Listen to the Moon by Michael Morpurgo
Almost at once came a murmur of assent from the crowd, which began to disperse, or at least to move back from the edge of the quay. Mr Griggs saw to everything after that. Within minutes, the undertaker’s two-wheel handcart had been fetched, and Günter Stein’s body was borne away covered in a blanket, the islanders looking on, bareheaded and eyes lowered as the cart passed them by. Many were crossing themselves. No one spoke. It was quiet and calm, and the onlookers that were left stood back. Uncle Billy came with me – unwillingly, but he came.
It was a strange procession, the Reverend Morrison leading the way, then the undertaker and his cart, the pace measured and solemn, with the three of us following close behind, the German sailor on one side of me, and Uncle Billy on the other, touching my elbow from time to time, for reassurance, I think. And behind us came Mr Griggs and dozens of islanders. People were lining the street as we made our way towards the undertaker’s. All that could be heard was the shuffle of footsteps and the rumble of cartwheels over cobblestones. As we passed the post office, there were a few who turned their backs as we passed by, and there was, I could feel, some silent hostility in the crowd as they scrutinised the German sailor at my side. But there was also a certain respect, and great curiosity too – many of the children pushing through, pressing forward, necks straining to get a better look.
It was at this point that I began to notice that the German sailor walking beside me was himself as curious as many of the onlookers, almost as if he was searching among the crowd, and among the children in particular, for faces he knew. He never spoke a word, not until the undertaker turned his cart off the High Street and into the alleyway beside his workshop. “Mein Freund, Günter,” he said. “They will bury him in the church?”
“Yes,” I told him.
“Gut. That is gut. Günter will be happy to be there with all who drowned from the Schiller.”
“You know about the Schiller?” I asked him.
“Of course. Many in Germany know about this, everyone on my boat. Mein Kapitän, he told us. His uncle was saved from this ship. Many others also, he said. It is because of the kindness shown to us by the people here that it is verboten to attack any ship close to here. And now I too am saved by a sailor from Scilly, Günter also. It was too late for him. But he will be among his friends. One day I shall tell his mother, and she will be happy.”
Even as he was talking, as we passed on down the street towards my house, he was still searching the crowd, but for what, for whom, I had no idea. “Ich kann das Mädchen nicht sehen,” he said, speaking to himself, then turning to me, “I cannot see the girl. She is not here.”
“What girl?” I asked. “You know someone who lives here?”
“Ja, I think so. I hope so,” he replied. But he said nothing more.
Mrs Cartwright met us at the door. She did not look pleased with me. “Three for breakfast, Doctor? Do I look to you as if I lay eggs myself?” Her indignation was jocular, but meant none the less. “Some warning would be appreciated in future, Doctor,” she said, standing back and allowing us in. “And wipe your feet if you please.” And when I asked for two hot baths to be drawn for our guests, and a suit each of dry clothes from my wardrobe, she gave me that look of hers, as only Mrs Cartwright can. I waited for the sarcastic quip that I knew would inevitably follow. “And is there anything else I can do for you, Doctor?” she said. “I have, as you know, nothing else to do.” Then with an imperious swish of her skirts she flounced down the passageway into the kitchen.
An hour or so later, after bathing and changing, and after I had treated both of them for sunburn and blisters – camomile lotion is still best for this, I find – the three of us were sitting at the table, eating a most excellent breakfast, Mrs Cartwright bustling about as she does when she wishes it to be known how inconvenient and troublesome I have been. With her there, I felt I could not yet continue the conversation that the German sailor had begun in the street, much as I wanted to. I was intrigued by how much he knew of the wreck of the Schiller, which was certainly among the most famous wrecks on Scilly, but also, apparently, in Germany. I could see that both my guests were far too busy eating to talk. I decided to be patient. There would be a time for questions and for talk later.
I could hear the crowd gathered outside the house. I could see them through the curtain. Every time I looked, there were more of them. On more than one occasion, Mrs Cartwright went outside to remonstrate with them. Some left, but despite her most vociferous protestations, most lingered on, waiting, though for what I could not imagine. There was some excitement at the arrival of Major Martin, commanding officer of the garrison. Mrs Cartwright answered the knock at the door.
