Times of War Collection

by Michael Morpurgo

  man turned to her. “That is what you said, Mother, isn’t it? We must never give in, right?”

  He still spoke in English, but I could see from her smile that she understood, that she had understood everything all along.

  Aman went on, holding her hand tight in his. “They will come and try to take us away again. It could be today. It could be tomorrow, it could be next week. But we won’t go without a fight, will we, Mother?” She reached out and touched the back of his head, stroking his hair fondly, proudly.

  “She won’t answer me,” Aman said. “It’s a rule she made when we came here, that with her I must always speak Dari. She says I must never forget we are Hazara, and if I speak the language, I never will. And I tell her we have to speak English, because we are now English also. We are both. We argue about it, don’t we, Mother?”

  But I had the impression that his mother wasn’t listening to him any more. She was directing her gaze at me.

  And then she spoke to me, in English, slowly, hesitantly, searching for the words, but meaning every one of them. “Thank you for coming to see us. Aman has talked about you. He likes you. You have been very kind to us.”

  My attention was distracted then, as it had been off and on all afternoon during Aman’s story, by a little girl, only about two or three years old, I guessed, in a pink dress. She’d been running around the visitors’ room, and I had noticed her before, how every time the door that led to the outside world opened, whenever someone came in or went out, she would run towards it, only to have it slam shut in her face.

  There were several doors out of the room, but she seemed to know that this was the door you had to go through if you wanted to get out of this place. After she found it shut against her this time, she stood there looking up at it, then at the guard standing beside it. She sat down on the floor then, a teddy in her hand, her thumb in her mouth, waiting for the door to open again, the guard looking down at her stony-faced. He kept fingering the bunch of keys on his belt, shaking them every now and again, like a rattle.

  I got up to go a few moments later. “I’ll be back,” I told them.

  “I hope we’ll still be here,” said Aman. I wasn’t expecting him to want to shake hands. But he did. As I took his hand I felt something pressing into mine. I guessed at once it was the silver badge. He looked hard at me, telling me with his eyes not to look down, just to put my hand in my pocket and walk away. I knew as I left the detention centre, as the gates closed behind me, and I was once again out in the free world, that I was holding their futures in the palm of my hand.

  Matt was waiting for me with Dog. “Well? What happened, Grandpa? You’ve been in there ages. Did you see him?”

  “I saw him, him and his mother,” I said.

  “Is he all right?” he asked.

  “For now,” I said.

  Matt was bursting to hear what had happened in there. I gave him Aman’s silver-star badge, and all the way home in the car, with Dog leaning his head on my shoulder as usual, I told him everything Aman had told me, about Bamiyan, the whole incredible story of their escape from Afghanistan, about Shadow and Sergeant Brodie, their nightmare of a journey to England – everything about Yarl’s Wood too, what it was like inside – and about that little girl in the pink dress. I just couldn’t get her out of my mind.

  Until I’d finished – and we were nearly home by then – he said nothing, asked no questions, but simply sat there and listened, Aman’s silver-star badge cupped in his hands.

  “He never told me,” Matt said. “He never told me a thing.” And then, “I’ve seen that little red train. He keeps it in his room. I thought it was just his favourite toy, y’know, from when he was little. He never said.”

  We didn’t talk much after that, hardly a word till we arrived home. Then we just sat there in the car for a while. I knew what he was thinking, and I think he knew what I was thinking too.

  “It’s no good, Matt,” I told him. “I’ve wracked my brains, but it’s hopeless. Even if we could think of something, it would be too late. I really don’t think there’s anything we can do for them.”

  “Oh, yes, there is, Grandpa,” Matt said, “There has to be. And we’re going to do it too.”

  ’ve got to be honest.

  As I was listening to Grandpa in the car, I was feeling more and more hurt.

  I mean, why hadn’t Aman told me any of this before? After all, I was his best friend, wasn’t I? Didn’t he trust me?

