Snowdrop’s words came back to me – I hadn’t thought about them in a long while. “Always remember, Michael, it’s not the face that matters, not the skin, not the hair, it’s what lies beneath. You have to look deeper, Michael, behind. Look through the glass, through the photo, and you’ll find out who your Papa really was.”
I looked hard into Papa’s face, into his eyes, trying all I could to know the man behind the glass, behind the photo, behind the eyes.
Jasper was with me, snuffling around my feet. I wasn’t paying him any attention, which was why, I suppose, he decided to jump up on to my desk and shove his nose into my face, knocking the photograph over as he did so. I heard the glass shatter as it fell.
“Get off, Jasper,” I shouted, pushing him aside angrily. I’d never been so angry with him before. As I was standing the frame up again the glass fell out on to my desk in several pieces. I’ve often thought since that Jasper might have done it on purpose, because he knew, because he was trying to tell me, because Auntie Snowdrop had told him all about it, and he knew that’s what Auntie Snowdrop wanted him to do. He wanted me to find it, and so did Auntie Snowdrop. That’s why he broke it. That’s what I think, anyway.
It was the first time I’d seen Papa’s face not through glass. He was already somehow more real to me, closer and more alive without the glass in between us. The photo was loose in the frame now, and had slipped down. I noticed there was one small piece of broken glass still trapped there in the bottom corner of the frame. I tried to prise it out with the point of my pencil, but I couldn’t do it. I’d have to open up the frame at the back if I was going to get it out.
I hadn’t really noticed, not until now, but the back of the frame was nothing but a piece of cardboard, held in place by a few rusty-looking pins. All I had to do was to pull these out one by one and the cardboard came away easily enough. I had expected to see simply the back of the photograph, but there was something else there, a writing pad about the same size as the photo. On the front it said, ‘Basildon Bond’, in fancy printing, and below it, written in pencil, in large capital letters:
“WHO I AM, WHAT I’VE DONE,
AND WHO YOU ARE”
BY
MARTHA MAHONEY
(AUNTIE SNOWDROP)
FOR MICHAEL, SO HE’LL KNOW
FOR HIS EYES ONLY
WRITTEN IN MAY 1950
It took me a little while to cast my mind back, to work it out. This must have been written then about a month or so before she died, because I knew that was in June of 1950. (I checked later in my diary and I was right about that.)
She’d hidden it behind the photo for me to find. Behind the photo! Behind the photo!
Maman called up from downstairs. “Chéri, I’ve got to go down to the shops. Have you got that dog up there? I’d better take him with me. He hasn’t had his walk yet. You’ll be all right on your own?”
“I’ll be fine,” I told her. I opened the door to let Jasper out. He didn’t seem to want to go even when Maman whistled for him. She had to shout for him more than once. Even then he went only because I pushed him out – I was still cross with him. He gave me a long last look before he left. Read it, his eyes were telling me. Read it. Then he was gone, scuttling down the stairs. I heard the front door close after them.
I was alone. I went back to my desk, picked up Auntie Snowdrop’s writing pad, sat on my bed, pillows piled behind me, rested the pad on my knees, and opened it. My heart was pounding. I knew even as I began to read – and I have no idea how I knew – that my life would be changed for ever, that after I’d read this I would never be the same person again.
Who I am, What I’ve done, and Who you are
I’m tell you this, writing it down for you, Michael, because we all have a right to know who we are. I should have told you myself, face to face a long time ago. Early on, when you were little, I always thought you were too young – or that was my excuse. And then as you grew up, I didn’t know how to tell you. I never had the courage, that’s the truth of it. I should have told your Maman too, but I could never quite bring myself to do that either.
Now that I’ve been told in the hospital that time is running out for me, that I have only a few months left, I thought this was the one last thing I had to do. Somehow I had to tell you, and there seemed to me only one way to do it. I would put it all down on paper, and arrange things, if I could, so that one day you would find it and read it for yourself. I did try to point you in the right direction. I did tell you where to look, didn’t I? Look behind the face. Remember?
