Michael Morpurgo

by Maggie Fergusson

  So now, all these decades later, it is my turn to tell you a witchy story. It’s a story I should have told you, or rather confessed to you, a long time ago. But I could never bring myself to do it, until you were gone, until now.

  Only three people in the world know this story, the three witches of Philbeach Gardens. I’ve never told anyone else because it’s a story I’ve been ashamed of ever since it happened, some sixty-odd years ago. It still upsets me when I think of what I did, what we all did, and what happened afterwards. I still can’t understand it or explain it. Maybe you can? I mean you’ve been alive and you’ve been dead, so you’ve been on both sides of the divide, haven’t you? You’d know about these things. Anyway, here’s our story, how it happened.

  You remember when we all lived in London at number 84 Philbeach Gardens? And you remember the bomb site right next door to our house? I’d have been about six maybe, in my first year of proper school, at St Matthias on Warwick Road. It was an ordinary enough London County Council school, but strangely there was a chapel attached to it that we shared with Greek Orthodox priests who drifted around the place, black-bearded phantoms to us, so we kept well clear of them. Apples were the best thing about school. They were sent over from Canada for us because, just after the war, fruit was scarce. We were still on rations, weren’t we?

  Usually Piet would walk me to school, but if there was one of those pea-souper smogs, you’d take us and come and fetch us – for safety’s sake, I suppose. I loved that, to see you waiting for us outside the school gates in the fog. But then, when we got home, you’d go and spoil it; you’d make us drink hot Bovril for tea to warm us up. You can’t imagine how much I hated Bovril.

  But Bovril aside, that was always the best time of the day, after school. What you won’t remember, what you don’t know, is what Piet and I and Belinda got up to down in the basement, when you weren’t there. You remember Belinda from across the road? The three musketeers, you always called us. But we weren’t the three musketeers at all, not for long anyway, not after what we found down in the basement that day.

  You didn’t like us to go down to the basement on our own because the wooden steps were too steep and they were rotten as well in places. That’s why you kept the door locked. There was all sorts of stuff down there, anything you didn’t want in the house or there wasn’t room for. You kept suitcases there, among other things. We knew they were down there because we’d helped fetch them up with you before we went off on holiday to Bournemouth, the first holiday I ever went on, the first time I saw the sea.

  We noticed then where you kept the key, up on the ledge above the door. I couldn’t reach it, even standing on a chair, but Piet could. So that’s how we got in there without you or anyone knowing. We just waited until the coast was clear, got the key, and down we went. The place was stuffed full of trunks and tea chests, iron bedsteads and mattresses, boxes of old clothes – wonderful for dressing up – and papers and broken picture frames. It was a real Aladdin’s cave, full of treasures waiting to be discovered. But it was musty and dusty down there and full of cobwebs, and more than once when I came down the steps I saw rats scuttling away into dark corners. At least the light worked – only dimly. But it did mean that it wasn’t as scary as it might otherwise have been.

  There was a small fireplace in the basement: at one time someone had used it, because the whole place reeked of soot and smoke. There was a heap of ashes in the grate, and the feathery skeleton of a jackdaw or a crow lying on top, wings outstretched – it must have fallen down the chimney. There was a Belfast sink in the corner with a tap, always dripping away the seconds.

  One trunk in particular fascinated us because it was covered in labels, and on every one of them a picture of a ship – one was called the Mauretania, another the Queen Elizabeth. Who knew what treasures it contained? But what excited us most about the trunk was that it was locked. We had to imagine what was in there, and our imaginings led us naturally to pirates – treasure chests and pirates go together, don’t they. So that was partly, I suppose, why I came to think of that dark and dingy basement as a pirate’s lair. The iron hooks hanging from the ceiling only served to confirm it. When we first saw the hooks, Piet and I knew at once that this place had to be Captain Hook’s treasure cave. This was where Captain Hook from Peter Pan kept all his treasure and his spare hooks for his arm, in case he lost one in a fight, we thought.

