Listen to the Moon by Michael Morpurgo
Alfie had most certainly been worried at how his strange new ‘sister’, his ‘mermaid sister’, might be treated by everyone when she came to school. All the early indications, after her mysterious appearance on the island, after they had taken her in, had not been good. Zebediah Bishop’s constant niggling and mockery, and all his cronies’ endless japes and jibes and wisecracks, had, until now, made Alfie’s school life a misery. He had only expected things to get worse, now that she was actually coming to school with him. But, quite unexpectedly, it did not turn out like that at all.
Instead, Lucy had been catapulted at once to huge fame and universal popularity: firstly by that dramatic arrival on horseback, and then by the playing of the piano in Assembly. These would have been quite enough on their own to make her the talk of the school, but being sent to Coventry as a punishment by Beastly Beagley turned her instantly into a folk hero. Alfie found himself suddenly popular too, by association, especially after Mr Beagley had caught him talking to Lucy Lost in the schoolyard in playtime. He was punished for it there and then in front of everyone – three strokes of the dreaded ruler, edge first on the knuckles, Mr Beagley’s favourite punishment. It hurt, hurt horribly, but, with every stroke Mr Beagley administered, his tongue between his teeth, his face contorted with fury, Alfie could sense he was becoming ever more popular. And that helped a very great deal to soothe the pain in his knuckles.
WHEN MARY HEARD THAT EVENING about how Mr Beagley had been treating Lucy and Alfie, she was all for going over to Tresco at once and giving him a piece of her mind, but Alfie told her that it would only make things worse if she did, and Jim agreed. “Let Alfie and Lucy sort it out for themselves, Marymoo,” he told her, when they were alone later. “They’re looking after themselves pretty well, if you ask me. It ain’t right, that’s for sure. But it’s what we all got to do at school, I reckon: take our punishment, learn to look after ourselves. Not all about reading and writing, is it?”
But Jim thought about it a lot as he lay awake that night, and decided that he had been wrong. Mary had been right: this was not punishment, it was cruelty. Something should be said, and it was up to him to say it, at the first opportunity.
Some days later, when he was over on Tresco selling some crabs, he happened to see Mr Beagley coming along the road on his bicycle. So he stopped him there and then, and told him to his face just what he thought of him, quietly and politely, but leaving Mr Beagley in no doubt as to how he felt over the matter. “I give you fair warning, Mr Beagley,” he said. “You go easy on our Lucy Lost, and on our Alfie too, or you’ll have me to answer to.”
“Is that a threat, Mr Wheatcroft?” Mr Beagley replied, somewhat shakily – he had clearly been taken aback.
“No, not a threat. It’s a promise,” said Jim. “More carrot, less stick is my advice, Mr Beagley, if you understand my meaning, if you know what’s good for you, and for the children, come to that.”
He never told anyone at home of this meeting, but it had the desired effect. After that day, Mr Beagley seemed to find other victims to persecute. He left Lucy Lost more and more to Miss Nightingale’s care, and there were no further confrontations with Alfred Wheatcroft.
In the Infants class, Miss Nightingale was ever more puzzled at Lucy’s inability to speak, or to read and write properly, because she was obviously so intelligent otherwise. She was exceptionally gifted at both playing the piano, and drawing too. It was noticeable how well she listened to stories being read aloud, and how considered and thoughtful she was with the other children in the class – all of them at least five or six years younger. They did not seem to mind at all how silent and strange she was. Somehow, they were all drawn to her, taking turns to sit on her lap, wanting always to be near her, and play with her. In time, Lucy became like a silent mother to them, and, for Miss Nightingale, she was nothing but a help with the little ones, for ever doing up shoelaces, drying tears, wiping noses.