“Major Martin, how nice. And have you come for breakfast too?” I heard her ask, her tone rather chilly. She showed him in. I knew of course that he had come for the German sailor, and that indeed was what he immediately confirmed. Major Martin can be a pompous fellow, but he is essentially well-meaning. With the German sailor, he was courteous, if a little haughty, I felt. I have tended to his soldiers often enough up at the garrison, so we know one another quite well. I told him that I should like to keep the German sailor here for a few hours more, to keep an eye on him further. Major Martin then asked me what his name was, and I had to confess I did not know, that I had quite forgotten to ask. So the Major asked him directly, formally, speaking unnecessarily loudly, I felt, as some people do with foreigners.
“Seemann Wilhelm Kreuz,” the sailor replied.
“Your ship?”
“U-boat 19.”
“It was sunk?”
“Yes.”
The Major seemed satisfied. “I shall leave him in your custody then for a short while longer, Doctor, as you suggest. He is of course a prisoner of war, so I shall have a guard posted outside the door until the prisoner is fit to leave.” He asked me then if there was anything else he could do. I did say that the crowd outside was disturbing us, and unsettling Uncle Billy. It was true that all through breakfast, as the crowd grew in number outside, and ever louder, Uncle Billy was becoming more and more agitated. It was hard enough, I could see, for him to be in a strange house, and Mrs Cartwright’s somewhat brusque behaviour was clearly unnerving him. His eyes were darting continually this way and that. He kept telling me he wanted to see his sister, and I was at pains to reassure him that she would be with us soon. He was more at ease after Major Martin’s intervention, when the crowd quietened down, and was visibly more relaxed when Mrs Cartwright had finally cleared away the breakfast and left us alone.
This was the moment I felt I could ask Wilhelm Kreuz the question that had been on my mind all through breakfast. Instead, he spoke first, rather stiffly and slowly, choosing his words with care.
“I wish to thank you so much for your kindness, Herr Doctor,” he began. “Mein Kapitän was right. The people here are good.” He paused before he went on. “I have to say something. I was here once before, in these waters, Herr Doctor, a few months ago. Und I brought someone with me, eine junges Mädchen. She did not speak, not a word. This is all I know of her, because this is all she told us. It is difficult to believe, but we found the girl on a piano in the middle of the sea. It was after the sinking of the Lusitania. You will know of this, I think. She had with her a small bear, a toy, you understand. We had to save her. She was a child. At home I am a teacher in school. Ich bin auch ein Vater. I could not leave a child there. All the men on the boat agreed. Unserer Kapitän, he agreed also. But we could not take her home with us. It is verboten in the Kriegsmarine, you understand, to do this, to rescue people from the sea. So, when he looked at the map, he decided the closest place for the little girl was the Islands of Scilly. Here. So, in the night-time, we came here and put her on the shore. She is eleven or twelve years old. And she plays chess very well. Is she here? Do you know her? Is she well? Kannst du mich verstehen?”
I scarcely knew what to say, so fast were my thoughts racing, my heart beating.
Uncle Billy spok
“Ah, so her name is Lucy,” said Wilhelm.
“Did you give her a blanket?” I asked him. It was all too incredible. I needed to be quite sure.
“Yes, to keep her warm,” he replied. “Meine Mutter, my mother, she made it for me.”
There was something else I had to know. “Was it your submarine that sank the Lusitania?” I asked him.
“No,” he told me. He could not look at me for the tears in his eyes. “It was not us. But it could have been. We sank many ships, Herr Doctor. English, French. It is a terrible thing for a sailor to sink a ship, to watch it go beneath the waves, to see men die. You can hear them shout, hear them scream. For a sailor to kill a sailor is like killing a brother. There were many brothers on the Lusitania, and mothers and fathers, and little children like Lucy. We could save only this one. So we did.”
There was a knock on the front door. “It is like living in a market place,” Mrs Cartwright grumbled, as she stomped down the passageway to answer it. “Doctor,” she called out. “You have visitors from Bryher. Shall I let them in?”
