Times of War Collection

by Michael Morpurgo

  Flat Stanley was there, Samir, Joe, Solly, all of them. They all came running over. I had the whole team around me. It felt suddenly so good. Nothing could stop us now. We were going to win. We always won, didn’t we?

  “Quite a production you got going here,” said Flat Stanley, with that great big grin on his face. “For Aman, right?”

  “For Aman,” I said.

  There were parents and teachers with them, and there were other kids there too, from our year, a whole coachload!

  They held up the banner we’d all made weeks ago back at school for the team photo, the one we’d sent off to Aman. ‘WE WANT YOU BACK’, it read, in letters all the colours of the rainbow, big and bold and bright.

  Then the television cameras were there too, lots of them. There were newspaper reporters and radio reporters, and everyone wanted to interview us. In the end, by the middle of the afternoon, just about all our friends and family had turned up to join us, just as we had hoped they would. They came from all over, most from Manchester and Cambridge, but many from much further away.

  Auntie Morag, who is eighty-four years old, had flown down from Orkney, and brought three of her friends with her, to support the best of causes, she said, as she gave me a hug. So Grandpa and I had plenty to be happy about. In all, there must have been a couple of hundred people gathered there, and more were arriving all the time.

  No one told anyone to start chanting, it just seemed to happen, led mostly by Flat Stanley and Samir and the football team, then picked up by all of us.

  “We want Aman back! We want Aman back!”

  Extra security people were gathering behind the gates, and they were beginning to look more and more anxious, on their phones the whole time.

  Apparently we had been on national television and radio for the lunchtime news, and of course the newspaper story had been out there for several hours by now, with its invitation for anyone and everyone to join us. And they were joining us now, more and more all the time, more than we could ever have believed possible. This wasn’t just a small protest demonstration any more, it was becoming a huge crowd, a shouting, chanting, Mexican-waving crowd. This was the real thing, a proper protest. There were enough of us there by now for everyone to know that we meant it, that we weren’t going away.

  But more police were arriving too, in large white vans, and when they jumped out we saw that these ones were carrying helmets and shields. I don’t think I realised until I saw them quite how serious this might become, that things really could get out of hand.

  All around me, feelings were running high, and I could see from the faces of the policemen that they were sensing it too. They had dogs with them, and Dog did not like that one bit. He barked at them furiously if they ever came too close, and I was pleased to see that the police dogs seemed a little surprised at that. They didn’t seem to know quite what to do. I was proud of Dog. He wasn’t going to be intimidated any more than we were.

  All the pushing and shoving, all the shouting and chanting, was exciting, but it was frightening too. I was beginning to wonder whether this had been such a good idea in the first place. I mean, Aman was still stuck in there, inside Yarl’s Wood, and we were outside. Yes, we were making a lot of noise, and making quite a nuisance of ourselves too. But what good was it doing, and how was it going to help Aman and his mother if someone got hurt?

  I could feel myself losing heart again, losing hope. I reached into my pocket and squeezed tight on Aman’s star. That, and another chocolate digestive, and the high spirits of the crowd around me bucked me up enough to keep me going, keep my courage up, keep me chanting along with the others.

  But then it came on to rain, and rain hard, and all the chanting and the shouting soon faded away. We were left standing there, dripping and cold, and feeling rather sorry for ourselves. It was as if the police had ordered the rain to dampen our spirits, and it was working. But then Grandpa did something completely wonderful, completely surprising. He started singing, in the rain. And that IS what he was singing too: ‘Singing in the Rain’, from one of his favourite films, and mine – we’d often watched the DVD together. In no time, everyone was joining in, laughing, arms linked, and singing and dancing in the rain.

  Some of the police were smiling too, I noticed, but none of them was dancing.

  But a song can only go on for so long, and soon we were all just standing there in the rain, silent again, waiting, not knowing quite what for. I mean, we’d made our point, done our protest, but so what? Hour after hour we stood there, wet and cold and tired. No one was saying it, but I knew everyone was thinking what I was thinking. Aman and his mother were still locked up inside Yarl’s Wood, and if they were coming out at all, it would only be in a car that would be taking them to the airport to deport them back to Afghanistan. Sooner or later we’d all have to go home, and we would have achieved nothing. Even Aman’s silver star seemed to have lost its power.

  Cars and vans came and went though the gates into the Detention Centre. More security guards were there now on the other side of the wire, and I noticed a couple of them were taking photographs of us. More police reinforcements kept arriving. They were there in their hundreds now, facing us, silent and unsmiling. It was a stand-off.

  But they didn’t scare me any more. I think I was too cold and wet and hungry to be frightened. I couldn’t help thinking that Grandpa and I hadn’t thought this part of our plan through at all. We hadn’t got an umbrella between us, no tea left, no more biscuits. And what if everyone just ignored us and left us there getting wetter and wetter? I could feel a growing sense of the same desperation around me in the crowd. The whole protest was just fizzling out, and people were starting to drift away. The football team were looking miserable and cold, as if they’d just lost ten-nil. Uncle Mir had long ago been taken away to sit in his car. It was obvious that we couldn’t last out for much longer.