But when it came to speaking Miss Nightingale was daily disappointed in Lucy’s progress. Despite all her efforts, nothing she did could induce Lucy to utter a single word. With her writing, though, there were signs of much greater hope and promise. Under Miss Nightingale’s gentle guidance, and after slow and tentative beginnings, Lucy was becoming much more confident, able to copy more and more words in her writing book. And when she came to the blackboard now each day, as they all did, to write up a word for the class, Miss Nightingale was pleased to see she was able sometimes to write out a few longer words too, although she was still very slow and laboured in her handwriting. Every day she was forming her letters better – though her spelling was often awry – often joining them up automatically, without ever being shown how to do it, which surprised Miss Nightingale. Writing seemed to be coming to her more naturally, almost as if she was relearning it, Miss Nightingale thought, rediscovering something she’d clearly been taught how to do already, but that had been somehow hidden from her.
This was not an illiterate child, not a wild, untutored child. And she was very far from being mad or stupid, as Mr Beagley constantly insisted she must be. If she was backward, as he said – and Miss Nightingale did not believe it for one moment – then there were reasons for it, and she was quite determined to find out what these reasons were.
Lucy’s progress with the written word, despite her continuing inability to spell properly, gave Miss Nightingale some encouragement to believe that if Lucy could master the written word then speech might soon follow. Above all, she felt, she had to get to know this child, to become her friend, to soothe her anxieties, whatever they were. It was fear, she was sure of it, that was at the heart of her troubles. Banish those fears, Miss Nightingale thought, through trust and friendship, and perhaps Lucy might find her voice again and her memory.
So, very much against Mr Beagley’s wishes, she encouraged Lucy to come to the piano and play whenever possible. She was not good at her scales, and, like most children Miss Nightingale had taught, showed very little interest in practising them. But she had a repertoire of pieces that she knew by heart, and that she obviously loved, and she played those with great flair and commitment. Listening to her was a sheer joy for Miss Nightingale. She had never known a child so deeply lost in her music. When Lucy played, she seemed to be in another world altogether.
Mr Beagley took every opportunity to remind Miss Nightingale that it was not her job to teach children the piano, that the instrument was there for the playing of hymns in Assembly, but she argued strongly that all children should be encouraged to do what they love, that this was how children gained confidence in themselves. Young though she was, Miss Nightingale was not at all afraid of Mr Beagley and always argued forcibly on the children’s behalf, which irritated him greatly. The children though liked and trusted her. To all of them as they grew up, she had become an elder sister – kindly, strict when she needed to be, but understanding and patient, and ultimately on their side.
She painted as positive a picture as she could to Mr Beagley of Lucy’s progress, knowing just how unfair and judgemental he could be on her, as he always was on those children who had any kind of learning or behavioural difficulty. For Lucy Lost, she thought, he seemed to reserve a special dislike, a dislike confirmed daily in his attitude towards her, and often echoed in the school logbook, which Miss Nightingale insisted on reading from time to time, whether he liked it or not. It was, as she pointed out, not his logbook, but the school’s, and she had a right to read it.
From Mr Beagley’s school log,
Friday, October 15th 1915
Thirty-three answered the roll. Two absent. Amanda Berry with the measles. Morris Bridgeman with the influenza again. In his case, I rather suspect malingering.
Miss Nightingale claims daily that Lucy Lost is improving, but I see little sign of it. She writes better, I am told, but still does not speak, communicating with other children only rarely, and then only in a kind of sign language with Alfred Wheatcroft as a go-between. He is almost always at her side,
Miss Nightingale calls her withdrawn; I believe she is mentally disturbed, and that her silence, whether pretended or not, is a sign of an unbalanced mind. A child like this certainly does not belong in a school for normal children, as I have repeatedly told Dr Crow. It is my firm opinion, and I have told this repeatedly to both the doctor and the Vicar, that she should be removed from the Wheatcroft family and from this school, and be found a place in an establishment suited to the care of the mentally retarded. I have written two letters now to the School Board, but have not yet received the courtesy of a reply.
