Of Lions and Unicorns: A Lifetime of Tales from the Master Storyteller. Michael Morpurgo
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, 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