The Classic Morpurgo Collection (six novels) by Michael Morpurgo
The ice was here,
the ice was there, The ice was all around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound!
At length did come an Albatross,
Thorough the fog it came;
As if it had been a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God’s name.
Every time I spoke those words now, I felt that somehow I was living inside the poem, that it had been written just for Dad and me, just for this moment as we approached the Horn on the 9th March.
Around the Horn, and with Dolphins Too!
2005hrs 9 Mar 55’ 47”S 74’ 06”W
Dear Mum, dear Grandpa, dear everyone. Feels like this really is the bottom of the earth down here. The sky up there is black with rain squalls and the wind’s screaming like I’ve never heard it before. this is not a funny place to be. don’t think I’ll hang about. Kitty 4 doesn’t seem to care though. she just bounces along, two storm jibs up twin poled, 6 knots, riding each wave like it was just a ripple. If this was a talking boat – bout the only thing she can’t do! -she’d be shouting at the waves – bring it on baby, gimme more, see if I care, you think you can beat me? no way hosay! And you should see the waves she’d be shouting at. Bout 15 metres from bottom to top, so when you’re down in a trough and look up they look as if they’re about 50 metres. And they’re long, that’s what makes them different. They’ve travelled all around the world just to meet us here – aren’t they nice? aren’t they kind? – building all the time. Up to 200 metres long, I promise you. Awesome, magnificent, majestic, amazing, exhilarating, overwhelming (running out of adjectives so I’ll stop). They’re wave monsters that’s what they are, and when one decides to break it’s like an avalanche that goes on and on, and Kitty 4 does snowboarding then surfing through the middle of it, raging white water all around, the air snowing foam. So beautiful, so wonderful. Should be scary but it’s not. Too excited to be frightened, too much to think about, too much to do. And maybe I’m too Cretan to be scared, Grandpa!
And besides, I keep thinking that every wave brings us nearer to the Horn. The Horn is dead ahead by my reckoning, only 230 miles to go – can you believe that? We should be going around it on Friday if all goes well. It’s strange, I’m not worried at all. Maybe that’s because my albatross is still up there, still with us. He hovers over the bow, like he’s leading us, like he’s showing us the way. Wind doesn’t seem to bother him at all. I mean why isn’t he just blown away? How does he do it? He looks like he’s playing with the wind, like he’s having fun with it, teasing it. He’s not just the king of the birds, he’s the master of the wind too. Against the black of the clouds he looks whiter than he’s ever been, white as an angel, a guardian angel. I keep saying it I know, but that’s what he looks like to me. Had the last of my sausages and baked beans for my supper. Got to go easy on the hot chocolate. run out if I’m not careful. One little problem, caught my little finger in a rope, think it’s broken so I’ve strapped it up. can’t feel it most of the time so that’s good. I can hear what you’re saying Mum. Yes, I’ll be careful. Got 9 more fingers. So no worries. Loving this. Love you. Allie.
1825hrs 11 Mar 56’ 00”S 67’ 15”W
Done it done it done it! Woweee! We’re going around the Horn and with dolphins too, and my albatross of course. I’m going to tell you how it was. I knew the Horn was there, but I couldn’t see her. Every time we climbed a wave in the last four hours I was looking for her, but she was never there. So from time to time, I’d go down to check the screen. The Horn was always on the screen but never where she should be when I went back up into the cockpit again. It was so so frustrating. Kitty 4 didn’t seem to want to stay on the top of a wave long enough for me to catch my first glimpse of land. Then I did. I whooped and yelled and sang and danced, well sort of, not a lot of room for dancing in the cockpit. And my albatross swooped down low over the boat almost touching me as he flew by. Then he soared up high and went off towards the Horn, to have a look I guess. He’ll be back.
I’ve been dreaming about this moment, Mum, Grandpa, ever since I first read about it, or did Dad talk about it first, can’t remember. And now I’m doing it. I’m here. Kitty 4 is poled out, full main. No squalls about. West wind 15-20 knots. Got to change the flags soon, Chilean to Argentinian. Aussie and Greek one still up there Grandpa, looking a bit battered and torn, like me. But they’re still flapping away up there, like they’re really happy, really proud we’ve made it. Me too, me too. I’m flapping with happiness.
The rocks of the Horn do not look at all inviting – wouldn’t want to be any closer, black and jagged when you can see them through the sea mist. grey and grim and dismal. been so lucky with the weather. Not hard to imagine what this place can be like in a Force 10 when it’s really angry. Underneath us, the seabed must be littered with all those ships who didn’t make it, those who didn’t get so lucky. I thought a lot about that when I was sitting there half an hour or so ago, drinking a celebratory hot chocolate – who needs champagne when you’ve got hot chocolate?
I think I just had a moment I’ll never forget. I so wished you were with me, and Dad most of all. I was just sitting there looking at the Horn and sipping the last of my hot chocolate when a shaft of evening sunlight broke through the mist and lit the Horn. It set her on fire and all the sea around her too. Never in my life saw anything so beautiful. Don’t mind telling you, I had a little weep. It was the joy of just being here at this moment, of being alive, grateful to y’all, to the Horn for letting us sail by, to my albatross for sticking with us, to dear old Dad who’s made it all happen and who’s been with me all through this and is here with me now.
