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