Out of the Ashes by Michael Morpurgo
Mum and I are better together than we’ve ever been before. There’s no pretending any more, on either side. Before this I never really thought of her as a person, just Mum, Mum pestering me, Mum organizing me, organizing Dad. But she’s not like that now. She cries like I do. I think she really needs me, as much as I need her.
Mum and I went down to the farm gate to get our shopping. Auntie Liz brings it out to us every other day. Big Josh was with her – he likes me calling him ‘Big Josh’. He asked me if I’d got ‘leg and mouth’, and we laughed. I just wanted to hug him, he’s so sweet! I couldn’t hug him or even touch him just in case I’ve got the virus on me somewhere. So I blew him a kiss over the gate and he blew me loads back.
I think all the time about Little Josh. I see him as I saw him for the last time being carried off, still bleating. Was he crying out for help? Was he saying goodbye? Did he know what was happening? I hope not.
I dreamed about Hector last night. I can’t remember all of it, only that he came into the barn and bellowed, and all the cows rose from the dead and followed him out into the field. And Dad was there, laughing like he used to.
Friday, March 30th
On the way back from the farm gate with the shopping this afternoon we saw Dad out on Front Field. He was standing by the mass grave. He had a single daffodil in his hand. Suddenly he just fell on his knees and began crying. Mum and I ran to him, and took him home. He cried into his hat all the way. Mum sat him down in the kitchen, and talked to him, but he couldn’t stop crying. I came up here to my room. It’s like foot and mouth isn’t satisfied with killing all our animals. It’s killing Dad too.
Thursday, April 5th
I thought after the fire had burnt itself out that the worst would be over. I was wrong.
When we woke up this morning Dad was gone. We looked everywhere, but we couldn’t find him. I noticed the Land-Rover was gone, and then Mum discovered his shotgun was gone too. She called the police. After that we sat at the kitchen table and waited. Mum said she knew she should have made him see a doctor, that she knew he wasn’t well. He hadn’t been eating. He hadn’t been sleeping. All he did was scrub the sheds and cry. She kept blaming herself, and I kept saying it would be all right, that Dad would come home, that he’d be fine. But I didn’t believe it. Every hour we waited there in the kitchen seemed like a day. Both of us thought the worst – that he’d gone off somewhere and killed himself – but neither of us dared say it.
We sat by the phone all day just holding hands, hoping and praying and crying. And then this evening we had the phone call. They’ve found him. He was out at Stoke Church in Hartland, sitting by Grandad’s grave. He was very upset and very confused, they said. They’ve taken him to North Devon Hospital at Barnstaple, and he’s been given some pills to help him sleep. He’s fine. We can go in and see him tomorrow.
So the worst wasn’t the worst. Some prayers do work after all.
Friday, April 6th
I hate hospitals. I hate the look of them. I hate the smell of them. Lying in a huge hospital bed Dad looked very small and sunken and sleepy. When I gave him his bananas – he loves bananas – he tried his best to smile, but it very soon turned to tears. He kept saying over and over again that he was sorry and that he shouldn’t have gone off like he had, that he didn’t know what he was doing.
We didn’t stay long, so as not to tire him, and then Mum went off to see the doctor and left me outside in the corridor. She told me what they’d said on the way home in the car, that Dad’s not likely to be out of hospital for at least a couple of weeks. He’s depressed, badly depressed. It’s not something Dad ever liked to talk about, she said, but he had been depressed once before when he was much younger. And depression isn’t just sadness, she told me. It’s an illness that makes you feel very bad about yourself, that makes you feel completely useless and lost, as if you’re living at the bottom of a deep dark pit of hopelessness that you can see no way out of. They’re giving Dad medication and treatment to make him feel better, and he’ll be seeing a psychiatrist to help him come to terms with everything that’s happened, but it might be a long time before he’s completely better.
I think Mum and I talked more about Dad on the way home today than we ever have before; but not like mother and daughter, more like best friends holding hands through a nightmare we long to wake up from, but can’t. We know that all we’ve got now is each other.
Sunday, April 22nd
Dad’s still in hospital. I really miss him being about the place. Mum goes in to see him every day after work, and I go with her at weekends. Today, for the first time, he seems more like his old self. He was still a bit sleepy, but the crying has stopped. He even laughs a little. He’s been doing a few sketches each day, to stop himself from going mad with boredom, he said. He didn’t want to show me at first, but I bullied him till he did. He’s done pages and pages of lovely pen portraits of the animals that died, Hector, Jessica, Molly – every one of them, with their names underneath each one. ‘It’s so’s I don’t forget them,’ he told me. He didn’t seem at all sad when he said it, just matter of fact. He’s so much better, but I’ve noticed that he drifts away from us sometimes into his own thoughts, into a world of his own. A shadow seems to fall over him, but then it passes and he’s back with us again.
He says the food in hospital is horrible. His friend in the bed next to his says they all call him ‘chimp’ on the ward, because he only eats bananas.
Best of all, he’s making plans for the future, and when he talks about it he’s really excited. He says he can’t wait to get back home. He wants to get the farm ready for when he buys in a new herd of Gloucester cows. We’re not allowed to have animals on the place for another five months. He’s already got the compensation money, but he’s going to start slowly, he says. He reckons in a year or so the farm’ll be ‘just like it was, I promise’. And there was a real sparkle in his eye when he said it.
Mrs Merton was right in her letter – there is going to be life after foot and mouth.
(Dad's drawings, not mine)
Friday, April 27th
Everyone’s saying that the worst of the foot and mouth is over now. There are still a few cases each week, most of them up north, but none around here. And for the first time this morning when I went down the road to catch the school bus, I couldn’t smell the fires. And the birds were singing.
