Times of War Collection

by Michael Morpurgo

  We travelled on foot too, dodging border patrols by night. I heard shooting once, but our guide said they did that just to frighten people away from the border. We kept going, and somehow we got through. Mother always knew how. It was God watching over us, she said.

  Then there was another long lorry journey – at least they gave us food and water this time, and we could breathe. It wasn’t so bad by now. Maybe we were getting used to it. By this time, we had all got to know one another, and we knew we were all in this together. That helped a lot.

  The old couple from Kabul never said very much, but they kept our spirits up, telling us day after day that we were getting there, that it wouldn’t be long now. That was something we all wanted to believe, and that was why we believed it, I suppose. This old couple, they took quite a liking to me, they said, because I reminded them of their son when he was little. In fact everyone looked out for me, and always saw to it that I had enough to eat and drink. I’ve thought a lot about why they were all so good to me. I think they did not want to see another child die.

  In a way I became everyone’s son on that journey.

  I knew, because everyone was worried about it, and talked about it all the time, that the most dangerous part of the journey was going to be the last bit, getting across the English Channel. The only way across was to hide away in a lorry, I was told, and just hope not to be caught. But lots of people were caught.

  Mother was terrified of being caught. It was around this time that she had her first panic attack. In a way it was her panic attack that saved us. The old couple from Kabul looked after her, and calmed her down. I think that was why they chose us, because of Mother’s panic attack, and because I reminded them of their son maybe.

  They had been talking about it for some time, they told us, and they had decided they wanted to help us. They couldn’t help everyone. They’d like to, but they couldn’t. There were police everywhere near the French coast. They said there were hundreds of people waiting to find a way across the Channel into Britain. There were plenty of fixers who would offer us a place in the back of a lorry, but they were all crooks. They just wanted your money.

  Well, after what happened to us before, we believed that, didn’t we? The fixers might get you on to a lorry, they said, but the police and immigration people were very thorough these days, and they checked all the lorries, every one of them. We’d be lucky to get through. The last two times this old couple had tried, this was how they had been caught. They had a plan, they told us. It might work, it might not, but all they were sure of was that it was a lot better than chancing it again in the back of a lorry. There was nothing to pay, they said, when Mother asked them. We were all Afghans, weren’t we? All brothers and sisters together.

  So, I’ll tell you how we came into England, shall I? We hung around for a long time with lots of refugees like us. It was in a kind of camp – near the sea in France. It wasn’t too bad. We had food. We had shelter. We all lived in lots of tents inside a great big building.

  Mother and me and the old couple from Kabul shared a tent together. Best of all, there were dozens of other kids, so we could play football. Sometimes we would pick up teams – you know, Manchester United against Barcelona. You can guess which side I played for.

  The old couple had a mobile phone, so Mother spoke a couple of times on their phone to Uncle Mir in Manchester, and I did too, just once. He told me that Manchester United had won the day before. They’d beaten Liverpool two-nil, and David Beckham had been the best player on the pitch, and he said how much he was looking forward to taking me to see Manchester United play, and to have us living with him and Mina in their home.

  I remember Mother was terrified the night we escaped from the camp. I was just excited. All four of us went together, the old couple from Kabul and us, and we weren’t the only ones getting out that night. We crawled though a hole in the fence and ran off into the dark of the countryside. We seemed to be walking for ever after that. There were dogs barking, I remember that, and it sounds stupid, but I really did wonder, just for a moment, if Shadow had followed us all this way, and tracked us down with her sniffer nose. Stupid or what?

  Then we came down a track and out on to a little road. We followed this for a while, until we came to a crossroads. Only minutes later this car came along, pulling a caravan. The driver turned out to be the son of the old couple, the one who was like me when he was little, they reminded me. It was all so quick. He helped all four of us up into the caravan, and made us crawl in under the bed, where we squeezed in together. Then the door was shut on us, and we heard it locked. “If we are lucky,” said the old man, “we will be in England in a couple of hours, maybe less. No one must talk, not a word.”

  Well, we didn’t talk, and no one discovered us. So that’s how we came into England, smuggled in the back of a caravan. Uncle Mir and Aunt Mina met up with us at some petrol station – I suppose everything had all been arranged with Mother on the phone. We said goodbye to the old couple, and Uncle Mir drove us home to Manchester in his taxi. He was just as chatty as he had been on the phone. He was so pleased to see us that he talked almost the whole way.

  The next day Uncle Mir took us into the police station in Manchester, to claim asylum, to register as asylum seekers. The sooner you do that the better, he said. Mother and me, we were so happy. We thought that was it. We’d made it to England. We thought we were safe now.

  But we weren’t safe at all.

  ll that was nearly six years ago now. And the six years have been good too. Uncle Mir has looked after us all this time, just like he said he would. I don’t know what we’d do without him.

  But he’s been in hospital for an operation, so that’s why he can’t come to see us in here. He will come when he’s better, he says – if we’re still here, that is. He phones us every day. We’ve been living in a little flat, just above Uncle Mir and Aunt Mina, and his taxi-cab office is next door. He gets me to man the phone in there sometimes with Aunt Mina, to help out. It’s good fun. I like it.