  Yes, of course I knew that he’d come over from Afghanistan when he was little. But I’d never asked him anything about it – I didn’t think it was my business – and he’d never told me.

  And yes, I knew his dad was dead, he’d told me that much, but never how he’d died, nothing about the caves, or the dog or the soldiers, nothing about being an asylum seeker. All this time, for six years, he’d told me nothing. I’d never even heard of his silver-star badge before, and now here I was, holding it in my hands.

  But then as the car journey went on, I felt the hurt inside me turning to anger, not anger at Aman, but anger at the way he and his mother were being treated in that Yarl’s Wood place.

  It was unfair. It was cruel. And it wasn’t right.

  The more I thought about it, the clearer my thinking became. So by the time Grandpa and I got back home, by the time we were sitting down at the kitchen table and he was pouring himself a cup of tea, I knew exactly what we should do. I didn’t know if it would work. I only knew we had to try.

  And what’s more I knew Grandpa would go along with it, that he was feeling just as angry about it all as I was. Even as I was telling him about my idea, I had the distinct impression that this was nothing new to him. It was something he’d already been thinking about.

  “You know what I think, Grandpa,” I was telling him. “I think you should write Aman’s story, put it in the newspapers. You’re a journalist, aren’t you? You could do it. If people knew Aman’s story, what he and his mother lived through, how he saved Shadow and those soldiers, they’d be just as angry about it as we are. We could get people to come to Yarl’s Wood to demonstrate, to protest. They’d come, I know they would. I mean, the government – or whoever – they’d have to change their minds, wouldn’t they? We could do it, Grandpa.”

  Grandpa sipped his tea thoughtfully for a while. “Do you really think there’s a chance?” he said.

  I put Aman’s star on the table in front of him. “Aman thinks so, Grandpa,” I said. “That’s why he gave you this. He’s relying on us, Grandpa. He’s got no one else.”

  Grandpa looked at me across the table. “All right. You’re on,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

  He got up right away, and went into the next room to ring his old editor at the newspaper. They talked, but not for long.

  I thought from the downcast look on his face as he came back into the kitchen, that maybe he’d been turned down. “I don’t know if I can do it, Matt,” he said. “He likes the idea of the story, he’s really excited about it. He says if I get it right it could be front page news. But if we want it in tomorrow’s paper, he says I’ve got two hours to get it done. Fifteen hundred words, and he has to have it by six o’clock at the very latest.”

  “So?” I said, with a shrug. “What’s your problem, Grandpa? How many times have you told me to stop procrastinating, and get on with my homework?”

  “I take your point,” Grandpa replied, with a smile.

  He sat down at the laptop at the kitchen table, and got to work. From then on he hardly looked up. I wanted to read it over his shoulder, as he was writing. But he wouldn’t let me. Only when he’d checked it through and put in the last full stop did he let me read it at last.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “Brilliant,” I said. And it was too. I had tears in my eyes by the time I’d finished reading it. He emailed it to the newspaper at once. There was an email back within half an hour.

  It read:

  Going in the paper tomorrow. Haven’
t changed a word. Front page, photos, the lot. Your headline too. ‘We want you back’. And the byline you asked for, and with the special appeal for everyone to come along and join the protest at Yarl’s Wood at 8am tomorrow. This paper is right behind you. Good luck with it.

  I rang home straight after that and told Mum what Grandpa and I were up to, about everything that had happened that day, about how Grandpa’s story was coming out in the newspaper the next morning.

  It was a long phone call – and Grandpa had a word with her too. But by the end of it, when she’d heard all about Aman, she wanted to do anything she could to help, and so did Dad. They agreed to contact everyone we knew: family, friends, school – by email, Twitter, Facebook, text, phone, whatever way they could, to try to persuade them to come and join in the protest.

  Mum was really fired up about it. She’d been quite an activist when she was a student, she said. She knew how to do these things. And they’d be there the next day themselves at Yarl’s Wood, supporting us, of course they would.

