Singing for Mrs Pettigrew: A Story Maker's Journey

by Michael Morpurgo

  “Thank you,” said Cherry. “I won’t forget. I doubt anyone is going to believe me when I tell them about you. No one believes in ghosts, not up there.”

  “I doubt it too. Be happy, little friend,” he said. And he was gone, back into the tunnel. Cherry waited until the light from the candle in his hat had vanished and then turned eagerly to the ladder and began to climb up towards the light.

  She found herself in a place she knew well, high on the moor by Zennor Quoit. She stood by the ruined mine workings and looked down at the sleeping village shrouded in mist, and the calm blue sea beyond. The storm had passed and there was scarcely a breath of wind even on the moor. It was only ten minutes’ walk down through the bracken, across the road by the Eagle’s Nest and down the farm track to the cottage where her family would be waiting. She began to run, but the clothes were still heavy and wet and she was soon reduced to a fast walk. All the while she was determining where she would begin her story, wondering how much they would believe. At the top of the lane she stopped to consider how best to make her entrance. Should she ring the bell and be found standing there, or should she just walk in and surprise them there at breakfast? She longed to see the joy on their faces, to feel the warmth of their arms round her and to bask once again in their affection.

  She saw as she came round the corner by the cottage that there was a long blue Land Rover parked in the lane bristling with aerials. Coastguard she read on the side. As she came down the steps she noticed that the back door of the cottage was open and she could hear voices inside. She stole in on tiptoe. The kitchen was full of uniformed men drinking tea, and around the table sat her family, dejection and despair etched on every face. They hadn’t seen her yet. One of the uniformed men had put down his cup and was speaking. His voice was low and hushed.

  “You’re sure the towel is hers, no doubts about it?”

  Cherry’s mother shook her head.

  “It’s her towel,” she said quietly, “and they are her shells. She must have put them up there, must have been the last thing she did.”

  Cherry saw her shells spread out on the open towel and stifled a shout of joy.

  “We have to say,” he went on. “We have to say then, most regrettably, that the chances of finding your daughter alive now are very slim. It seems she must have tried to climb the cliff to escape the heavy seas and fallen in. We’ve scoured the cliff top for miles in both directions and covered the entire beach, and there’s no sign of her. She must have been washed out to sea. We must conclude that she is missing, and we have to presume that she is drowned.”

  Cherry could listen no longer but burst into the room shouting.

  “I’m home, I’m home. Look at me, I’m not drowned at all. I’m here! I’m home!”

  The tears were running down her face.

  But no one in the room even turned to look in her direction. Her brothers cried openly, one of them clutching the giant’s necklace.

  “But it’s me,” she shouted again. “Me, can’t you see? It’s me and I’ve come back. I’m all right. Look at me.”

  But no one did, and no one heard.

  The giant’s necklace lay spread out on the table.

  “So she’ll never finish it after all,” said her mother softly. “Poor Cherry. Poor dear Cherry.”

  And in that one moment Cherry knew and understood that she was right, that she would never finish her necklace, that she belonged no longer with the living but had passed on beyond.

  we are what we read

  Edward Thomas once wrote that as a young boy he preferred birds to books. Me too, though being a little savage, I preferred bird-nesting to birdwatching. I collected eggs and butterflies and Turf cigarette footballer cards where all the footballers had big heads. I played rugby and cricket and conkers and jacks and marbles. I did read, but only when I had to, and then it was mostly Eagle or Enid Blyton, probably because both were banned at home. By rights, by all logic, I should have grown up an avid reader. Our house groaned with books. They lined the walls in every room, even the lavatory. I had a grandfather called Emile Cammaerts, an eminent bilingual poet and philosopher, who had his poetry set to music by Edward Elgar; and a stepfather, Jack Morpurgo, who was both a publisher and a writer. Both were intellectuals, both bookmen to the core. This pedigree should have helped – it didn’t. It hindered probably – but that’s not their fault.

  I may not have liked books, but I did like stories. I simply loved stories. And now, these many years later, I know why. I think I also know how it was that later on my love of stories turned into a dislike of books, even a fear of them. My mother was an actor (actress in those days) and a good one too – RADA, Stratford-upon-Avon and all that. When I was very little she’d come and sit on my bed and read me a story, or a poem or two. I don’t remember any pictures in these books. The pictures came into my head with the words she spoke, words that sounded to me like familiar music. I treasured then and now those precious moments alone with my mother, the only time we were truly alone in a busy household. And it was the story that bound us, the story and the tune of the words. The book was the living link between us. Every bedtime I dreaded the coming of the end, the finality of the last line of the poem or story.

  She read me Aesop’s fables, Masefield and de la Mare and Belloc and Longfellow and Kipling and Edward Lear’s “Jumblies”, a great favourite of hers and mine:

  They went to sea in a Sieve, they did,

  In a Sieve they went to sea:

  In spite of all their friends could say,

  On a winter’s morn, on a stormy day,

  In a Sieve they went to sea!

  And when the Sieve turned round and round,

  And every one cried, “You’ll all be drowned!”

  They called aloud, “Our Sieve ain’t big,

  But we don’t care a button! we don’t care a fig!

