Unforgettable Journeys: Alone on a Wide, Wide Sea, Running Wild and Dear Olly. Michael Morpurgo

       Scrambled Eggs and Baked Beans

      We’d been living at the Ark for about four or five years when Aunty Megs had her accident. Marty and I had been swimming in the river. We did that most days, when the weather was right, if there was enough water in the river. Swimming was something else Aunty Megs had taught us. “Almost as important as poetry,” she’d say. “Best exercise there is. Could save your life one day too!”

      We came wandering back up to the house, but when we called for Aunty Megs she wasn’t there. A quick look at the empty compound told us what she was doing and where she was. She’d gone off on one of her rides into the bush, hoping to release some of her little fellows, her family of animals. Normally she’d be gone for an hour or two, no more. But after several hours there was still no sign of her. We decided we shouldn’t wait any longer, that we had to go out looking for her.

      I was leading Big Black Jack out of the paddock when we saw her horse come galloping riderless down the track from the hills. We didn’t waste any time then, but rode back up the way her horse had come, calling for Aunty Megs as we went. We knew roughly where it was she usually went to release her animals – the same area she’d found us all those years before. So that’s where we headed now, both of us on Big Black Jack, Aunty Megs’ horse following along behind. After a while we heard her singing, singing out loud – later she told us the singing helped to take her mind off her pain.

      We found her out in the open beyond the trees, sitting with her back up against a rock, her family of animals scattered all around her. She was holding her arm tight to her chest, and had a nasty gash down one side of her face. There was so much blood all over her. Her shirt was soaked with it, both hands and her neck. She smiled up at us. “Am I glad to see you,” she said. “Don’t worry about the blood. Got plenty more where that came from. Just get me up and take me home, there’s good boys.”

      She was already too weak to walk very far, so we knew that somehow we had to get her on to her horse. It wasn’t at all easy. We had to find the right tree stump to use as a mounting block, then help her up into the saddle. I could see her shoulder was paining her dreadfully. I led the way on Big Black Jack while Marty rode up behind Aunty Megs, holding her steady in the saddle all the way home. Then I rode on into town for the doctor. It turned out she needed a dozen stitches in her face and that she’d broken her collar bone. He put a sling on her, and told her also that she’d lost a lot of blood and had to rest up for a while, a month at least, maybe more. She said, “Phooey.”

      The doctor stood there then, wagging his finger. “Don’t you phooey me, Megs Molloy,” he told her. “This is serious. You’re to keep that sling on and stay still. These boys of yours’ll look after you. You stay put, you hear me? Doctor’s orders.” And then he turned to us. “And if she tries to get up and go off looking for her little animals, you have my permission to lock her in.” I think he was only partly joking.

      Marty and I took him at his word. Now we were looking after Aunty Megs, which made a change. We made a deal with her. You tell us what to do and we’ll do it, we said. But she had to stay put, stay still, rest as the doctor had told her. She agreed, reluctantly. So that’s what happened. She only had to tell us what to do for a few days until we got into some kind of routine. After that we just got on with it. We took turns at everything we didn’t much like doing – which was mostly the cooking and the washing up and the laundry.

      Aunty Megs taught me from her sofa how to make scrambled egg on toast. She was very detailed and specific in her instructions. She allowed no deviation. Beat the eggs, bit of salt, bit of pepper, some milk. You had to spread the butter on the toast, keep it warm. Then you cooked the eggs, and the eggs had to be cooked just right, not for too long or they’d go all lumpy and tasteless. I did it better than Marty who always forgot the toast and burnt it. I still cook the meanest scrambled eggs in the world all these years later. It’s still my favourite meal. During Aunty Megs’ convalescence scrambled eggs alternated regularly with baked beans, or bubble and squeak, or corned beef hash. And we could fry bacon too. Poor Aunty Megs. Thinking back, it wasn’t the best of diets for a patient, any patient. But she never grumbled. She laughed about it instead and told us in the nicest possible way that neither of us should ever take up a career in catering.

      Outside though Marty and I really came into our own. We did everything that Aunty Megs had done. There was no time any more for swimming or fishing or climbing trees. Most mornings we’d go off, as she had done, up to the main road, searching for any surviving orphans. We fed those we had in the compound, and every so often we rode off into the bush, the animal cavalcade following behind, hoping one or two might stay up there. We milked the cows and the goats, fed the hens, took pot-shots with Aunty Megs’ gun at any dingoes that came too close. We even learned to be brave with the geese, and to keep Henry out of the house – we were only partially successful in that. We learned to cope. And, to be honest, we liked it, every moment of it, even the laundry and the shopping.

      We’d ride off once a week into town, one of us on Big Black Jack, the other on Aunty Megs’ horse. We took it in turns to ride Big Black Jack because neither of us much liked Aunty Megs’ horse. He was easily spooked, a bit nervous too, and not only by kangaroos either, but by just about everything. Whenever I rode him into town I felt the same as he did, always on edge, always twitchy. I could never forget that it was his fault Aunty Megs was lying there with a broken collar bone. He’d heard something rustling in the trees, she told us, and he’d reared up in sudden terror – that’s how it had happened. I could never forget that, so I could never trust him.

      Then there were the visitors who came to call, usually for tea. Aunty Megs didn’t like these visits any more than we did. She swore she’d never fall off a horse again, nor ever get ill. It wasn’t that she didn’t like people. She did. But the trouble was they clearly liked her more than she liked them. Now she was incapacitated, they came visiting all too often and there was nothing much she could do about it.

      When the vicar turned up, she didn’t like it one bit, and didn’t trouble to hide her feelings either. I was there when he came. She was pretty blunt with him. “I’m not at death’s door yet,” she told him. “Just broken a collar bone, that’s all. No need for the last rites.” He wasn’t amused and went off quite quickly after that. And Marty and I didn’t like the intrusion of these visitors much either. We felt that some of them were checking up on us to see if we were looking after her properly. They’d bring baskets of food, and all of them, without exception, would ask if there was anything they could do to help. We loved it when Aunty Megs told them that her boys were looking after her wonderfully, that everything was just fine.

      It was about this time though that I first began to notice a change in Marty. He’d grown up a lot recently. He’d always been a lot taller than me, but now he seemed much older too. Until now I’d hardly noticed the four-year difference between us. But I did now. He was becoming the man of the house. Marty would sit with Aunty Megs for hours on end, listening to the stories of how her family and Mick’s had come over to Australia from Ireland a century before, driven out by the potato famine, she said. They had found this valley and settled here. Marty loved looking through Aunty Megs’ photograph albums with her too. He wanted to hear about Mick in particular, and she loved to talk about him too.

      I remember sitting there watching them, and feeling a little jealous of Marty for the first time. Marty seemed to be able to talk to her in a way I couldn’t. He wasn’t just one of her “boys,” he was becoming more of a friend. And she still treated me more like a boy, like a child. Up to now that had been fine, but suddenly it wasn’t. Sometimes I couldn’t bear to sit there and watch them, and I’d go off to bed early. It made me feel very alone again. I’d sulk about it from time to time, but with Marty