The Classic Morpurgo Collection (six novels) by Michael Morpurgo

  It was Mr Stanton too who first saw the lights of the Carpathia. His cracked voice shouted it out to the rest of us. Some did not believe it at first because the rise and fall of the swell intermittently hid the lights from us. But soon they were quite unmistakable. A great joy surged through every one of us, giving us new strength and new determination. Not that any of us cheered, but when we looked at each other now we could manage a smile. We knew we had a chance to survive. Those lights of hope, lights of life, for that’s what they were for us, drove away the darkness of our despair, and the agony of the cold too. Mr Stanton’s arm came round my shoulder. I knew he must be hoping what I was hoping for, that his wife, and his daughter, and Kaspar might be there on the Carpathia, and safe.

  We did not know it at the time, but we were the last survivors to be picked up by the Carpathia. I went up the rope ladder ahead of Mr Stanton. My legs were so weak that I wondered often as I climbed whether I could make it or not. I could see that my hands were gripping the ladder, but I couldn’t feel them. It wasn’t strength that got me up that ladder, it was nothing but the will to live. Then with Mr Stanton and all the others from the lifeboat we were all taken below into the warm, given dry clothes and swathed in blankets. We sat there drinking warm, sweet tea. It has been my favourite drink ever since.

  There was chaos on board. It was no one’s fault. The crew of the Carpathia were doing their best, but they were overwhelmed, they were busy just coping as best they could. Whoever we asked, no one seemed to have any definite news of anyone. Lists of survivors were being compiled, we were told.

  Mr Stanton asked the sailors repeatedly for news of his family, but there was no one who recognised their description. Every one of us on that ship was looking for someone. Many sat silent, already knowing the worst, lost in grief. Joyous reunions were few and far between. Fearful and hopeful, we went looking for Lizziebeth and Mrs Stanton and Kaspar. We searched the ship from bow to stern. They were nowhere to be found. We found bodies lying on the deck, though, wrapped in blankets. We checked these too. I came across one little girl, about the same age as Lizziebeth, and was sure it was her at first, but it was not.

  We looked everywhere we could think of, asked again and again the same question. The last lingering hope left to us was that they might still be out there at sea in their lifeboat. The two of us went to the ship’s rail. But all the lifeboats we saw floating around the ship were already empty. We scanned the sea all around, searched the horizon. There was nothing. At that moment of utter despair we heard a yowling from behind us. We turned. They were there, all three of them, shrouded in blankets, only their faces showing. It was a strange and wonderful reunion for all of us. We stood there on the deck for many long minutes, our arms around one another. It was during those moments I really felt for the first time that I had in some way become one of them, one of the family.

  Crowded in a cabin below with other survivors, we slept and told our stories and slept again. Lizziebeth and her mother owed their survival, they told us, to a small Japanese man who spoke no English and a brave French lady who fortunately spoke both Japanese and English, so could translate. Through her, the Japanese man made it quite clear to everyone that they should do what he was doing and row. If they rowed they would keep warm, he said, and keeping warm could save their lives. So that’s what they did, taking it in turns all night long. Even Lizziebeth rowed. She sat on the French lady’s lap and rowed. Because of that wonderful man’s example, Mrs Stanton said, not one of them had died of the cold in that lifeboat. His example and his cheerfulness had kept their spirits up all through the longest, coldest night of their lives, and when they reached the Carpathia, he was the last out of the lifeboat.

  I knew even as she was telling us that it had to be Little Mitch. I went searching for him at once, and found him after a while on his own, looking out over the railings at the empty sea. We greeted each other as old friends, which of course after all we had lived through, we most certainly were. I was up on deck with Little Mitch a few days later, as the Carpathia steamed slowly in to New York Harbour. That was when we first set eyes on the Statue of Liberty. He turned to me with a big grin on his face, and said just one word: “America!”