  In a Sieve we’ll go to sea!”

  Far and few, far and few,

  Are the lands where the Jumblies live;

  Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,

  And they went to sea in a Sieve.

  Story time over, she’d leave me in the darkness with just the smell of her face powder. The door would be left open a chink, because she knew I liked it that way. Soon enough, though, it would be closed completely – because “boys your age shouldn’t be afraid of the dark”. In the terrifying, impenetrable blackness, the blackness of death I thought it was, I would try all I could to relive the story, remember the poem. Stories and poems, and the singing words that made them, lightened my darkness, were a joy and a comfort to me all through my early childhood.

  Then, at five or six, “unwillingly to school” I went, trudging the leafy pavement through the pea-souper smogs to St Matthias Primary School on the Warwick Road, and later, even more unwillingly, to boarding school in Sussex. In both places words and books became a threat. They were no longer magical, and certainly not musical. Words were to be spelt, forming sentences and clauses, with punctuation, with neat handwriting and without blotches. Some words were called nouns or pronouns or verbs. Some words were to be recited standing up, my memory stifled and numbed by terror, my tongue and throat cramped with a stutter. There were dictations, copying, precis and comprehensions, and all were tested and marked. A few red ticks, very few. But more often a multitude of red crosses and red slashes covered my exercise books like bleeding cuts. Then there were the punishments. Misspelt words had to be written out fifty – a hundred – times. For any untidiness there was detention and more lines to be written out. And often, for persistent underachieving, to encourage us to do better, there was the dreaded visit to the headmaster’s study for the cane. Worst of all, though, was the disapproval at home for a bad report, official confirmation of my failures and failings. “If you want to pass your exams you’ll have to read more,” I was told. So I was given Oliver Twist to read – I think I was eight at the time.

  Stories and poems had taken on an entirely differ
ent hue. The music had died; the magic, the joy and the comfort were gone. I was no longer read to in bed because I wasn’t at home much, and when I was, I was thought to be too old by now. Books became a source of dread for me, a reminder of my own failure to achieve. So I went bird-nesting instead of reading. You can blame the scarcity of mistle thrushes in Sussex today on Oliver Twist. Like most children I wanted very much to succeed at something. I could play cricket really well, took to it easily, became brilliant at rugby, utterly amazing at marbles and a veritable genius at jacks.

  Somehow though, through all this, I must have read just enough to keep the memory of the music alive: schoolboy stories, derring-do, adventures in comic or word form. G. A. Henty I remember well, With Lee in Virginia, With Clive in India; C. S. Forester too – all the Hornblower stories. I did become truly passionate about one book, a book I read again and again, so strongly did I identify with its hero. I was Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island. I lived it with him, hid in the barrel of apples on board the Hispaniola, overheard the horrible conspiracy, witnessed murder and skulduggery, fought the baddies alongside the goodies, sailed a ship all on my own. Stevenson modelled Jim Hawkins on me – no question. All these years later, he’s still the writer I most admire and most long to be. But back in class, back at home too, books simply made me feel frightened and inadequate. I lied my way out of trouble in both places, read Classics Illustrated (comic-book versions of the real thing), and claimed I had read A Tale of Two Cities and War and Peace and Jane Eyre. They had pictures and they had cracking stories. Most serious books remained closed books for me for a long while yet.

  I did just once briefly discover that early love of words my mother had instilled in me. I was taken to see Paul Scofield playing Hamlet at the Phoenix Theatre, in the mid-fifties it must have been. I would have been about twelve. I listened entranced, enchanted, to the concerto of poetry he was playing that night. I have never forgotten it. And I did have one teacher, just one, Sidney Sopwith, who tried to encourage me to believe I had a brain in my head, that there was more to life than rugby, and that one day I’d find that out for myself. But by now I was typecast as a good chap and a bit of a dummy and sadly was quite happy enough and lazy enough to play that role.

  After a brief period in the army, I went to university and studied English and French and philosophy. I just about muddled through, still burdened by that same deep sense of inadequacy whenever I opened a book or tried to write an essay. But then in my third year at King’s College London I happened to read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and LOVED it. I was riveted by the pace of the story, the richness of the language, and for the first time in a very long while found a place for myself inside a work of poetry or fiction. Suddenly I wasn’t an outsider. I was Gawain, just as I had been Jim Hawkins. I heard the music in the words again, was a child again, was a reader again.

  Years later I wrote a story about just such a child, a reluctant reader you might call him, inspired one day by someone who loves stories, who through the power of her storytelling and her passion for books changes the child’s life. I called it “I Believe in Unicorns”. Like many of my stories it has appeared in several forms. I love that, the transformation into a film, into an opera, into a stage play; each breathes new life, a different life, into a story. In this case this short story was developed into a novella, given greater depth and space within which to live. But what follows here is the original, the essence of the story, if you like.

  i believe in unicorns

  My name is Tomas Porec. I was seven years old when I first met the unicorn lady. I believed in unicorns then. I am nearly twenty now and because of her I still believe in unicorns.