  But all our hopes and spirits were raised when the rain stopped at last, and the sun came out. We suddenly saw a glorious rainbow climbing up into the sky behind the Detention Centre. “A good-luck sign, if ever I saw one,” said Grandpa.

  When some moments later it turned out to be a double rainbow, everyone in the crowd started laughing and cheering. I had never heard a rainbow being cheered before. Like Grandpa said, a good omen. It had to be, surely.

  That was when I saw one of the policemen come striding across the road towards us, purposefully, a loudhailer in his hand. “May I have your attention, please?” he began. It was a while before the crowd quietened down enough for him to go on. “I am Inspector Smallwood, and I have just been informed that Mrs Khan and her son Aman left Yarl’s Wood Detention Centre early this morning. They were taken to Heathrow Airport to be put on a flight to Kabul. So, I have to tell you that these individuals are no longer here. They have already been removed.”

  e all stood there in stunned silence. I looked up, and saw though my tears that there was a blackbird singing from the top of the barbed wire fence, the double rainbow still there arcing through the sky. It was as if both were mocking us.

  The police officer hadn’t finished. “So now you know,” he said. “Which means that there’s no point in hanging around here any more. It’s all over. So now let’s all go home, before we catch our death. Let’s break this up. Come on now. Time to go home.”

  I don’t think I would have actually cried, had I not heard the sound of sobbing from amongst the football team standing behind me. My eyes and my heart welled up with tears then. Grandpa clung on to my arm and held it tight. There was nothing we could say.

  It was over.

  I didn’t see or hear the car coming up the road. It just seemed to be there, in front of us, suddenly, out of nowhere.

  I watched as the car doors opened, and I was wondering who it was. But I didn’t really care any more. I was that miserable. The first to get out was a young girl, about ten or eleven years old, I thought. And then a dog jumped out after her on a lead.

  It was a s
paniel, a brown and white spaniel – like Dog. Just like Dog.

  The girl was trying to hang on to the dog at the same time as reaching in to help a man out of the back seat. As he got out and stood up I saw that he was a soldier, in a khaki uniform and a cap. He had medals, lots of them. He was walking with a stick, and gazing around him, strangely. I knew at once that he was looking about him like blind men do, looking without seeing.

  The girl was still struggling to hold on to her dog.

  “Grandpa,” I whispered. “That’s Sergeant Brodie, isn’t it? And that’s got to be Shadow. It has to be.”

  Everyone seemed to realise who they were by now – from Grandpa’s story in the paper, I suppose – and the whole crowd began clapping. The two dogs, Shadow and Dog, were nose to nose, tails wagging wildly.

  “Sorry we’re late,” the soldier was saying. “Traffic, and everything up in London took a whole lot longer than I thought it would, didn’t it, Jess? Oh, this is Jess, my daughter. And I’m Sergeant Brodie, by the way. I’m an old friend of Aman’s.” Shadow and Dog were sniffing each other over, and squeaking with excitement.

  For a long while we all just stood there, not knowing quite what to say. Then Grandpa spoke up. “I’m afraid it’s too late,” he said. “They’ve just told us here that Aman and his mother were taken away this morning, before we got here. They’re already on their way back to Afghanistan. We’re all too late.”

  Shadow was snuffling busily around my feet now. “Sorry about her,” Jess said, fighting to pull her back. “She goes where her nose goes, she’s like that.” Dog wouldn’t leave Shadow alone. He thought he had found a friend for life, a fellow sniffer, a fellow wagger.

  “Oh, but we’re not too late,” said Sergeant Brodie, with a smile. “You obviously haven’t heard the news, have you?”

  “What news?” I asked.

  “About the volcano,” his daughter said, “up in Iceland. There’s this huge cloud of ash up there in the sky and the planes can’t fly, none of them can, not to Afghanistan, not to anywhere. All the airports are closed.”

  “That’s right,” Sergeant Brodie went on. “Better explain, I think. When Jess read me the piece in the paper this morning, I rang the regiment, spoke to my commanding officer, told him the entire story – some of which he already knew, of course – and he arranged for me to go with him to London to see the Minister right away.”

  He tapped one of the medals on his chest, a silver one. “This little gong they gave me, the Military Cross, it opens a few doors, has its uses. I always knew it was a lucky medal anyway. Plenty of the other lads deserved it as much as I did. The truth is that without my lucky medal, and without that lucky volcano, Aman and his mother would have been gone by now, that’s for sure. Anyway, the long and the short of it is that Aman and his mother are staying. A special case, the Minister called it, when he’d heard me out, a very special case. And he’s dead right. Aman was a good friend to us, a good friend to the regiment, and to the Army. Everyone should look after their friends, that’s what I told the Minister. He picked up the phone and stopped the deportation there and then. I’ve spoken to Aman and his mother myself, on the phone, told them the good news. I think they were quite pleased really! They’re on their way back here right now.”