I’m back at school now – have been for a few days. I felt a bit out of place at first. No one seemed to know what to say to me, except Jay. She’s been great. She’s the only one I’ve told about Dad – that’s because I really know I can trust her. Most people at school don’t live on farms, so they only know what it’s been like from the television. They know the animals are killed and burnt, but they don’t know how it affects people, the farmers, the families. It’s not their fault. How could they know? And then today, Mrs Merton asked everyone in the class to think up questions to ask me about how it had been, about what had happened on the farm, about the animals. (She’d spoken to me first. I was a bit nervous about it, but it seemed like a good idea so I agreed.) When I told them about Little Josh I could feel the sadness and the stillness in the room around me. It felt right to talk about it, to tell them about Little Josh and Molly and Jessica and Hector. And I didn’t cry once, not so that anyone could see or hear anyway.
When I got off the bus this afternoon and walked up the lane I saw there were swallows swooping over the fields, and primroses in the hedgerows, and the bees were out, and there was warmth on the back of my neck and in my heart too. All the trees that were winter-dead are alive again and green with leaves.
Dad’s coming home soon, probably next Monday. I can’t wait. I can’t wait to see his face when he sees what we’ve done.
Monday, April 30th
Mum went off early to fetch Dad back from the hospital. Everything worked out just as we had planned it. I was waiting in the yard as the Land-Rover drove in.
‘Come and see,’ I
Afterwards
On October 5th (Dad’s birthday!), six new Gloucester cows arrived, four of them already in milk with calves at foot, and Dad started milking again and making his cheese.
On October 30th when I got back from school I found a new flock of twenty-five ewes, Cotswolds again, out in Front Field. The grass has grown over the grave site now – you’d hardly know it was there. We’ve planted an oak tree at the far end of it in memory of Little Josh and Hector and all of them. It’ll grow out of the ashes and be there for hundreds of years.
And today it’s November 5th, and the pigs have arrived. Just three, but as Dad says: ‘With pigs, three soon becomes thirty’. They’re all Gloucester Old Spots. The boar we’ve called Guy, and his two sows are Geraldine and Georgia. They’re gorgeous!
It’s half-term and Dad’s finally stopped smoking. I was out riding Ruby this morning with Bobs trotting along beside us when I saw Dad out on his tractor. He was ploughing in Drot Field up against Bluebell Wood. He came closer and closer, looking back over his shoulder from time to time at the plough. He didn’t notice we were there. And, as he came past he was singing. He was singing ‘Danny Boy’ at the top of his voice.
Author’s Note
In the last few months, foot and mouth has spread like wildfire through our countryside. Thousands of farming families have seen their life’s work destroyed before their eyes as over three million animals have been slaughtered. It has been an unimaginable catastrophe.
It was to reflect the impact of this tragedy that I wrote Out of the Ashes. The story in itself is not true but has been woven together from events that I know to be true or have witnessed myself.
Michael Morpurgo
Iddesleigh, Devon
June 2001
Michael Morpurgo is the author of over ninety books for children and has won numerous literary prizes, including the Whitbread Book Award. Together with the poet Ted Hughes he devised and set up the Children’s Laureate, a position created to bring attention to the importance of writing for children. Out of the Ashes was written at the height of the 2001 epidemic of foot-and-mouth disease in Britain and published nine weeks later. It won the 2002 Children’s Book Award for Younger Readers and was shortlisted for the WHSmith Children’s Book of the Year. It was dramatized for BBC children’s television in a one-hour film shot entirely on location in Devon, and was nominated for three major television drama awards.
Michael and his wife Clare live in Devon and set up Farms for City Children, a charity that enables 3,000 children every year to spend a week living and working in the countryside. As a result of foot-and-mouth disease, the charity closed its farms, but was able to open them again after the epidemic was over.
‘A master of his art . . . able to react to a tremendous individual emotional shock with a focus which has created a lasting impression in this moving fiction’
School Librarian
‘A moving and thought-provoking novel . . . moving but delicately written... this book deserves to be read by adults and children alike’
Glasgow Herald
‘A heartfelt novel of rural life . . . this book will stand as a testimony to the troubled times that so many have faced’
Manchester Evening News
‘A hard-hitting . . . heartfelt account’
Times Educational Supplement
‘The changing nuances in Becky’s voice come across so vividly and the interplay between her, her parents and her adored animals with such economy of style – but without any diminution of emotional impact’
Irish Times
‘Here is insight we can all feel, without the obscuring clouds of rights and wrongs, petty or political’
School Librarian
Also by Michael Morpurgo
Alone on a Wide Wide Sea
The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips
Arthur, High King of Britain
Billy the Kid
Born to Run
The Butterfly Lion
Cool!
The Dancing Bear
Dear Olly
An Elephant in the Garden
Escape from Shangri-La
Farm Boy
Friend or Foe
From Hearabout Hill
The Ghost of Grania O’Malley
Kaspar: Prince of Cats
Kensuke’s Kingdom
King of the Cloud Forests
Little Foxes
Long Way Home
The Marble Crusher
Mr Nobody’s Eyes
My Friend Walter
The Nine Lives of Montezuma
Private Peaceful
Running Wild
Shadow
Tom’s Sausage Lion
Toro! Toro!
Twist of Gold
Waiting for Anya
War
War Horse
The War of Jenkins’ Ear
The White Horse of Zennor
Why the Whales Came
The Wreck of the Zanzibar
First published in the UK 2001 by Macmillan Children’s Books
This edition published 2012 by Macmillan Children’s Books
This electronic edition published 2012 by Macmillan Children’s Books
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ISBN 978-1-447-22779-3 EPUB
Text copyright © Michael Morpurgo 2001
Illustrations copyright © Michael Foreman 2001
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Michael Morpurgo, Out of the Ashes