The Classic Morpurgo Collection (six novels) by Michael Morpurgo
But there was another picture there that haunted me, that would not go away every time I closed my eyes. I’d seen it first as a black and white photo in a magazine, I think, then in a film on the television. It was an image of a young girl in Vietnam, running down the road away from her village. She had been burned by napalm bombing, dreadfully burned. She needed help. She was coming towards me. She was naked and she was crying. And she kept coming towards me, holding out her arms to me, and suddenly her face would be Kitty’s face. I knew I’d been part of the war that had done that to her, to a girl just like Kitty and to thousands and thousands of others too. Every night she was there, and every night I couldn’t sleep.
I’d be late for work in the morning, or I’d fall asleep on the job. I’d get the sack. Time and again I got the sack. Any money I did earn I’d gamble away the same day I got it. I’d hitch a ride anywhere and had no idea where I was when I arrived nor why I’d gone there. I felt myself slipping into a deep dark hole of despair. I couldn’t find any way of stopping myself, and in the end I didn’t even want to stop myself. It seemed a lot easier just to give up and let go. So I did.
I woke up in hospital. They told me I’d drunk a bottle of whisky, and taken a lot of pills. The doctor said I was lucky. Someone had found me in time. I didn’t think I was lucky at all. He wanted to keep me in hospital, for my own safety, he told me. I’d had a breakdown, he said. It was an illness like any other, and I’d have to be hospitalised until the treatment was over. I gathered pretty soon that it was the kind of hospital you could leave only when the doctor said you could. I looked out of the hospital window and saw the sea. I asked where I was. “Hobart, Tasmania,” he said. When he went out he locked the door behind him, just as Mr Piggy had at Cooper’s Station. I was a prisoner again.
So there I was, over forty-five years old by now, rock bottom, suicidal and losing my mind in some hospital in Hobart, and I don’t remember to this day even how I got to Hobart. But I still had Kitty’s key around my neck. The doctor asked me a lot about my childhood. I showed him my key, and told him about Kitty too. He asked if I hadn’t made Kitty up entirely. Hadn’t I invented her because I so much wanted her to exist, wanted to have a family?
He was a strange man, my doctor. He never smiled, not once. But to be fair to him he didn’t get angry either. And I gave him enough cause to get angry. Thinking back, I treated the poor man a bit like a punch bag. He didn’t seem to mind, just let me rant on. Nothing rattled his professional calm. I had the strong impression he didn’t believe a word I told him. And I don’t think he cared much either. So after a while, I didn’t tell him anything more. We’d sit there having long silences together, and I’d gaze out of the window at the sea and watch the boats.
It was during one of those silent sessions that I felt the stirrings of a new longing. I wanted to build boats again, and to sail them. I’d sit in my room and recite The Ancient Mariner aloud over and over again. It made me feel I was out there at sea, and it reminded me of Marty and Aunty Megs. And I remember too that I’d sing London Bridge is Falling Down very loudly in the shower. I loved my showers, and singing made them even better. I was sad and alone, very alone, grieving for everyone I had loved, everyone I had lost.
Then one morning there was this new nurse on the ward who smiled at me, not because she was trying to be kind but because she was kind. She treated me like a person not a patient. My whole world lit up every time I saw her. I was mesmerised, and not just by her gentle beauty and her shining black hair. It was the sound of her laughter, her sheer exuberance that lifted my spirits and made me feel lonely without her. When I told her about Kitty’s key, about Cooper’s Station and Marty, and Aunty Megs and Vietnam, she listened, and she wanted to know more. When I recited The Ancient Mariner to her, she listened. Bit by bit, every time I saw her, I felt myself coming together again. I made a model boat for her, a liner with three red funnels. I was beginning to see a way out of my darkness. And once I could see the light, then I knew I could climb up towards it.
So that’s what I did, and when I walked out of that hospital a couple of months later, my nurse was waiting for me. Zita, she was called. And I knew as she drove me away that morning that she was all I’d been looking for all these years. I found more than happiness with Zita. I found myself again, then a home too, and an entire family. Best of all, I now had a reason for living.
Oh Lucky Man!
What Zita had done was to restore my faith, and not just my faith in myself, but in the wider world around me too. When you’re down and out you get to thinking only how bleak and brutal the world is. The more you believe it, the more you expect things to be like that, and the more they prove to be like that. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. That’s the spiral I was in. What Zita has shown me since the day I first met her is that the world is not like that, most people are not like that, I’m not like that. She didn’t do it by telling me, by preaching to me, but just by being who she is. Genuinely good people are like that. The sun shines out of them. They warm you right through. Zita’s like that. As the song goes – and songs do get it right sometimes – when she smiles, the whole world smiles too. She was half my age and she chose me to love. If she hadn’t told me first, I’d never have dared to tell her back. Oh lucky man!