A gull must have flown into the school classroom through the broken window over the weekend. I found the creature dead on the floor when I came into the schoolroom this morning. The inconvenience caused was very considerable. I was forced to delay the opening of school for twenty minutes whilst I cleaned up the mess. Miss Nightingale did not come to work today. It is her nerves, I am told. I was obliged to teach the whole school together. Most unsatisfactory.
Windy day, so the children were inclined to be riotous. I imposed silent lunch and afternoon detention for all.
By the autumn, one entire end of the kitchen at Veronica Farm was completely covered with a patchwork of Lucy’s drawings. Upstairs in her bedroom you could hardly see any of the walls for her drawings. When the first autumn gales came in – and they were frequent that year – and Alfie and Lucy couldn’t go across the channel to school, or go out riding on Peg, she would sit down at the kitchen table and draw, listening all the while to the gramophone. On days like this, Alfie would be out working the farm with his father. There was nothing he liked better than not going to school.
Lucy’s drawings were mostly studies of nature from around the island: seals, cormorants, oystercatchers – she drew more oystercatchers than any other bird – but there were gulls and crabs and lobsters, and fish, all kinds of fish: herring, pollock, starfish. Strangely, there were peacocks too, several pictures of peacocks, but all the same, tail feathers fanned out. There were portraits of the family too: Mary baking, Jim mending nets, Alfie shrimping, and one or two of Uncle Billy standing on the deck on the Hispaniola in his Long John Silver hat, one of Dr Crow puffing his pipe as he sat in Jim’s chair by the stove. And there were several of Peg, of course. Peg grazing, Peg sleeping, Peg running. Studies of her head, her feet, her ears.
But among the sketches there were pictures of buildings that neither Alfie nor Mary nor Jim recognised at all: a city with wide streets and grand houses with steps up to the front doors. And there were several of people they did not recognise – an old lady and gentleman tending to two horses, another rather grander-looking lady in a great feathery hat, and beside her a soldier in army uniform. There were sketches of a lake with ducks swimming about, and time and again she’d drawn pictures of a giant with a moustache sitting by this same lake, holding a book in his hands, with ducks gathered round his feet and gazing up at him. It looked as if he was reading them a story.
She drew deftly, and with great skill, the drawings seeming to pour out of her. Once one was finished, she’d move immediately on to the next, almost with no hesitation, as if a new picture came at once into her head and she had to draw it. Time and again, they asked about the drawings, about who these people were, where the buildings and streets were. But they were most puzzled by the peacocks. Why so many peacocks? They were all anxious to know more, to unravel the unknown stories behind the pictures, stories they knew must be there, somewhere deep inside her memory, locked away from her, and from them. They also asked because they felt more and more that she wanted to remember and to tell them, that she longed to remember, longed to speak.
But if they asked too much or too often, or pressed their questioning too hard – and of all of them Mary was the most inclined to do this – she could suddenly become tearful, and run away upstairs to her bedroom, to cry, to be on her own. She cried these days as often as she smiled. Mary and Alfie hated to hear her cry. But Jim would always tell them not to worry about it, that it was a good sign. “Tears and smiles,” he said. “All it means is that she’s coming out of herself. And that’s what we want, don’t we?”
Lucy and Alfie were out riding around the island on Peg when the doctor next came to visit. It was too rough for fishing, so Jim was home. Mary had spread the drawings out on the kitchen table, and was proudly showing them to the doctor, telling him everything Miss Nightingale had said about how well Lucy was doing at school these days, how her writing was coming on, even her spelling, how well she played the piano, how wonderfully she drew. Jim began to realise after a while that the doctor hadn’t said very much since he arrived, and that he wasn’t really listening to Mary, which wasn’t like him at all.
“Something on your mind, is there, Doctor?” he asked.