“If you please, Mrs Cartwright,” I replied.
I shall not even try to describe here the untrammelled joy of the reunion I witnessed in my dining room this morning. The look on Uncle Billy’s face when he saw his sister was something to behold.
“Yo-ho-ho!” he cried.
And “Yo-ho-ho!” they replied.
I found myself moved to tears as the Wheatcroft family greeted one another, all of them unable, it seemed to me, to make up their minds whether to laugh or cry. In those moments, for Mary and Jim and Alfie all that mattered was Uncle Billy, so they hardly noticed me, or Wilhelm Kreuz, at my side. Lucy did though. Lucy stood there, staring at Wilhelm Kreuz, unable to take her eyes off him. After a while, I cleared my throat, to remind them that we were there, and I introduced him.
“This,” I began, “is Wilhelm Kreuz. He is a sailor in the German navy. Uncle Billy saved him from drowning, rescued him.” They looked bemused. Mrs Cartwright was in tears by now, overwhelmed as I never imagined she could be.
I invited them all to sit down, before I went on. “I think I should perhaps explain something about this man, something rather remarkable. Some months ago, Wilhelm Kreuz and his shipmates saved the life of the girl we know as Lucy Lost. Lucy Lost, it seems, was a passenger on the Lusitania. Some time after she was sunk, Wilhelm tells me, they came across Lucy Lost lying on the ship’s piano in the middle of the ocean. They picked her up, rescued her, and brought her to a friendly shore, to Scilly, to St Helen’s. Isn’t that right, Lucy? They saved your life. This man saved your life. And now Uncle Billy has saved his life, picking him up out of the sea, and bringing him to Scilly. As my dear mother used to say: what goes around, comes around.”
I never in all my life enjoyed telling a story more. After I had finished, no one in the room spoke. But all of us were looking to Lucy for some sign of recognition. There was none, not at first, not for some time. The clock was ticking away on the mantelpiece, and as it struck the hour I witnessed a sudden transformation come over her face. Where there had been bewilderment in her eyes, there was, in a single moment, the sudden light of understanding, and a smile of recognition on her face. She got up and walked across the room, taking the blanket from round her shoulders, and then offering it to the German sailor. Standing before him, she looked up into his face, her eyes never leaving his. “Thank you, Wilhelm,” she said, “for your blanket, and for saving me too. I couldn’t thank you before. I wanted to, but I couldn’t talk. And now I can.” She spoke without hesitation, without struggle, the words simply flowing from her.
Then she turned and spoke to us all. “I am not Lucy Lost,” she said. “I am Merry MacIntyre.”
So it was that sitting there round the table, in my dining room, we drank tea and listened as Lucy’s story unfolded. She told us at last who she was, about her family and friends and school in New York, about her soldier father, now lying wounded in a hospital near London in England. She remembered the name of it, she said – Bearwood Hospital – because they had a cottage of the same name, back home in America, in Maine.
She told us of the sinking of the Lusitania, how her mother and Brendan and so many others had been drowned, little Celia too, and how Wilhelm and his whale-ship had come up out of the sea to save her. Perhaps because it was all so freshly remembered, she told it just as if she was seeing and living it all over again, told it all so vividly that I felt I was living it with her. I think we all did.
They have all gone now, Wilhelm Kreuz under escort to the garrison, and from there no doubt to a prisoner-of-war camp on the mainland. Anyone who knows what he did for Lucy – or, as I should now say, for Merry – will, I trust, remember him as a good German, a kind German – one, I am sure, of many. Even in the midst of this terrible conflict, we should all do so well to remember that, and remember him.
Mrs Cartwright, who was as enraptured as the rest of us by Merry’s story, has left me one of her “nice fish pies” for supper. She knows perfectly well I do not care for it. But she says it is good for me, and I must eat it. So I have, washing it down with a glass of beer. I am now sitting by the fire as I write this, gazing on to the flames, smoking my pipe, and thinking that with such people in the world as the Wheatcroft family, and Merry MacIntyre and Wilhelm Kreuz – and Mrs Cartwright despite her fish pie – all will be well in the world after this present conflict is over. Please God, if you are up there, may it all be over quickly.