I love this place so much I almost don’t want to leave it, don’t want the moment to pass. But moments always pass, don’t they? It’s passed even as I was writing this. Gone. I’d better be gone too.
I’ll be going up north towards the Lion Islands, just south of the Falklands, a little over 300 miles away. Stop in the Falklands for a few days, have lots of long hot baths – been dreaming of those – and lots of big breakfasts and a warm dry bed for a few nights. Been a bit lax on my washing lately – blame it on the weather – whole plastic bags of it waiting. one whiff would kill, promise. So I’ll get all my washing done. Be so good not to be rocking and rolling every hour of every day, not to be banging my head all the time. Be good to see people again. Be good to be dry. And yes Mum I’ll do what you say and get my little finger checked out.
Went up into the cockpit a few minutes ago and my albatross is back from the Horn, done his explorations. He’s sitting in the sea, and by the look in his eye he’d like another fish. Soon as we turn north I’ll put the line out again, and hope to catch a fish or two. That should keep him happy. It should be flatter that side, so better for fishing. Then up to the Falklands for a bit of a rest. I need it. Kitty 4 needs it. she needs a good clean – covered in barnacles and slime. Slimy she may be but she’s done Hobart to the Horn in 60 days. Not another boat like her in the whole world. Just gave her a smacking great kiss to tell her I loved her. Put Louis Armstrong on the CD. “What a Wonderful World”. It is too.
2115 same day
Just got all your congrats, thank you, thank you, and and and your grate grate news Mum about Kitty, you said something would turn up and it has, but only because you never gave up. Love you so much. It’s incredible, brilliant, wonderful, grate! So I’ve got a whole new family I never knew about! And Kitty is real, really real, not a figment of Dad’s imagination. Tell that bloke who emailed you that he’s the best vicar in the entire world. When I get to England I’m going to go to St James in Bermondsey to see the baptism records for myself, see the place where they were baptised. I keep looking at the family tree you sent me, Mum, I can’t believe it! New grandparents! Ellen and Sidney Hobhouse. And the marriage certificate too – Ellen Barker (spinster) Sidney Hobhouse (cobbler). Now I know for sure that Dad was a baby once! He was a happening, wa
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx – zillions of them.
Dr Marc Topolski
Thinking back I should have stayed longer in the Falkland Islands. I didn’t, mostly because the hopeful news I’d just had about Kitty made me impatient to be on my way again. The Falklands is a bleak and barren place, that’s for sure, and the people are tough—they have to be. But they were kindness itself. My arrival caused quite a stir. Lots of people were following my trip now on the website, so they knew I was coming. I had lots of helping hands, and a place to stay in Stanley which was a home from home for me. Mrs Betts mothered me like a happy hen who has just found a lost chick. I had all the baths I’d been longing for, all the breakfasts too. I did a couple of interviews, but then she made sure I was left alone to recover.And Kitty Four was well looked after too. Within a week she was tidy and trim again, not a trace of slime, and the barnacles gone. She was ready to go. The solar panel was fixed—I’d been having a lot of trouble with that. She was filled up with diesel, and I had all the provisions on board I needed to get me to England, all the packets of hot chocolate I could ever want! I was just waiting for the right wind, and the right tide. But an onshore wind was blowing a gale, and it went on blowing for days on end, apparently quite common in the Falklands. So I couldn’t leave. If I’d tried I would have been crunched against the jetty.
Mrs Betts offered to show me the island a bit while I was waiting. So off we went in her little Morris Minor van, bumping our way across the island. She took me all over, told me about the daughter she had who’d left the island and was living in New Zealand and had a baby now, but how she’d never seen her grandchild. I told her a bit about Dad. She knew something about him already from the newspapers, and she made me recite The Ancient Mariner just to prove to her that I could—she’d heard about that too, from the website I guessed. I knew almost forty verses by then, so she got the lot. We saw penguins and we saw sheep, all huddling against the cold of the wind. She took me to the British war cemetery, and told me about the war they’d had there when the Argentinians invaded the island twenty years before. It made me so sad to see all those graves. Standing there, the wind whipping about us, I thought of Dad and Vietnam, of young men dying a long way from home. “They were fine boys,” Mrs Betts said suddenly. “But then so were the Argentinians. And they all had mothers.”
That evening, my last on the Falklands, I read her the last part of The Ancient Mariner, because she said she wanted to know what happened. She had tears in her eyes when I’d finished. “So in a way it’s a kind of happy ending,” she said. Then she looked at me hard. “I’ll be thinking a lot about you, Allie. I want your journey to have a happy ending too. And I want you to find Kitty. You deserve a happy ending.”
She offered me her phone then to ring home. She said I should, that a daughter needs to speak to her mother, that emails weren’t enough. So for ten minutes I talked to Mum and Grandpa, who kept snatching the phone from one another. We laughed a lot and cried a lot too, which meant we didn’t say as much as we should have. Grandpa kept going on about a “big surprise” that he couldn’t tell me about yet, and then he would almost tell me, and Mum would snatch the phone off him again, and I could hear her telling him off, that he’d promised to say nothing, not until they could be sure of it. I was certain I knew what it was.