  I like this country too. Well, I did till four weeks and six days ago when they brought us in here. Back home in Manchester, we’ve got just about everything we need, enough to eat, running water, and hot water too. It’s a little different from the cave in Bamiyan. Once a week Uncle Mir takes me to the mosque, and about once a month we go to watch Manchester United. You can’t go more often than that – it’s too expensive.

  Uncle Mir treats me like a son. We play Monopoly, Scrabble, chess – you name it, we play it. He loves board games. I beat him at Monopoly, like I beat you. But he always beats me at Scrabble. One day I’ll beat him though. And I did see David Beckham. I didn’t shake his hand, but I nearly did. I got his autograph instead.

  But I had my ups and downs, especially to begin with. Some of the kids at primary school gave me a hard time at first. I didn’t speak English, not at all to start with. So that was a bit difficult, but I soon picked it up. Then there was this mouthy kid – Dan Smart he was called – and he picked on me in the playground. He kept pushing me around and telling me to go back to my own country. But Matt soon sorted him out, faced him down, and told him he was a wally and an idiot – and lots of other names too that I had better not say. Dan didn’t bother me again. And Matt and me, we’ve been best friends ever since. So school’s great, no problems, not any more.

  But it hasn’t been that easy for Mother. She misses Bamiyan a lot more than I do. She misses her friends most, I think. She still cries a lot when she thinks about Grandmother and Father, and everything that happened. She helps out a friend in the charity shop down the road, and she does all their mending for them on her sewing machine. She’s brilliant on her sewing machine. And she teaches Dari, gives lessons to some of the local kids – but not for money. You’re not allowed to earn money, not if you’re an asylum seeker. But she still gets frightened sometimes, and the doctor makes her takes some pills. But then she gets sleepy, so she doesn’t like taking them. She makes me work h
ard at school, because she wants me to have a good job when I grow up and not be poor.

  I go to school at Belmont Academy now. I like just about everything, except Home Economics. I’ve got my GCSEs next year, and I’m doing my Maths this year, a year early, because I’m good at Maths. Mr Bell – he’s my Maths teacher – says I’ll be good enough to go to university later, if I work hard. That was the plan anyway. Mother wants me to go to university as well, so that I can become an engineer, which is what I want to be. I want to build bridges. I love bridges. I’m not much good at English. I can speak it OK, but my spelling’s no good.

  But I’ve got to tell you that I’m a whole lot better at my football. I showed you the photo, didn’t I, that one my football team sent me, remember? We won the league last year, and the year before. We’re the best! And I’m not just saying that. We are the best!

  But ever since we’ve been living here in England, there’s been one thing worrying us all the time: whether or not we’d be allowed to stay, whether the government would grant us asylum. It’s been like a shadow hanging over us. I think I got used to it, but Mother could never stop thinking about it. Uncle Mir kept telling her that everything would be all right, that the lawyer said we had done everything we should have done, that we had a very good chance, that we should just get on with our lives and not worry.

  But that’s easier said than done. For six years we never heard anything from the government.

  Then one day we get this letter, telling us we have to go back to Afghanistan, just like that. So we try to appeal. We tell them how it was for us and our family in Afghanistan, how the police treated us, how the Taliban are everywhere, how Father was killed for helping the Americans, how they murdered Grandmother. We tell them again how Mother was tortured by the police.

  We have told them all this before, but it is no good. They give us all sorts of reasons. Afghanistan is different now, they tell us. It’s all quite safe now, they say, and the police there aren’t like they were. But we’ve got friends there, and they all say that the Taliban are still strong, and the police are just as bad as they ever were. There’s a war going on over there, or don’t they realise?

  But they don’t listen. They just want to find any reason they can to get rid of us – that’s what it feels like to us anyway. We say we are proper asylum seekers, that this is our home now. This is where we belong. But they don’t want to know, and like I told you, they won’t even let us appeal.

  Mother was always getting herself really stressed out with all this. Sometimes she couldn’t sleep, she couldn’t eat, and then sooner or later she’d get one of her panic attacks. I tried not to think about any of it, just put everything out of my mind, to do my work, play my football, and get on with my life, like Uncle Mir told us.

  But Mother could never do that. That’s why I didn’t pay her much attention, when she kept going on about it. She did warn me only a few months back, that sooner or later they would come for us. I just always thought it would be later, or that they might forget all about us, that it might never even happen. I didn’t want to believe it, that’s the truth of it.

  Then one morning – I was still in bed and asleep – I was woken up by a loud knocking on the door downstairs, that went on and on. It was like the beginning of your worst nightmare.

  thought it was Uncle Mir at first. Only a few days before we’d had a pipe that burst in our flat, and the water had flooded down through the floor into their place. I thought it must have happened again. So I got out of bed to open the door.

  But it wasn’t our door, and it wasn’t Uncle Mir. The knocking was coming from downstairs, from the street door.

  So I went down to open it. It was men in uniform, policemen some of them were, or immigration officers maybe – I didn’t know – but lots of them, ten, maybe twelve.