  Once we’d found that key, Piet and Belinda and I would be down in the basement whenever we could, mostly after school, mostly when you went away or whenever you were out and left us with Aunty B and Aunty J, our live-in babysitters. We got up to all sorts of tricks with them, which was wicked of us, I know that now. We only got away with it because they adored us. The best trick of all was to disappear down to the basement and then come up again after hiding away for a while to find them all of a fluster and running around the house like headless chickens looking for us. Poor Aunty B. Poor Aunty J. But I have to say it was fun, being so horrible.

  In spite of the hours we spent down there, we didn’t come across the witches’ cauldron for some time. It was hardly surprising – there was just so much fascinating stuff to sift through and explore. The tea chests were stuffed with old photos and papers and newspaper cuttings, which Belinda would read out to us because she was the best reader. We found an entire treasure trove of family heirlooms, each one wrapped up in newspaper – pewter cups, china plates and ornaments, vases. But as soon as we found the witches’ cauldron, nothing else mattered to us.

  Piet discovered it under a pile of coal sacks in a dark, dank corner. It was heavy, black and pot-bellied, with handles, and stood on three clawed feet.

  ‘Look,’ Piet whispered – we always talked in whispers down in the basement. ‘It’s a witches’ cauldron. Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble.’

  ‘We could do spells and things,’ Belinda said.

  I was up those stairs like a bat out of hell. It was at least a week before they could persuade me to go down to that basement again, and then it was only because of Belinda, because I didn’t want to look like a scaredy-cat in front of her.

  You used to tease me about Belinda, Mum. Only gently, but it made me blush and get cross. You were right, though: I did love her. She used to sit next to me in class and she was very clever. She’d always be first with her hand up and would finish her letter-copying before anyone else. She often used to get ten out of ten for her spelling, and could read aloud almost as fluently as our teacher, Miss Cruickshank. What’s more, Belinda could add up and take away in her head, without using her fingers. She was a genius. She could hopscotch better than anyone in the whole school, and stand on her head for over five minutes. Plus, she was pretty. She had red hair and her eyes were green as beech leaves in spring. She was also Piet’s girlfriend, but we were young enough for none of that to matter.

  I’d never have dared to do it if Belinda hadn’t suggested it. We were on our way back from school one afternoon. She and Piet were walking ahead of me, whispering to one another. I caught up with them.

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘You don’t want to know,’ Piet replied. ‘It’s about witches.’

  ‘I’m not scared,’ I told him.

  So he went on, ‘I was telling Belinda about the three witches and the “Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble” spell and she said why didn’t we do it together, y’know, with the cauldron? We could make a fire, put in the frogs and newts and stuff, say the spell. We could be the three witches. I said you wouldn’t want to do it.’

  ‘I would,’ I insisted.

  ‘See?’ Belinda said. ‘I told you he’d do it, Piet. I’ll make the hats. We’ve got to have witches’ hats or the spell won’t work.’

  That was it. There was no way I could get out of it now.

  It all happened while you were away. I think it was one of those times you went off to America with him, with our stepfather. I remember the postcards you sent us of the Empire Stat
e Building and one of the Statue of Liberty. I’ve still got them somewhere hidden away, in some trunk in our attic, I suppose. We didn’t ever like you going off with him. But when you went away, there was always one major compensation. Aunty B and Aunty J would look after us, which meant of course that we could do pretty much as we liked.

  Belinda set it all up, made the hats as she said she would, told us what to do and how to do it. She said it was the boys’ job to make the fire, that girls didn’t do that sort of thing. She sat on the locked trunk with the ship pictures all over it, kicking her heels, and watched as Piet and I did our best to get the fire to light. We got through half a box of pink-tipped Swan Vestas and still nothing would burn. Everything we tried was too damp – old newspapers, magazines, sacks, socks even. We tried blowing and fanning. Nothing worked. Belinda kept telling us we had to keep at it and it would light. ‘Easy as pie,’ she said. ‘You’ve just got to blow harder.’