“You’ve found Kitty, haven’t you?”
“No, it’s not that,” Mum said. “But we’re still looking.”
“Then what’s the surprise?” I asked.
“Nothing, nothing,” she told me. But I knew something was going on.
I had a big send-off the next day, and as we said goodbye Mrs Betts gave me a digital camera. “A going away present, because yours doesn’t work, dear,” she said. “This one does, I promise.”
And so it did too. The first photo I took was of Mrs Betts waving goodbye from the jetty. I was in such high spirits. I was on Kitty Four again. I’d had all my home comforts with Mrs Betts—but I’d missed Kitty Four, missed the smell of her, missed the movement of the sea underneath me. This was my real home. This was where I wanted to be. I knew I had a lot of tomorrows ahead of me before I reached England, about sixty-five days away. Then I’d go to London, go to St James in Bermondsey, and find Kitty if I could. As I left the Falklands, I had never felt better about the outcome of the whole expedition.
But now I was back at sea I had one growing doubt, and it was a doubt that nagged me every hour of every day that followed. My albatross wasn’t there. I had dolphins, dozens of them all around me. But the last I’d seen of my albatross was the day we’d sailed into the Falklands. I’d just presumed that he’d be out there, that he’d be just waiting for us to put to sea again.
I was wrong. The days went by. I began to feel so alone without him. My emails became shorter and shorter at this time, partly because I didn’t want Mum to know how miserable I was, and partly because I wanted to be up there in the cockpit as much as possible so that I would be there when he came. But he didn’t come and he didn’t come. And by now I’d worked out why of course. Albatross rarely come this far north. They are southern ocean birds, I knew that. But I went on hoping he’d come back anyway. I tried to keep myself as busy as I could, tried so hard not to dwell on my loneliness. But I couldn’t sleep at nights now for thinking about my albatross. I was beginning to believe, in the darkness of those long nights, that I really was on my own now, that Dad had gone too, gone with the albatross. I had been right about that then: they were one and the same. Having been so hopeful, so sure of everything, I was suddenly overwhelmed with misery.
There was a lot of kelp about, ugly-looking stuff, the bubbly kind, the thistly kind, and some of it in very thick long strands of up to twenty metres. And it was all around the boat. I felt hemmed in by it, threatened. It looked like writhing sea snakes coming to get me, reaching out to grab me. It would rise up on either side as we ploughed through it. I longed not to have to look at it, to go below, but I couldn’t. It wasn’t just because I was looking for my albatross that I needed to be up on deck. I had other reasons.
There were suddenly a lot of fishing boats around down there, I could see them easier at night all along the horizon—and fishing boats were every bit as dangerous as icebergs. Get caught in the miles of nets they trail behind them and I knew that would be the end of everything. I hadn’t ever felt this low before. To make it worse my pc was playing up, and for the first time on the trip I could neither send nor receive. The wind died. The sea stilled. There was grey sea, grey sky all around, and I was marooned in a sea of serpents. I sang to keep my spirits up. I could think of nothing else to do. I sang till my throat ached, every song I’d ever known. But one song I sang again and again, London Bridge is Falling Down. It was a cry of pain, I think, but also a cry for help.
How fast things can change at sea. I came up into the cockpit one morning to find the kelp all gone, the fishing boats nowhere to be seen. And the wind was up and gusting. It was like the whole earth had suddenly woken up around me. Where there had been grey, there was blue, endless blue, beautiful blue. I breathed in deep and closed my eyes. When I opened them, he was there floating down towards me on the wind. An albatross, my albatross. He didn’t care about north or south. He just wanted to come with me. When I’d finished all my crying and whooping I told him exactly what I thought of him
I was down below in the cabin a couple of hours later, baking the first bread I’d made since leaving the Falklands, and still revelling in the memory of my reunion with the albatross. His return had not only cheered me, it had clearly had some magical effect on my pc which was now working again, perfectly. Then the phone rang, the Satphone. It had rung only a few times on the whole trip, and then it had always been a coastguard calling, and always much nearer land. I picked it up, worried there might be something wrong at home, or maybe it was just Mum panicking because she hadn’t been able to reach me on email.
“Hi there,” it was a man’s voice. “This is Dr Marc Topolski. You don’t know me”—he had an American accent—“but your Grandpa’s been speaking with NASA. They phoned right up and suggested I might like to talk with you.”
I didn’t understand what he was on about, not at first. “I’m not ill,” I said. “I don’t need a doctor. I’m fine.”
“Sure you are, Allie. Thing is, Allie, that I’m up here right above you in the International Space Station, and you’re right down below us, and your Grandpa said you can see us sometimes and how you’d like to get in touch. And I thought that seemed like a fine idea, because we’re both kind of explorers, aren’t we? And so I thought like you did, that maybe we could like get together on email or by phone, from time to time, whatever you like, a kind of ongoing conversation. Might be fun. Might be interesting. What do you say?”