MY GRANDMA TAKES UP THE story again where Dr Crow’s journal left it. What follows is in her voice, as she told it, word for word. I recorded her nearly twenty years ago in New York. Grandpa was there, but he always said it was more Grandma’s story than his really, and that anyway she was better at telling it. Her memory of childhood was razor sharp, but she could not remember where she’d put her glasses down ten minutes before, nor where she kept the sugar in the kitchen cupboard. She was ninety-four. They died shortly after, within weeks of one another. It was the last time I saw either of them.
Grandma. Recorded New York,
21st September 1997
I have often wondered since, why it should have been at that moment in Dr Crow’s house on St Mary’s that I discovered myself again, my lost voice, and my lost memory. When I think back – and at my age I think back a great deal – I realise it was by no means instantaneous. For many weeks and months before, I was a nobody in a strange and incomprehensible world. I had experienced fleeting, flashing glimpses of some previous life – a muddled, confused vision of my past. I could speak, but only in my dreams. In my dreams I knew who I was, who everyone was, all the people and places in my life: Mama and Papa, Uncle Mac and Aunty Ducka, Pippa, Miss Winters and everyone at school, the statue in Central Park, Bearwood Cottage, Brendan, the Lusitania, the submarine, Wilhelm – they were all as clear as bells, inside my dreams.
How this happens I do not know, but, even as I was dreaming, I was conscious I was dreaming, that what I was dreaming was real and true, and I would always promise myself that when I woke up I would remember everything, remember who I was, remember how to speak. But later, when I woke, I never did and I never could. It was as if I was lost in a fog, and the fog was inside my head and would never lift. Does that make sense? It doesn’t to me.
I do know now that without Alfie, in particular, and Mary and Jim, without Uncle Billy and Dr Crow I should still be lost in that fog. I should never have discovered that I had a life before I came to Scilly, that I was Merry MacIntyre, and not Lucy Lost. And I know also that, without Wilhelm Kreuz, I should never have survived at all.
As I was telling them my story that day in Dr Crow’s house, I could almost feel my missing memories unlocking as I was speaking. A whole world was opening up for me, my world, the world I belonged to, the world tha
After I had finished telling them everything, there was only one question. It was Mary who asked it, or Mother Mary, as I later came to call her. “But I don’t understand,” she said, “when I first saw you, lying there half dead on the beach, the day Alfie and Jimbo brought you back from St Helen’s, you spoke. You spoke just one word. ‘Lucy.’ You said your name was Lucy.”
“Lusy was the ship,” I told her, “the nickname of the ship, the Lusitania. You remember my friend Brendan? He always called the ship ‘the Lusy’. Everyone who worked on it, stewards, sailors, stokers, they all called her ‘the Lusy’. ‘The Lucky Lusy’, they called her; or sometimes, Brendan told me, ‘the Lovely Lusy’. Perhaps I was just trying to tell you the name of the ship.”
Mrs Cartwright, who was very tearful, I remember, told me I was a very brave little girl, and gave me a huge slice of her lemon drizzle cake with my tea, for being so brave – much bigger than Alfie’s, which pleased me a lot, but not him. Everyone got a slice of it, Wilhelm too, because he was, as Mrs Cartwright said – and in front of him too – “a nice Fritzy, not like all they other horrible Huns”.
When the soldiers came to take Wilhelm away shortly afterwards, he stood up straight and bowed his head to me, and called me, ‘gnädiges Fräulein’, and said he hoped we would meet again one day, that he would never forget me. I did not know what to say. I think I was too overcome to speak. Then he was gone. I never saw him again. I don’t know if he forgot me, I hope not, but I have most certainly never forgotten him.
We all sailed home to Bryher that afternoon on the Hispaniola. Dr Crow saw us off on the quayside. He would, he said, be contacting the Bearwood Hospital near London – he was sure he could find someone who knew where it was – to get news to Papa that I was alive and well. This he did, but it took some time, and sadly the news did not reach the hospital until it was too late.