  Dad came on the phone then, and said he was really proud of me. (I really liked him saying that. I don’t think he’d ever said it before.) He sounded quite choked up, and said there were times when it was good to be a troublemaker, and this was one of them – but I wasn’t to make a habit of it!

  So Grandpa and I left all that side of things, the organisation of the protest, to Mum and Dad, and busied ourselves on the kitchen floor, making the banners. We spread newspaper out wall-to-wall. I found a leftover pot of green paint, out in the garden shed. It wasn’t the best of colours, but it did the job. We made two. One read (my idea): WE WANT AMAN BACK. The other (Grandpa’s idea): LET OUR CHILDREN GO.

  It took a lot longer than we thought. It didn’t help at all that Dog kept walking all over the banners, punctuating the letters with his great green smudgy paws. We kept trying to shoo him away, but he kept coming back. He thought it was a game, and there was nothing we could do to convince him it wasn’t. After that we went out in the garden and sat and looked up at the stars for a while by Grandma’s tree. There were shooting stars that night, lots of them. We counted six before we went to bed. But it was the one I had in my hand that mattered most, the one I was squeezing hard and wishing on, with every shooting star we saw.

  few hours later – and I hardly slept at all that night – we were up and on the road to Yarl’s Wood Detention Centre, our banners rolled up in the boot, with Dog in the back seat panting with excitement on Grandpa’s neck. He knew something was up.

  We picked up a couple of copies of the morning paper from the shop on the corner, and there it was, Aman’s story, on the front page. We could not have hoped for more.

  “Well,” Grandpa said, “hopefully, hopefully, that should stir things up a little. There should be quite a few Ministers up in London choking on their cornflakes this morning over this!”

  We both expected there to be dozens of people waiting outside the gates of Yarl’s Wood when we arrived. But there was no one there. I couldn’t understand it. Grandpa said it was early still, that I shouldn’t worry, that they’d be along soon enough. But I was on my mobile right away making sure Mum and Dad at least were on their way. They weren’t answering, and that made me even more anxious and depressed.

  Feeling a bit ridiculous now, and sad, we stood there, the two of us and Dog outside the barbed wire fence at Yarl’s Wood, holding up our banners, waiting, and hoping someone would notice us, that we wouldn’t be alone like this for long. We were hopeful every time a car came up the road, but every one just drove past us, and in through the gates. We got a lot of strange looks.

  The security people on the gates came to have a look at us through the wire, and afterwards we could see them on the phone back in their guardroom. At least they’d noticed us, I thought, that was something. But, an hour or so later, and a long hour it was too, still no one had come to join us. Grandpa, I could tell, was trying not to look too disappointed, but he was, and I was too.

  “Not exactly a mass protest, is it?” I said.

  “Give it time, Matt, give it time,” Grandpa told me.

  I knew he was only trying to make the best of it, trying to make me feel better, and that really began to irritate me in the end. He said that it wasn’t even breakfast time for most people yet, that it would all turn out fine.

  “No, it won’t,” I snapped. “Course it won’t, not if no one comes.” I went off to take Dog for a run, partly because I could see he was getting fed up standing there on the lead, but mostly because I was ashamed of myself for having snapped at Grandpa. I let Dog off the lead, and we ran off together down the wide grass verge.

  I was back with Grandpa, still trying to find a way to say sorry, when, at long last, we saw a car coming slowly up the road. It stopped and parked up on the verge. Our first protester, I thought. But it was a police car. Two policemen got out, and came over to us, one of them talking on his radio as he came. I heard him saying something like: “Nothing to worry about. Just two of them and a dog.”

  They came up and asked Grandpa what we were doing there. Grandpa gave it to them straight. I was amazed at him. I’d never seen him angry and defiant like this before. He told them about Aman, about all the kids and families being kept locked up in there, and about how it was wrong and cruel. I just went on where he left off. I was really fired up.

  “How would you like it,” I said, “if your kids were locked up like that when they’d done nothing wrong? My best friend’s in there, and any day now they’re going to send him back to Afghanistan. He’s been living here six years! That’s why we’re protesting about it.”

