Billy the Kid by Michael Morpurgo
“I want to wake up in the morning at the Shed End, Billy, and watch you bamboozle the Arsenal again.”
When we woke the next morning we were still on our hillside. And crouching all around us was a bunch of wild looking men, some in berets, all of them armed to the teeth, and not at all friendly. Maquis, they called themselves, resistance fighters. They took us to their camp high up in the hills, and there we found dozens more like us, all escapees from Italian camps. We felt a bit like prisoners again – there was always someone keeping an eye on us. They fed us and made us as comfortable as they could – but I think we were a bit of a nuisance. They had more important things to be doing. Soon enough, they said, they’d be taking us down to the Americans who had landed in Southern France, then we could go home. And that’s what happened.
So there I was on yet another ship, this time going from Marseilles to Liverpool, back home. When we landed they gave us a week’s leave. Robbie and me came to the parting of the ways. He went north to Aberdeen to see his wife who was in the Land Army up there, and I went south to London. We said we’d keep in touch, but we never did.
I could have sent a telegram home, but I didn’t. I thought I’d just walk in and surprise them. It was tea time. I never even knocked on the door. Emmy was there, they were all there. God, did I get a hugging – three of them all at once, and Mum going on and on about how I was just skin and bone. Emmy wept buckets, and even Ossie had to dry his eyes. I’d never seen him do that before. And he called me a young scallywag for not warning them. I gave Emmy back her gold cross and said it had worked, which it had. But she wouldn’t have it back, said I had to keep it. Back at Chelsea they treated me like a conquering hero. The war would be over soon enough now, six months, a year at the most, everyone knew it. They told me there’d always be a place for me back at the club when I’d finished with the army. I played a couple of practice games with some of the lads.
I wasn’t as sharp as I had been – I wasn’t strong enough to be sharp – but I could still tease them with my dribbling. I was soon out of puff though. I knew I’d have a lot of training, a lot of catching up to do if I was ever going to get back into the first team. But I’d do it. Nothing in the world was going to stop me from pulling on a Chelsea shirt again, not lousy Mr Hitler, nor his lousy war.
Home was difficult. They all knew I was going soon. So every day, every moment was precious, too precious for all of us. We couldn’t be normal. And Joe’s bed was still there across the room, and so was his box of cigarette cards on his shelf. I found myself talking to him even more now, sometimes aloud. I dreamt of him too, and I dreamt of Lucia and the shots echoing around the mountains.
I hate goodbyes, so I left a letter for each of them and crept out of the house before dawn. Once I was on the train down to Dover, I was back in the army, back to left right, left right, saluting officers and polishing boots. So they sent me off to war for the second time. How I wish they never had.
I thought the fighting would be mostly done with by now, and so it was. But there were still so many wounded to look after – our lads, and Germans, and refugees. We were treating as many refugees as soldiers. I drove ambulances, swabbed down floors, made beds, buried people. That was when I first started to drink with the lads. I never had before. When the work was over we’d get together and drown our sorrows. The drink was cheap, and I discovered I had a bit of a taste for it. No more than that. Not then. Not yet.
We’d heard about the camps, concentration camps where they’d been exterminating Jews and anyone they didn’t like; but I don’t think any of us really believed it. You had to see it to believe it. But when I saw it, I still couldn’t believe it. I didn’t want to believe it.
As we drove in through the gates of Belsen in our convoy of ambulances, they came wandering towards us like ghosts, walking skeletons, some of them in striped pyjamas, some completely naked. They were staring at us as if we had come down from some other planet. The children would come up to us and touch us, just to make sure we were real, I think. You couldn’t call them children – more like little old people, skin and bone, nothing more, hardly living. They all moved slowly, shuffling. A strange silence hung over the place, and a horrible stench.
It was our job to do what we could for the sick, to get them eating again. As for the dying, we were usually too late.
We buried the dead in their thousands, in mass graves. You didn’t want to look, but you had to. Once you’ve seen such things you can never forget them. They give out no medals for burying the dead, but if they did I’d have a chestful. There was one little boy I found in his bunk. I thought he was asleep. He was curled up with his thumb in his mouth. He was dead. I wrote home, but I couldn’t tell them what I’d seen. I just couldn’t.
When I left Belsen a few days later in a convoy of ambulances I was full of hate and anger, full of horror, and full of grief too for the little boy with his thumb in his mouth. I drank every evening now, drank to forget.
Thinking back, it was my fault. I should have kept to the track. Just a month or so after Belsen we were on our way to a refugee camp in Northern Germany somewhere. Four ambulances in the convoy, and I was driving the lead ambulance.
The military policeman directed us up a farm track and told us to keep on down to the end, and to keep on the track. But the farm track was impossible. Up to the axles in mud, we were slipping and sliding all over the place. The wheels just weren’t gripping. I thought I’d get bogged down. The meadow to one side looked a better bet, so I left the farm track and drove along the edge of the field.