  A New Life

  That was how Kaspar and I came to America, as stowaways, as survivors from the Titanic. When we docked in New York we came down the gangplank of the Carpathia together, the Stanton family and Kaspar and me. Mr Stanton had “a discussion”, as he called it, with the immigration authorities, and as a consequence of this I was allowed to go and stay with them in their house in Greenwich Village. From the very start I was treated as if I was one of them. I was told I should never again call them Mr and Mrs Stanton, no more “Sir” or “Madam”. It would be Robert and Ann from now on. I found this very difficult at first – old habits die hard – but it became ever more natural as the weeks passed.

  But then Lizziebeth fell sick, very sick. The terrible cold of that night on the ocean had reached her lungs, and she’d caught pneumonia. The doctor came often to begin with, a taciturn man who did little to relieve our anxiety. Kaspar stayed with her all through her illness, scarcely ever leaving her bed. All the rest of us would take it in turns to sit with her. Then one morning I came in and she was sitting up in bed, with Kaspar on her lap, and smiling at me. She was her sunny self again. But for some time afterwards she still had to stay in her room and rest, which she didn’t care for at all, not one bit.

  Lizziebeth claimed that it had to be Kaspar who had brought luck to all of us. Because of Kaspar, she said, they had survived the night in the boat, and because of Kaspar she had recovered from her pneumonia.

  I had a big argument with her about that. Much as I loved Kaspar, I never much believed in superstitions. You might as well say, I told her, that it was Kaspar who had brought us bad luck in the first place, the worst luck, that maybe it was because Kaspar was on board that the Titanic had sunk in the first place. “Nonsense,” Lizziebeth retorted. “It was an iceberg, not Kaspar, that sank the Titanic!” I think I discovered then, if I hadn’t before, that I could never have an argument with Lizziebeth and expect to win, that one way or another she would always have the last word.

  During Lizziebeth’s convalescence, when she still wasn’t allowed out of the house, I got to know Robert and Ann a great deal better. It took a while for me to feel completely at ease with them when we were alone, and I think they sensed it. They took it upon themselves to give me a good time, to show me New York. We went to Penn Station, visited the Statue of Liberty, and the zoo – all of which made Lizziebeth very jealous – and once we went collecting horseshoe crab shells on a beach on Long Island. Best of all, I learned to ride with Ann in Central Park. She took me riding almost every day. I hadn’t been on a horse before, so I had a lot to learn, but Ann was full of encouragement. “You ride so well, Johnny,” she told me once, “as if you’d been born in the saddle. I’m very proud of you.” The truth is that I loved being with them whatever we were doing. I felt as if I was a son for the first time. Having a mother and father of my own was better than I had ever imagined it could be. I was having the time of my life.

  In the evenings I’d be up in Lizziebeth’s room, playing with Kaspar if he was awake, and learning how to play chess with Lizziebeth when he wasn’t. I liked chess, although I never managed to win a single game against her. As for Kaspar, he had the run of the place as I did, and very soon had occupied the piano in the drawing room and made it his own. Everyone in the house, Lizziebeth’s governess, the servants too, all simply adored him. Like me, he couldn’t have been happier. Only one cloud hung over me, the knowledge that sooner or later all these golden days would have to end, and I’d have to leave. How I dreaded that day.

  One evening, some months afterwards, I was called down into the drawing room to find the family all lined up in front of the fireplace. Lizziebeth was in her dressing gown. Kaspar was sitting on the piano watching me, his tail swishing. Lizziebeth was looking a
t me conspiratorially – clearly she knew something I didn’t. Her mother and father on the other hand were looking very serious and stiff, rather as they had been when I’d first seen them that time back in their rooms at the Savoy Hotel. This is it, I thought, this is when they tell me my time’s up, that I have to go back to London, to my job as a bell-boy in the Savoy.