  They pushed past me and charged up the stairs. Then one of them had me by the arm, and was dragging me upstairs. I found Mother sitting up in her bed. I could see she was finding it hard to breathe, and that any minute she’d be having one of her panic attacks. A policewoman was telling her to get dressed, but she couldn’t move.

  When I asked what was going on, they just told me to shut up. Then they were shouting at Mother, telling her we had five minutes to get ready, that we were illegal asylum seekers, that they were going to take us to a detention centre, and then we’d be going back to Afghanistan. That was when I suddenly became more angry than frightened. I shouted back at them. I told them that we’d been living here six years, that it was our home. I told them to get out.

  Then they got really mad. One of them pushed me out of Mother’s room, and back into my bedroom, and told me to get dressed.

  They never left us alone after that.

  They wouldn’t even go while we were getting dressed – Mother said afterwards that there were at least three of them in her room all the time, one of them a man. They hardly let us take anything with us – one small rucksack and my schoolbag, that’s all. Almost all of our stuff got left behind, my mobile, all my football programmes, my reading books, my David Beckham autograph, Ahmed’s little red engine, and my goldfish.

  But I had my silver-star badge in my jeans pocket, so at least I didn’t leave that behind. They never stopped hassling us. They took us down the stairs and out into the street. There were lots of people out there in their dressing gowns, watching us – Uncle Mir, and Matt and Flat Stanley too. Matt called out to me, and asked what was going on, and I told him that they were sending us back to Afghanistan.

  A policeman had me by the arm the whole time, pushing me, frogmarching me. It made me feel ashamed, and I had nothing to be ashamed about. Mother was having a proper fit by now, but they didn’t bother. The policewoman said she was just pretending, putting it on.

  They shoved us in this van, locked us up in separate compartments, with bars on the windows, and then drove us off. I could hear Mother crying the whole time. They must have been able to hear her too, but it was just a job to them. They were busy listening to their radio, and laughing.

  I kept talking to Mother, trying to calm her down, but I could tell she was just getting worse and worse. I banged on the door and screamed at the police in the front, and in the end they did stop. They had a look at Mother, and the same policewoman told me again that she was play-acting, and to shut my mouth or I’d be in trouble. I didn’t keep my mouth shut. I told them I wanted to be in with Mother, and kept on and on until they let me. Mother calmed down a bit after that, but she was still in a really bad state when we got here.

  They wanted Mother and me to be in different rooms. They said I was too old to be in with her. I told them I was staying with her, to look after her, no matter what, that I’d been with her all my life, and there was no way we were going to be parted. We said we’d both go on hunger strike if they did that. We made such a fuss and noise about it that in the end they let us stay together. That was when we learned not to give in, not ever.

  When I first came into this place, I couldn’t believe it. I mean, it might look all right from the outside, like a recreation centre, a bit like my school. But inside it’s all locked doors and guards. It’s all a fake, just to make it look good – fake flowers on the table, pretty pictures on the walls, a nursery, and places the kids can play, and television. But it’s a prison. That’s what it is, a prison. That’s what I couldn’t believe. They put us in a prison. We were locked up. I hadn’t done anything wrong, and nor had Mother, nor has anyone else in here. Everyone’s got a right to ask for asylum, to try to find a safe place to live, haven’t they? That’s all we’ve done.

  For the first few days in here, Mother just cried and cried. Uncle Mir came to visit, and he said he’d get the lawyer and he’d do all he could to get us out of here and back home. But nothing could stop Mother from crying. When we heard the news that Uncle Mir had had a heart attack, and was in hospital – on account of everything that had gone on, I suppose – it only made it worse for her. The doctor came an
d gave her an injection, and after that, instead of crying, she just lay there looking at the ceiling, as if she’d got no feelings left inside her.

  It’s worse for her than it is for me. She’s got her memories, of the prison they took her to back in Afghanistan. I know they’re terrible memories, because she still won’t talk about them. She says she’s never ever going back to Afghanistan, that she’d rather kill herself. And I know she means it too.

  That’s almost it, the whole story – oh yes, except for one thing. About a week ago, I think it was. They came into our room one morning early, and told us they were going to take us to the airport, and then fly us back to Afghanistan. We asked them when it was going to happen, and they told us it was right now, and we had to get ready.

  We refused.

  Mother fought them, so did I. They had to hold us down and handcuff us. And in the van all the way to the airport we hammered on the side of the van, and we shouted and we screamed. They drove us right to the plane, and tried to make us walk up the steps. We wouldn’t go. They had to half-drag, half-carry us up. Even in her seat on the plane Mother wouldn’t stop fighting them. I had almost given up by then, but Mother never did. That’s why we’re still here, because Mother didn’t give up.

  In the end, the pilot came along and said he couldn’t take off with Mother and me on board, that we were a danger to the other passengers, that we were frightening them. So they took us off the plane, and brought us back here. They weren’t at all pleased to see us. Our wrists hurt where they’d handcuffed us, and we were a bit bruised all over, but we didn’t mind. Mother told me that night that Grandfather would have been proud of us. He had been a fighter for freedom, and so had Father, in his own way. We must fight for our freedom, and never give in.