The next thing I knew I was in hospital. Later on they told me everything. The ambulance had hit a mine. I was lucky to be alive. I didn’t feel lucky. I ached all over in every bone, and my left leg was agony. It had been crushed and broken in three places. I’d had an operation to put it right. The doctor was cheery, too cheery.
“Your leg’s a bit of a mess, old chap,” he said, “but you’ll be up and walking on it soon enough. It’ll always be a bit stiff, and you won’t be playing a lot of football, I’m afraid. But otherwise you’ll be fine.” Otherwise, you’ll be fine. I’ve never forgotten those words. I wrote home a lot from my hospital bed, and told them what had happened, what the doctor had told me, how he didn’t know what he was talking about, that I’d be playing football again just as soon as I got home. I wasn’t fooling them, wasn’t fooling myself. I believed it. I really believed it.
A few weeks later they invalided me out, and I found myself walking down the Fulham Road, limping a little, and needing a stick, but happy as a lark. I’d surprise them all again. I turned into our street. Where my house had been there was no house. A V-2 bomb they said it was, the last one to fall on London. A direct hit. They’d all been buried in the churchyard next to Dad.
All I could think was – if only Emmy hadn’t made me keep her gold cross, she might have been alive. They might all have lived.
I was there in Trafalgar Square the day the war ended. Everyone was so happy. I was swept along in the crowd up the Mall to Buckingham Palace. How they cheered, and sang, and danced, and hugged. And all I could do was watch. All I felt was emptiness. I did go back to Chelsea, but the doctor there said the same thing, I’d never play again.
They discharged me from the army. I had a demob suit and a disability pension and nothing to live for. I didn’t feel sorry for myself. I didn’t feel anything. One day I began to drink, and I just didn’t stop. It’s quite easy to fall apart, like going to sleep – you just drift into it.
For fifteen years I wandered the country, sleeping rough. I went all over, up to the Highlands of Scotland, down to the tip of Cornwall. I lived in barns, in abandoned cottages, in bombed-out ruins, and once in a disused chapel. I had enough to get by. My disability pension bought me my drink, and I seemed to need less and less to eat. And the drink worked too. It numbed the sadness for me. I talked a lot to myself as I tramped the country lanes, and if not to myself, to Joe and Lucia and Mum and Emmy and
But in all this time I never lost touch with Chelsea. I’d look out for them in the newspaper to see how they were doing. I knew the scores of every game, I knew where we were in the League, I knew the name of every player in the team.
When it was cold, I’d sit in libraries or in cafés – where it was warm – and read about Chelsea in the paper.
I’d grown a long straggly beard and I’m afraid I didn’t wash too often either. The best thing I ever did was keep my old army great coat, a real life saver that was. There were some people who turned nasty at me – and I don’t blame them, not really. I was drunk a lot of the time and I wasn’t a pretty sight either, I know that. But the children were always kinder, the young ones anyway. If ever I kicked a football about with them they thought I was the bee’s knees. I couldn’t run about much of course, not any more, but I could still get up to a few of my old tricks. They liked that, and so did I.
I never stayed in one place long enough to become a nuisance, nor long enough to get to know anyone. I just kept moving, over the next horizon, onto the next town. I spent the odd night in a police station, for vagrancy or drunkenness, but they were always happy to turf me out the next morning. I was never in any real trouble. But it was after a night in a police cell – up in Ipswich it was – that I decided to stop my wandering. It was early on a Sunday morning, and they’d just let me out. I was walking past the desk when I noticed the copper on duty had his paper open at the sports page. I asked him if Chelsea had won. They had.
“Lovely,”’ I said.
“You a Chelsea supporter then?” he asked.
It turned out he was too. He’d grown up just across the river in Putney. He was Chelsea mad. On the strength of that he gave me a cup of tea and we talked Chelsea for an hour or more. And then he said it.
“Used to be a young lad there just before the war. Billy the Kid. Remember him? Just about the best we ever had. Never heard of him since, have you? Wonder what happened to him.” I didn’t say anything.
“When I retire, three years from now,” he went on. “I’ve got it all planned. I’ve told the wife. We’re going to move back down to London and live right by the ground. I’ll be right there on the spot for every match.”
I set off for London the next day. I was there three years ahead of him. My travels were over. I was back here in this park, my park, back where I belonged. I slept here on this bench for three nights, picked up my pension and went to the match on Saturday – against Fulham. We won two nil. The Shed End was roaring. I’d come home.
They need a ref out there. That’s twice that poor lad’s had his legs scythed away from under him. For two pins I’d go and volunteer myself. I’d better not. I’ve still got my banana to eat and my apple – got to keep healthy. It’s nearly half past one. Perfect day for football. Bit of a breeze. God, I’d love to be playing.
I’d never dossed down in big cities. I liked to keep myself to myself and that’s difficult in places like London. But I was lucky, I found the perfect place just off where we’d lived in Franklin Road. Someone had rebuilt our house – all very posh. But I was quite happy where I was in the basement of a dilapidated old house round the corner, all boarded up. It was dry, and there was even a bed down there, of sorts; and piles of old curtains which I used for blankets. I was still drinking, but now at least I had something to look forward to. I’d always put back enough of my pension money to buy my ticket. Every home match I was there at the Shed End. I was there when Stanley Matthews came down to Chelsea, 48 years old, and beat us, practically all by himself. Best of all I was there in May of 1963 when Bobby Tambling shot four goals past Portsmouth, and put us back up in Division One.