She came from a family of smiling people. That’s where she took me the day we drove away from the hospital, to her family home down by the seashore in Hobart. There was a whole tribe of them, the most extended family I’d ever met, Greeks all of them, Cretans, dozens of them and loud with laughter – when they weren’t crying that is. They are people of extremes, wonderful people. They welcomed me at once as one of their own, and that meant everything to me. I was Zita’s man, so I was part of the family, no questions asked. They were all open-hearted and whole-hearted. The children climbed on my knees that first lunchtime. They tugged me by my fingers towards the sandpit or the swing or the beach. They’d found a new great big puppy to play with. I laughed with them in the sunshine, just as I’d laughed with Marty at the Ark all those years before.
From that day on I knew I had a proper home and a proper family of my own. And I danced, for the first time in my life I danced. Cretan dancing. Zita taught me, tutored me through the awkward stage where my feet simply refused to step to the music, told me to feel the music, to let the music do it. It worked. But I’ll never dance like a Cretan, like Zita. You can see the music floating through her. She’s a wonder to watch.
But there was more. Zita hadn’t mentioned it before. Maybe she left her father to tell me himself. “Zita she say you likes boats, Arthur,” the old man said after lunch as we walked together by the seashore. He had a truly wonderful white moustache which he stroked often, not out of affectation but rather out of affection, I think. There was a glint in his eye that demanded and expected an answer. You didn’t have conversations with Zita’s father. He talked, you listened.
“Me too,” he went on. “I likes boats. I grow up with boats when I was little boy on Crete. Now I have my own boatyard. Stavros Boats. Now I build my own boats – big ones, little ones, fat ones, thin ones, anything that sell. And I build good boats too, the best boats. We all build boats, the whole family. You can help us, yes?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “That’s good, that’s good.” He stopped then and turned to me. “I want Zita to marry a good Cretan boy, young and strong. But she say she want to marry you. Zita, she like her mother – you don’t argue with her. So you’re not Cretan boy – that’s not your fault. And you’re not young – that not your fault either. She like you and you likes boats – that’s good enough for me.”
I was like the cat that got the cream and fell on his feet all at once and the same time. And it got better too. Within a month or two I was married to Zita, and I was designing all the old man’s boats for him, and making models for the children too. We lived all together in the huge family home adjoining the boatyard, where everyone had their own chair on the verandah – even me, my wedding gift
Then came the icing on the cake. I know you’re not supposed to mix metaphors, that cats that get the cream and icing on the cake hardly seem compatible. But to describe this supreme moment of my life, I need all the metaphors I can lay my hands on – there’s another one! Before I knew it, Zita and I had a little girl of our own, Allie – Alexis really, but I’ve never called her that. Everyone else does, but to me she was always Allie.
“She’s got your nose,” Zita told me. Luckily for me that’s all she’s got of me. The rest is perfect. I have to say that because it’s Allie who’s writing my story down at this moment, typing this all out for me on her word processor. But it happens to be true. She types as fast as I can speak, which is amazing. But then she’s always been amazing to me, ever since she was born nearly eighteen years ago. It seems like yesterday.
Down in the old man’s boatyard, I was adapting Mr Dodds’ designs for ocean-going yachts, for dinghies, for motor boats too. For the first time now I had the opportunity to imagine a boat, to dream it up first in my head like a story, then sketch it and design it and build it. But all the while I kept Mr Dodds’ principles in mind: that a boat should be built to dance with the sea, not just to go fast or look sleek. I had one or two arguments with my new father-in-law about this, but as soon as he found my designs were selling well, he was more than happy to let me do what I wanted.
One boat I conceived, designed and built all with my own hands. I never let anyone else go near it or even see it till I’d finished it, and then the first person to see it was Allie. I called her Kitty. It came into my head – it just seemed a good idea at the time. And Allie liked saying it over and over. So the name stuck. Kitty was bright yellow, and built to sail the roughest waves in Allie’s bath, to survive close encounters with all her plastic ducks and loofahs. Based as usual on one of Mr Dodds’ designs, Kitty was sturdy and sound, the most bath-worthy boat ever built. Allie couldn’t turn that boat upside down even if she wanted to – and she tried often enough. Turn Kitty over and she’d just pop right back up again.
When she grew bigger, I built her a bigger boat, Kitty Two, I called this one, to sail on the pond, yellow again and fully rigged. Mr Dodds’ designs, I discovered, worked every bit as well in the sea or the pond or the bath. And just as soon as she could walk, I made her first real sailing boat, a dinghy, Kitty Three. This one was big enough for the three of us to go sailing together in her. Once, on Christmas Day, Allie insisted on taking the tiller so I let her. As she took us out to sea that day, she began singing her favourite song London Bridge is Falling Down! Can’t think who taught her that!
Allie was a natural sailor – it came I’m sure from starting so young. I hardly had to teach her at all. She took to it instinctively, and loved every minute of it. She won her first race when she was six. She just lived for her time on the water. Every day after school she’d be down at the boatyard, not only watching either, but building. For her, the boatyard was the next best thing to the sea, and she often had a canny way of making the one thing lead to another.