  Robert cleared his throat. He was going to make some kind of a speech. I prepared myself for the worst. “Johnny, the three of us have come to a decision,” he began. “You know how much we have enjoyed having you with us here as our guest. Lizziebeth has told us of your circumstances back home in England, that you have no family as such to go back to…” He hesitated, and that was when Ann spoke up.

  “I guess what we’re trying to say, Johnny, is that after all that has happened, and knowing you now as well as we do, and what a fine young man you are, we would very much like you to consider not returning to London, but instead staying here and making your home with us in New York. We’d be really proud to have you live here as one of the family, if you’d like it that is. What do you say?”

  I remember Kaspar and Lizziebeth both looking up at me, waiting for me to say something. It took me a while – not to make up my mind – I did that instantly, but to get over my surprise and find my voice.

  “Oh come on, Johnny Trott, say yes, please,” Lizziebeth cried.

  “OK,” I replied – it was a new expression I’d picked up in New York. I was so overwhelmed that it was all I could bring myself to say. But it was enough. Everyone hugged me then, and we all cried a little, except Kaspar who had sprung up on the piano, and was busy washing himself.

  So, by the greatest of good fortune, I acquired a new life, a new home, and a new country. They sent me back to school, which at first I didn’t care for. I thought I’d finished with all that – I’d never been much good at books and reading and all that. But Robert read stories to us all in the evenings, and through him I came to like books a lot better than I had. Gradually school became much easier, and sometimes even enjoyable. They teased me a bit at first on account of my London cockney accent, and so to start with I felt a bit alone. But someone put it about that I was a survivor from the Titanic, and after that I had all the friends I could handle. We spent long summers in Maine, sailing up there on the Abe Lincoln. Lizziebeth and I went walking in the woods and fishing, and everywhere we went Kaspar came with us. They were great days, days I shall remember all my life.

  I was to have gone off to college, to William and Mary in Virginia, where Robert himself had once been a student. I never got there. In Europe the First World War was raging, and my old country was fighting for her life. So when in 1917 America sent troops over to fight in France, I went with them. And who did I find marching alongside me up to the front? Little Mitch. We just picked up where we’d left off all those years before on the Titanic, on the Carpathia, and were best friends from then on.

  While I was at the front I’d get letters every week from Lizziebeth, who was away at boarding school by now. I’d look forward to every one of them because I could hear her voice in her writing, see her face as I was reading her words, and that cheered me more than I can say, when all around me in France I saw nothing but horror and death. And with her letters Lizziebeth would sometimes send me little sketches, and once a beautiful drawing of Kaspar sitting there looking at me, willing me to come home it seemed. I kept it with me in my tunic pocket, along with a photograph of her and me by the sea-shore in Maine. Lizziebeth always said afterwards, when the war was over, that it must have been the drawing of Kaspar that had kept me safe and brought me home. I’m not sure she was right about that, but she insisted on having it framed and put up in pride of place in the front hall. When no one’s looking, I do reach out and touch it sometimes. So I suppose that I must be just a little superstitious. But I’m not admitting that to her.

  Right after the war Mitch came to work with me in Robert’s publishing business – he had become quite a family friend by now. We worked together in the packing room in the basement – Robert said we had to learn the business from the bottom upwards. So we did, literally. For me, books became a part of my life. I didn’t just pack them, I read them voraciously, and very soon began to write stories of my own. And while I was writing, Lizziebeth would be up in her attic studio, drawing or painting or sculpting, animals mostly. On our holidays in Maine we wouldn’t climb trees any more, or go diving off the quay, she’d sit on the rocks by the seashore with her sketchbook out, and I’d scribble away nearby, and Kaspar would wander between us to remind us he was there. We would often talk of the old days in London, of Mr Freddie and Skullface, and the great roof rescue. And more than once she said what fun it would be to go back to visit. But I didn’t think she was serious.