‘Smelly Billy’ they called me at the Shed End, but I didn’t mind. I was one of them, one of the Chelsea family, and that made me feel good, better than I’d felt in a long, long time. When I talked to Joe now, down in my basement, I’d not be going on so much about my Belsen nightmares and my loneliness and all my miseries, I’d tell him more about how Chelsea was doing, who I thought Docherty should put in the team, and who he should leave out. But I still drank, drank hard. I knew I shouldn’t, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself.
The winter after Chelsea went up to Division One, my whole life changed. I’d been alone in my basement for three winters, and no one had bothered me. Then one day, I heard footsteps in the house above, and voices. I lay low and hoped they’d go away. But they didn’t. I heard a key turn in the lock at the top of the basement stairs, and down they came. I thought of running, but I didn’t see why I should. It was my place, my home. They were a young couple. They didn’t seem to know what to say at first, just looked at me.
“I live here,” I told them.
“Well that’s all right,” said the young lady, after a moment or two. “We’ve bought the place. We’ll be doing it up ourselves. He can stay for a while, can’t he, Jamie?”
The young man looked a bit doubtful. But then he shrugged and smiled.
“Why not?” he said.
So that’s what happened. Jamie and Maddy moved in over my head, and did the place up. To begin with they left me be, and I left them be. But then from time to time Maddy would ask me up for a cup of tea and show me what they were doing. Nicest people you could ever hope to meet. I was happier then than I’d been in years. At nights I told Joe all about them, how they were looking after me, how I knew he’d like them. I began to give them a hand, carrying bricks and blocks and timber, doing a bit of cement work here and there, plastering, sweeping up, papering, whatever they wanted. We did it together, the three of us. And in the evenings sometimes we’d sit around on boxes up in their half-built sitting room and have pizzas and beer. They loved pizzas, lived on them. They were good times.
It was one evening after a late pizza that Maddy asked me where I’d come from, what had happened, how come they’d found me living rough in their basement. So I told them, told them everything from start to finish, I told them things I’d never told another soul, except Joe. When I finished Maddy put her arms round me and hugged me and cried. No one had done that since Emmy, since Mum.
But they didn’t like it when I was drunk, I could see that. They always looked disappointed, but they never ticked me off. They just ignored me. And all the time the house was taking shape around us. Jamie often came with me to the matches – he was a Manchester United supporter to start with, but I didn’t hold that against him. I gave him a Chelsea blue scarf for Christmas. I tied it round his neck and told him he was a Chelsea man now, whether he liked it or not. He liked it.
It was on the same Christmas Day that Maddy told me she was going to have a baby. I was so happy, happy for them, happy for me; but I could see that Jamie had something to say, and that somehow he didn’t want to say it. He got round to it in the end.
“Thing is, Billy,” he said, “I need a place to do my architectural work, my drawing. I was going to have the room at the top of the house, but now that will have to be the baby’s room. I’ll be needing the basement.” My heart sank. I’d got used to the place, used to them, and now they wanted me to leave.
“When do you want me to go?” I asked them.
“We don’t, you old silly. Of course we don’t,” said Maddy, laughing. “We’ve had an idea, haven’t we, Jamie? Go on tell him, tell him, Jamie.”
“Well, what if we built you a sort of cabin at the bottom of the garden?” said Jamie. “A place on your own. How’d that be?”
“Lovely,” I said. “That’d be just lovely.”
So up went the cabin and I went to live at the bottom of the garden. I had everything I needed – toilet, wash-basin, the lot. I only needed to come into the house for a bath. Maddy said it nicely. She said I was a bit sniffy and I should have a bath at least once a week. But soon she was too busy with the new baby to bother about how sniffy I was.
They called h
Thinking about it now, I know it was Sam who stopped me drinking, Sam and Maddy. I would still get drunk from time to time, but then one day I did the unforgivable. Sam was about seven or eight by now, and at school down the road. One afternoon I found myself outside the school gates. I was drunk as a lord. They were all out in the playground. I saw Sam and he saw me. He waved and began to run across the playground towards me, and then he stopped. He saw the state of me and turned, and ran back indoors. I’d seen him recoil from me once or twice before. I’d promised myself I wouldn’t ever get drunk when Sam was around. But I had.
No one came to my cabin that evening, and I was too ashamed to go and say sorry. The next morning Maddy came down the garden. I had never seen her angry before, but she was steaming angry now. She tore into me and told me exactly what she thought of me.
“If you want to go on drinking yourself to death, that’s your business, but you’re not going to do it in front of Sam. Do you understand that? If you ever, ever do that again, you’re out! Out!” And then she looked around my cabin. “And look at this place. It’s a mess. It’s a tip. If you want to go on living here, you’ve got to clear it up, now.”