She learned boats the proper way, Mr Dodds’ way, my way: from the keel up, from the inside out. And she learned the sea, because she was always out there. I’d go with her when I could of course, but if I couldn’t then she’d pester someone else in the yard. She wasn’t at all easy to say no to, not for me, not for anyone. Even the old man, her grandfather, who was no one’s soft touch, was putty in her hands. Zita used to say Allie had us all round her little finger, and that was just about right. But she was clever with it too. She knew she had to put in the hours down at the boatyard. Whatever needed doing she’d do it. She was the same kind of dogsbody Marty and I had once been in Mr Dodds’ yard. She was a hard worker, and the blokes saw that and liked it, which was why one way or another she’d usually manage to get one of them to take her out sailing.
It was seeing her so at one with her boat, so happy, that inspired me to take it up seriously again myself. Watching the joy on her face, the sheer exhilaration, was infectious. I discovered I didn’t just enjoy sailing because she was with me, I began to love it again for itself, the way I had before. I was loving it because it made me feel alive again like nothing else. True, the sight of a passing fishing trawler, the unmistakeable lines of a warship on the horizon could still trouble me. But it was the heady, happy days with Marty I remembered most. And now I was out there again alone or with my own daughter. Zita came out with us only rarely on what she called picnic days, when the sea was listless, when there was so little wind the sails hung there limp above us. She liked it best like that, but Allie and I were bored out of our minds.
It was on one of those picnic days that it happened – Allie would have been about ten by then I think. The three of us were lazing there in the sun after lunch. I had my eyes closed when I felt Allie fiddling with my lucky key. She loved doing that. “Tell me about the key again, Dad,” she said, “and your sister Kitty.” I’d told her the story hundreds of times before, trying to make it a little bit more interesting each time, as you do. This time when I’d finished, she took it off me and put it round her neck. “You know what we should do when I’m a bit older, Dad? We should sail to England and find her. Could we do that, Dad?”
That was exactly what Marty had said I should do all those years ago as we were sailing past Dunedin off New Zealand.
“Could we, Dad?” Allie asked again.
“It’s a long old way to England,” I told her. “Half way round the world. And what if we can’t find Kitty when we get there? I’ve no idea at all where she’d be.”
“We could find her,” Allie said. “Course we can, and we’ll find out what the key’s for. I think it’s a box. Got to be, hasn’t it? S’only a little key. And we’ll open it up. What’s inside, d’you think?”
And then I said it. I said it quite deliberately. I’d thought about it, and I meant it. “I don’t know what’s inside,” I replied. “But we’re going to find out, Allie. I’ll have to build a bigger boat of course, but I can and I will. We’ll sail to England and we’ll find Kitty. If she’s there we’ll find her. It’s something I should’ve done a long time ago.”
“Do you promise me, Dad?” she said, looking up at me wide-eyed with excitement.
“I promise you, Allie,” I replied. And it was a promise I was determined to keep.
I looked across at Zita then, and she knew I meant it too.
I could see she was suddenly fearful. But I couldn’t backtrack now. I’d promised. Everything had been decided in those few moments. When Allie was older, we’d do it. We’d sail to England together and find my sister, Kitty, and discover what my lucky key was really for. On the way back home that evening, I was already designing the boat in my head – Kitty Four, she’d be called.
Kitty Four
It could have been just a pipedream. It would have been if Allie hadn’t kept me up to the mark. She didn’t pester me – not exactly. But she did prod me, and every prod was a reminder, and all the reminders served to crank me up, to get me going, make me feel guilty if ever I was thinking of back-sliding – she knew me too well, she still does. She knew the dream of the boat, the dream of her great ocean adventure, would never come to anything unless she made it happen, unless she made me do it. I had my own reasons for delaying the commitment, and they weren’t just backslides. I had good sound reasons too.
Both she and I needed far more experience of ocean sailing before we could embark on such a voyage – Zita was adamant about that. There was no way she’d let us go, she said, unless she was quite sure we were both ready for it. The old man said the same.
“Yous not going till I say yous ready,” he said. And he always meant what he said.
Zita also made it absolutely clear that Allie couldn’t go until she was eighteen – and that was years ahead. But years have an uncanny knack of passing. The boat I was building in my head was a thirty-three footer – the ideal size for ocean sailing, Mr Dodds used to say, beca
I knew what she was about. With every new silver cup on the mantelpiece she was proving to us all just how good a sailor she was. Zita was proud of her and her grandfather was too, too proud I sometimes felt, but then grandfathers are entitled. But neither was happy about the prospect of the two of us going off around the world. They made that very clear. And already Allie was talking of not just going to England and stopping off there to find Kitty, but of doing the whole thing, the entire circumnavigation.
As for me, I won no silverware, but I was in training. Four times I went crewing on the Sydney-Hobart race, and of course, everyone at home was there to see me off, follow my progress on the television, and was there to welcome me when I came home. I had some hairy moments – the Sydney-Hobart race specialises in providing those. No boat I sailed in ever won. But for me that wasn’t the point. I was learning again everything I’d learned with Mr Dodds and Marty, and more besides. I could feel my confidence and strength growing with every race. Best of all though, and thanks to Allie’s persistence and dogged determination, the old man himself was coming round. He was still cautious, but he was beginning to encourage us now in our great endeavour. Allie had it in her blood, he said. Cretans were the greatest and bravest sailors in the world.