  I think they were a bit taken aback. They took our names, and then said it was all right for us to stay, just so long we didn’t block the road, and didn’t cause a public nuisance – whatever that meant. They went away then, but only so far as their car, from where they sat and watched us. That made me feel all the more silly, because I knew they must be laughing at us.

  We’d been there for over two hours. I still couldn’t get hold of Mum and Dad on the mobile. Their phones had to be switched off, or out of signal. It was nearly half past ten by now, plenty of time for other people to have got to Yarl’s Wood. I kept taking Dog for runs, to keep myself occupied, to stop myself from feeling too miserable. It didn’t work. I was ready to give up.

  “It’s no use, Grandpa,” I said. “We’ve got to face it. No one’s read the story, and even if they have, they’re not coming. There’s no point in staying.”

  That was when Grandpa sat down, patted the grass beside him for me to do the same, and then poured us out some tea from the thermos he’d brought along. We had some biscuits too, chocolate digestives, lots of them. I felt a little better already.

  “You got that star with you, have you?” Grandpa asked me, after a while.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Then give it an almighty squeeze, Matt, and just hope. That’s what Aman told me he did, when things were looking really bad for him. It worked for him.”

  I did what he said, and gripped the star hard in my pocket, till my eyes watered.

  That’s when we spotted the black people-carrier coming slowly up the hill towards us. We saw as it came closer that it was a taxi. It stopped right in front of us. On the side of the front door, it read, ‘MMM. Mir’s Motors Manchester’. Six of them got out, all Aman’s family – I knew all of them – and the last was Uncle Mir, helped out by Aunt Mina.

  Uncle Mir was looking frail but determined, and was leaning heavily on a stick, as he walked towards me. He shook my hand, and Grandpa’s, and was full of tearful and effusive thanks for all we were doing. The whole family bustled round, helping him into a wheelchair and wrapping him in a blanket, Aunt Mina scolding him all the time for doing this against doctor’s orders.

  When he was settled in his wheelchair, he told us that after he had read the piece in the newspaper, nothing on earth would have stopped him from being here. “Aman is like a son to me,” he
told Grandpa. “I am so proud of him, and his mother too. One thing is missing though in your newspaper story. Didn’t he tell you that he wrote to him, to the soldier, to that Sergeant Brodie?”

  “No,” Grandpa said. “He never told me.”

  “Well, he did,” he went on. “Twice. Once, it was to ask if he could come to see Shadow. He worships that dog, always has – all these years later and he’s still talking about her. But he didn’t get an answer. Then later, he wrote to ask Sergeant Brodie to support their appeal for asylum, so that they could be allowed to stay in this country. He found out the address of the regiment, sent the letter – I posted it myself – but he never had a reply to that letter either. He kept hoping for one, but it never came. Aman found that so hard. But he was never angry about it. I was though. I tell you, if I ever meet that man, I’ll give him a piece of my mind. I will.”

  mean, why?” Uncle Mir went on, and he was getting more and more upset. “Why wouldn’t this Sergeant Brodie write back? And when you think what Aman did that day? He saved their lives, for God’s sake.” His wife was trying to calm him down, but Uncle Mir wasn’t listening to her. “With friends like that soldier, who needs enemies?” he said bitterly.

  And then, as he was talking, I looked up and saw Dad’s car coming up the road towards us, Mum waving at us out of the window. At last, at last.

  They weren’t alone. There was a whole convoy of cars coming along behind them, and in them at least a dozen or more of our friends from home. Mum made all sorts of excuses, terrible traffic on the motorway, and the mobile had run out of battery.

  I didn’t mind. They were here.

  Suddenly I was beginning to believe this might actually work. And when an hour or so later, a coach came up the road, and I saw what was obviously our whole football team piling out in their blue strip, Grandpa and I were jumping up and down, hugging each another, and whooping with joy. It was quite a moment. Dog thought so too. He was going wild!