  Then she patted the trunk. ‘What’s in this anyway?’ she asked, her legs swinging, her heels drumming on the trunk.

  ‘Dunno,’ I said. ‘It’s locked.’

  At that moment the lock flew open.

  ‘It’s not,’ she said, and she got off the trunk and lifted the lid. We all peered in. There were letters and photos, hundreds of them. She picked one out.

  ‘Who wrote this?’

  It was your handwriting, Mum. And when Belinda started reading, it sounded just like your voice talking.

  After just a few moments, Belinda stopped reading aloud and began reading the letter to herself.

  ‘Golly gosh,’ she whispered.

  ‘What?’ I asked. ‘What does it say?’

  ‘It’s all about love,’ she said. ‘Listen.’

  Darling J,

  I love you, you know I do. But I just don’t know if I can go ahead with it. Don’t think badly of me. I know I am weak. I know I need your strength around me. I love you, darling. Always.

  Kate

  She handed me the letter.

  ‘That’s our mum,’ I told her. ‘Sometimes she’s Kate, sometimes Kippe, sometimes Catherine. But that’s how she writes, that’s her handwriting.’

  ‘There’s lots more like this,’ Belinda said. Piet snatched the letter out of my hand. ‘You shouldn’t be reading it,’ he said, and there were tears in his voice. ‘It’s private.’

  That’s when Piet spotted the photograph lying there in the trunk in among the letters. He reached down and picked it up.

  ‘It’s their wedding,’ he said. ‘That’s him, our real father, in the uniform. And that’s our mum.’

  We stared at it in silence.

  ‘She looks so beautiful,’ Belinda whispered.

  ‘That’s private too,’ Piet said, as he dropped the photograph and the letter back into the trunk, and shut the lid.

  I should never have said it, but I did. ‘That letter, it looked dry, it felt dry,’ I said. ‘If that one was dry, they’ll all be dry.’

  That’s how we got the fire going, Mum, with your letters. So that’s my first confession. I’m not sure even now exactly what made us do such a terrible thing. Make no mistake, we all knew it was terrible, not just me. Piet didn’t want to do it. I’ve got to tell you that. But I talked him round. I persuaded him that burning your letters wouldn’t really matter because they couldn’t be that important. After all, why would they be left in a trunk in the basement if they were? Eventually he gave way, but only reluctantly and because, like Belinda and me, he really wanted to get that fire lit and the cauldron bubbling.

  We all wanted that, but if I’m honest I think there was another reason too. There were things in that letter, and probably in all the others, that I didn’t want to hear about or even know about. I prefer to think of course that after failing so often to get a fire lit, we burned the letters in the trunk because they were our last hope. Anything that would burn was all right. But I know now that wouldn’t be entirely true. What is true is that if we hadn’t burned them, none of the rest of this would have happened.

  Remember when we were a little older and you used to read us those C.S. Lewis books, the Narnia books? And how, although you loved them, I never really got on with them? Well, maybe what happened next was our Lion, Witch and Wardrobe moment. Only we didn’t walk through the back of a bedroom cupboard into a never-never land and discover a rather goody-two-shoes lion walking about – I could never believe in that lion or the never-never land either. Our Narnia was real bricks and mortar, and we didn’t get to it through a cupboard, but through a wall.

  Piet was kneeling down, ready to light the letters we’d piled in the fireplace, and Belinda and I were scouting around for any bits of wood we could find – I broke up an empty tea chest, I remember. And there was our old playpen already in pieces, so we used that. The letters caught fire at once, and within moments there was smoke billowing out into the basement. Soon we were all coughing and choking, frantically trying to wave the smoke away. Piet saw it first because he was closer to the fireplace than we were.