  Then just before her seventeenth birthday she announced to us that she was too old now to be given birthday presents. Instead she was going to give us something, providing, she added, that we didn’t mind giving it away. None of us knew quite what to make of this, until she took us out into the front hall. And there it was. Sitting on the table, below the famous sketch she had sent out to me in France during the war, was a magnificent sculpture of Kaspar, his neck arched, his tail curled around him. “I carved it out of ash wood,” she said, “and then I painted it jet black. And do you know what I want? I want to take it back to London, and give it to the hotel where we stayed, where I first saw Kaspar and Johnny. I want it to be there for ever. It’s where Kaspar belongs. Kaspar could come too. He may be old, but he’s fit as a fiddle. Well?” she said, beaming brightly at us. “When do we go?”

  We went six months later, and Little Mitch came with us too. We wanted him to come, to show him where it had all happened, where the whole story had begun, a story he was part of, that had changed all our lives for ever. I won’t pretend that any of us much enjoyed the crossing of the Atlantic. There were too many terrible memories, but we kept them to ourselves, and never once mentioned the Titanic. In fact we had hardly ever mentioned the Titanic in all these years. It was what bound us inseparably, and what distanced us from others who had not been there, but we had rarely spoken of it among ourselves. All together again on the wide Atlantic, we faced our fears, and took strength from one another’s silence.

  Mr Freddie was there to greet us at the front door of the Savoy, and when we went inside, the staff were waiting to welcome us. Kaspar yowled from his basket as they all clapped us in. So I took him out to show everyone. He loved all the attention, and to tell the truth, so did I. Mary O’Connell was still there, head housekeeper now, instead of Skullface. She gave Ann a huge bunch of red roses, and cried on my shoulder as she hugged me. As or the bell-boy who took us up in the lift, he was a cockney lad, just like me, wearing the same uniform, with his cap worn at the same jaunty angle. He showed us into the Countess Kandinsky’s old rooms, with windows looking out over the Thames down towards the Houses of Parliament. Kaspar made himself at home at once, resuming his place on the piano and proceeding to washing himself vigorously. He was as happy as I’d ever seen him.

  He slept on the window ledge in the sun all the rest of that day. He’d been doing a lot of sleeping lately.

  We had an unveiling ceremony outside the American Bar the next morning, and much to Lizziebeth’s delight, everyone seemed to like the sculpture as much as they loved Kaspar himself. He was there at the ceremony, but wandered off during the speeches. I watched him go, waving his tail as he went. It was the last I ever saw of him. He just disappeared. Everyone searched the hotel, over and over again, from the basement to the attic corridor. He was nowhere to be found.

  It’s well enough known that old cats go off to die when they’re good and ready. I think, and Lizziebeth thinks, that’s what he must have done. We were sad, of course we were. He was the cat that had brought us together, had survived with us, and he was gone. But in a way, as I told Lizziebeth, trying to comfort her, he is not gone. He’s sitting there proudly outside the American Bar.
You can go and see him for yourself, if you like. He’s still there, looking very pleased with himself, and so he should be. After all, he is Prince Kaspar Kandinsky, Prince of Cats, a Muscovite, a Londoner and a New Yorker, and as far as anyone knows, the only cat to survive the sinking of the Titanic.

  And then…

  …only a year or so after our visit to London, we received a letter from Mr Freddie.

  Dear Johnny and Lizziebeth,

  I’m writing to tell you of a strange happening. Several guests at the hotel have reported sighting a black cat wandering the corridors late at night. I took no notice at first, but it has happened time and again, and I thought you ought to know. And just yesterday, a lady staying in your rooms, the Countess Kandinsky’s rooms, reported seeing a reflection in the mirror of a grand lady in an ostrich-feathered hat, carrying a black cat in her arms. When she was offered the opportunity to be moved to another room, she said she’d rather stay, that they were kindly ghosts, like good companions. Mary and the others send love. Come and see us again one day, before too long.

  Yours, Freddie

  Postscript

  I’m a story detective. I hunt down clues because I need evidence to write my stories. So what was the evidence behind the writing of Kaspar?