  My little town, hidden deep in its own valley, was an ordinary place, pretty enough but ordinary. I know that now. But when I was seven it was a place of magic and wonder to me. It was my place, my home. I knew every cobbled alleyway, every lamp post in every street. I fished in the stream below the church, tobogganed the slopes in winter, swam in the lake in the summer. On Sundays my mother and father would take me on walks or on picnics, and I’d roll down the hills, over and over, and end up lying there on my back, giddy with joy, the world spinning above me.

  I never did like school though. It wasn’t the school’s fault, nor the teachers’. I just wanted to be outside all the time. I longed always to be running free up in the hills. As soon as school was over, it was back home for some bread and honey – my father kept his own bees on the hillside – then off out to play. But one afternoon my mother had other ideas. She had to do some shopping in town, she said, and wanted me to go with her.

  “I hate shopping,” I told her.

  “I know that, dear,” she said. “That’s why I’m taking you to the library. It’ll be interesting. Something different. You can listen to stories for an hour or so. It’ll be good for you. There’s a new librarian lady and she tells stories after school to any children who want to listen. Everyone says she’s brilliant.”

  “But I don’t want to listen,” I protested.

  My mother simply ignored all my pleas, took me firmly by the hand and led me to the town square. She walked me up the steps into the library. “Be good,” she said, and she was gone.

  I could see there was an excited huddle of children gathered in one corner. Some of them were from my school, but they all looked a lot younger than me. Some of them were infants! I certainly did not want to be with them. I was just about to turn and walk away in disgust when I noticed they were all jostling each other, as if they were desperate to get a better look at something. Since I couldn’t see what it was, I went a little closer. Suddenly they were all sitting down and hushed, and there in the corner I saw a unicorn. He was lying absolutely still, his feet tucked neatly under him. I could see now that he was made of carved wood and painted white, but he was so lifelike that if he’d got up and trotted off I wouldn’t have been at all surprised.

  Beside the unicorn and just as motionless, just as neat, stood a lady with a smiling face, a bright flowery scarf around her shoulders. When her eyes found mine, her smile beckoned me to join them. Moments later I found myself sitting on the floor with the others, watching and waiting. When she sat down slowly on the unicorn and folded her hands in her lap I could feel expectation all around me.

  “The unicorn story!” cried a little girl. “Tell us the unicorn story. Please.”

  She talked so softly that I had to lean forward to hear her. But I wanted to hear her, everyone did, because every word she spoke was meant and felt, and sounded true. The story was about how the last two magic unicorns alive on earth had arrived just too late to get on Noah’s ark with all the other animals. So they were left stranded on a mountain top in the driving rain, watching the ark sail away over the great flood into the distance. The waters rose and rose around them until their hooves were covered, then their legs, then their backs, and so they had to swim. They swam and they swam, for hours, for days, for weeks, for years. They swam for so long, they swam so far, that in the end they turned into whales. This way they could swim easily. This way they could dive down to the bottom of the sea. But they never lost their magical powers and they still kept their wonderful horns, which is why there are to this day whales with unicorn’s horns. They’re called narwhals. And sometimes, when they’ve had enough of the sea and want to see children again, they swim up onto the beaches and find their legs and become unicorns again, magical unicorns.

  After she had finished no one spoke. It was as if we were all waking up from some dream we didn’t want to leave. There were more stories, and poems too. Some she read from books, some she made up herself or knew by heart.

  Then a hand went up. It was a small boy from my school, Milos with the sticky-up hair. “Can I tell a story, miss?” he asked. So sitting on the unicorn he told us his story. One after another after that they wanted their turn on the magical unicorn. I longed to have a go myself, but I didn’t dare. I was frightened of making a fool of myself, I think.


  The hour flew by.

  “What was it like?” my mother asked me on the way home.

  “All right, I suppose,” I told her. But at school the next day I told all my friends what it was really like, all about the unicorn lady – everyone called her that – and her amazing stories and the fantastic magical storytelling power of the unicorn.

  They came along with me to the library that afternoon. Day after day as word spread, the little group in the corner grew until there was a whole crowd of us. We would rush to the library now to get there first, to find a place close to the unicorn, close to the unicorn lady. Every story she told us held us entranced. She never told us to sit still. She didn’t have to. Each day I wanted so much to sit on the unicorn and tell a story, but still I could never quite summon up the courage.

  One afternoon the unicorn lady took out from her bag a rather old and damaged-looking book, all charred at the edges. It was, she told us, her very own copy of The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen. I was sitting that day very close to the unicorn lady’s feet, looking up at the book. “Why’s it been burnt?” I asked her.

  Sitting on the magic unicorn, I heard my voice strong and loud.

  “This is the most precious book I have, Tomas,” she said. “I’ll tell you why. When I was very little I lived in another country. There were wicked people in my town who were frightened of the magic of stories and of the power of books, because stories make you think and dream; books make you want to ask questions. And they didn’t want that. I was there with my father watching them burn a great pile of books, when suddenly my father ran forward and plucked a book out of the fire. The soldiers beat him with sticks, but he held on to the book and wouldn’t let go of it. It was this book. It’s my favourite book in all the world. Tomas, would you like to come and sit on the unicorn and read it to us?”