The doctor hesitated to reply. “All this is wonderful news,” he began. “Wonderful. Wherever I go, I hear stories about how the other children have taken to Lucy at school. ‘Little Mother’ they call her, in her class, d’you know that? But I have some news that is not so wonderful, I’m afraid. It seems that Big Dave Bishop has been telling stories around the islands, about a blanket he says he picked up on St Helen’s, the same day you and Alfie found Lucy Lost over there. He is claiming that this blanket had a name embroidered on it. ‘Wilhelm’ he says it was, which as everyone knows is the same name as the German Kaiser. So Big Dave Bishop is going about the place, telling everyone that Lucy must be German. On Scilly, and all over England just at the moment, this is not a good time to be a German. It is not a good time to be thought to be a German either. I just felt I ought to warn you that I fear there may be trouble ahead.”
TO BEGIN WITH, IT LOOKED as if I was going to spend most of the voyage confined to our cabin, because Mama took sick almost before we lost sight of land. After that, she was neither well enough nor strong enough to get up. For a day or so, I never left her side. She slept for hours on end, and when she was awake she felt so ill that she neither knew nor cared where I went or what I did. She lay there, propped up in her peacock dressing gown – wearing it made her feel at home, she said – as pale as her pillows, enduring the misery of seasickness, refusing at first to take any food at all and then only soup.
In the end – and to this day I am ashamed to admit it – I tired of sitting there doing very little except watching her. I passed my time waiting for her to wake up. When at last she did, I’d sit her up and arrange her pillows and help her with her soup. She was too weak to do much for herself. Sometimes I’d spend hours on end kneeling on my bed, looking out enviously through the porthole at all the other children running about below me on deck, and when there was no one there, at the grey of the sky and the sea beyond, at the wide emptiness of the heaving ocean.
I longed to venture out from time to time, just for a little while, to go up on deck, to run and play. Eventually I worked out a plan that would enable me to do it, and salve my conscience at the same time. I’d wait for her to drop off to sleep. Then, leaving a note on her bedside table telling her I’d be back soon, I would slip out to explore the ship, and find friends maybe. The chances were that I’d be back before she ever knew I’d been gone. But I don’t think I’d ever have actually done it without the help and encouragement of one who was to become, over the days that followed, such a good friend and companion to me – Brendan Doyle. Very soon, thanks to him, I got to know the ship just as well as, but very probably better than, any other passenger on board.
He was the cabin steward who brought Mama her soup, who was looking after us on the voyage. I asked him – rather cheekily, now I come to think of it – why he spoke as he did, why his English sounded as it did, more like singing than talking. And he told me that growing up in a little place called Kinsale, in Ireland, might have had something to do with it. “How you speak comes with your mother’s milk,” he told me once. It was, I thought, a strange thing to say. I didn’t know what he was talking about, not then. He lived in Liverpool
I liked Brendan at once, because he was kind to me and laughed a lot, and because he did all he could to make Mama comfortable, to try to get her to eat something more substantial than soup – always unsuccessfully, but he never gave up. And he it was who first encouraged me to get out and about a bit more – which chimed perfectly, of course, with the escape plans I was hatching at the time. He said that I was looking just about as peaky as Mama, that it wasn’t good for me to be stuck in my cabin all the while, that I should go to the dining room, and meet some of the other passengers, that there were children up there I could play with. He would look in on Mama from time to time while I was gone, he said. He would look after her. She’d be fine.
His good advice was all the excuse I needed to leave Mama on her own. So, having let Brendan know, at lunchtime on our second full day at sea, I left a note for Mama by her bed as I had planned, and made my way to the dining room. It was just like I had always imagined the grandest ballroom might be, I remember, a place glittering with lights and chandeliers, where everyone looked very proper and important. As I followed the waiter to my table, I felt everyone staring at me, which I did not like at all. Worse still, I found myself sitting alone, and did not know at all which way I should look. But suddenly I didn’t mind one bit any more, and that was entirely because the music started up. It came from a piano in the centre of the dining room, a huge shining grand piano.