  ‘It’s not going up the chimney at all,’ he spluttered. I noticed then that he was leaning forward, hand over his mouth, peering into the chimney. ‘It’s going out the back. The smoke, it’s going out through the bricks at the back of the fireplace. Look!’

  Crouching down, through the clearing smoke, we could see that he was right. Piet had picked up the old chair leg he’d been using as a poker and began prodding at the bricks. ‘They’re loose,’ he said. ‘You can see them, they’re moving – look!’

  Now he was not just prodding, he was poking at them hard. That was when there was a sudden avalanche of bricks and the whole back wall behind the fireplace fell away. We were looking out through a huge hole into the bomb site beyond.

  The bomb site next door had that high chain-link fence on the street side of it, remember? The sign read ‘Keep Out’. You told us again and again never to climb the fence and go in there, that the walls were dangerous and could collapse at any moment, that there might even be unexploded bombs. More than once you told us about Malcolm, the teenage boy from down the street who used to go climbing the walls in there before the fence was put up, and how he’d fallen and broken his neck and how his legs didn’t work any more – you pointed him out once in his wheelchair outside the corner shop. So Piet and I had never dared venture in there.

  Belinda had though. She’d crawled in lots of times, she said, through a hole in the fence, and nothing had happened to her. And I’d stood there often enough, gazing into the bomb site from the street, fingers hooked into the fence, just longing to go in and explore. Now was our chance. More than a chance. That hole in the wall was an open invitation.

  Once we’d scrambled through the hole and out into the bomb site we found we were not overlooked at all. We were well hidden from the road by the ruins and the thick undergrowth and trees, which seemed to be sprouting everywhere, even out of the walls themselves. The place was like a jungle and there was no one in it but us. Belinda discovered another fireplace, just like ours in the basement of the ruins of the house adjoining ours. We knew we couldn’t light a fire for fear of discovery, but we had our cauldron and our hats and our ‘Bubble, bubble’ spell. We’d look for frogs and toads, find whatever we could and then imagine the rest, she said. We got lucky and found a frog and a few beetles and caterpillars. We managed to drag our cauldron through the hole, set it in the fireplace in the basement of the bombed-out house, and very soon we had collected enough hopping and wriggling and crawling things to make a proper witches’ spell. But there was no water in the cauldron and no fire. We’d have to see if the spell would work without.

  So there we sat, the three of us, in our witches’ hats. We held hands around the cauldron, closed our eyes and chanted our ‘Bubble, bubble’ witches’ ditty. Then, believing in these dark powers as hard as we could (the technique for me was much the same as praying, it had to be done with eyes squeezed shut), we put spells on all the people we hated. Belinda chos
e Miss Cruickshank because she was always picking on her in class for having inky fingers or a blunt pencil. She turned her into a frog – it would serve her right, she said, because she had poppy eyes. Piet chose Ma Higgins at the corner shop who we were sure cheated us whenever we went in to buy three pennyworth of lemon sherbets or humbugs or liquorice. She had a wart on her nose and he used his spell to make her grow at least twenty more.

  As for me, I chose Aunty B because she kept saying that Piet and I should be more grateful to our stepfather, that he was a much better father than our real dad because our real dad had gone off and left us. I knew that was a lie. So I decided to put my witches’ spell on her. She had a big nose anyway. My spell would make her nose grow longer and longer, just like Pinocchio’s when he told fibs. We sat there, eyes squeezed, for ages, until it came on to rain. Then we decided it was time to let the little creatures go and we went back through the hole into our basement, dragging the cauldron with us.

  The days that followed were disappointing. Miss Cruickshank did not turn into a frog. Ma Higgins still only had one wart, and Aunty B’s nose stayed just about the same. Our spells hadn’t worked. We knew exactly why things hadn’t gone as well as they should have done: we needed to light a real fire, to boil the water so that it bubbled and so that we could do the whole spell properly. Piet said that maybe it was also because we were being mean with our spells, that witches didn’t have to do bad things, that maybe we could make good wishes come true using the same spells.