  It took a while for all this to sink in, and then for the news to spread among the crowd. And when it did there was a whole lot of hugging and cheering and whooping. There was a fair bit of crying too. Everyone began singing ‘Singing in the Rain’, again – although it wasn’t, if you see what I’m saying.

  The best moment for me, for Grandpa, and for Uncle Mir and his family, for everyone in the crowd, came an hour or so later when we saw a car coming up the road towards us. We could see Aman and his mother waving to us from inside. Aman jumped out, saw Shadow, and ran over to her at once. He crouched down, put his arms around her and held her. I was right there beside them, the football team all around, all of us together again.

  For several moments no one spoke. Shadow was licking Aman all over his ear, making him giggle. He looked up at his mother then. “You see, Mother, I told you she’d know me. I told you, didn’t I?”

  “Aman?” said the Sergeant, holding out his hand towards him. Aman stood up and took his hand.

  “I wrote to you,” Aman said quietly. “You never wrote back.”

  The Sergeant was frowning, touching his forehead above his eyes with the tips of his fingers, as if he was in pain. “I’m sorry, Aman,” he said, “but I never got it. Stuff gets lost, I suppose, what with one thing and another. The trouble is, I’ve been in and out of hospital quite a lot over the last few years. Fifteen operations in all. IED. Roadside bomb it was. The day it happened, I didn’t have Shadow with me, more’s the pity. It would never have happened if she’d been there. They’ve been trying to patch me up ever since. Got a new leg, a new arm too. They work fine. But they couldn’t do anything about my eyes. I haven’t been able to see a thing since the day it happened.”

  Aman took a step back and I could see that he was noticing the Sergeant’s white stick for the first time. “I’m sorry,” he said. “And I’ve been blaming you all this time for not writing back, even hating you for it sometimes.”

  “You couldn’t have known,” the Sergeant told him. “No one’s fault, Aman. The bomb’s fault. The war’s fault. And anyway, we met up in the end, didn’t we? ‘Got to look on the bright side, there’s always someone worse off than yourself ’ — that’s what my gran always used to say. And she was right. It could have been a lot worse for me – for some of the lads it was a lot worse. When they brought me back home, after I was wounded, when I was in hospital, I told Jess all about you and Shadow, and she decided to call her Shadow from then on. She couldn’t be Polly to either of us any more. Shadow’s my eyes now, and that’s only thanks to you, son.”

  That was when Aman saw his mother wheeling Uncle Mir through the crowd towards us. He ran over to him at once. A moment or two later, crouching down by Uncle Mir in his wheelchair, Aman looked across at me and smiled. I took the silver star out of my pocket and handed it back to him. He didn’t say anything, he didn’t need to.

  That evening, late, after it was all over, we were back at Grandpa’s house, the two of us, and sitting out in the garden beside Grandma’s tree. I was sad, and I knew I shouldn’t be. I was sad because I knew this had been the best day of my life, and that there would never be another one like it.

  We had fed Dog, who was lying at my feet, as usual, his head heavy on my toes. He looked sad too, I thought, probably because he was missing his new friend.

  And the stars were out. They were looking down on us, and we were looking up at them.

  “Aren’t they wonderful, Matt?” Grandpa said. “I think stars are just wonderful, don’t you?”

  “Yes, Grandpa,” I replied. “But if you ask me, I think volcanoes are better. I think volcanoes are really great.”

  he Taliban rose to power in Afghanistan in 1996, and ruled for five years. The strict regime was notorious for human rights abuses and for its extremist views prohibiting the education of women.

  Following the September 11 2001 attacks in the USA, Osama Bin Laden was declared the prime suspect by President George W. Bush. Bin Laden was thought to be in Afghanistan, and the US issued an ultimatum demanding that Afghanistan hand over Al-Qaeda leaders in the country. They refused, and the US and UK began to bomb Afghan targets on 7 October. The following month the UN authorised the institution of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, to help maintain security in and around the capital, Kabul.

  Since 2001 the balance of power in Afghanistan has shifted repeatedly, with Taliban forces gaining and losing control over different parts of the country at different times. When the invasion by US and UK forces began in 2001, polls indicated that about 65% of Britons supported military action. However, by November 2008, 68% of Britons supported withdrawing troops from Afghanistan.

  There are no offici
al figures on the number of civilian casualties of the war, but some estimates run to the tens of thousands. As at 1st August 2010, 327 British military personnel have been killed while on operations in Afghanistan.

  arl’s Wood is an immigration removal centre in Bedfordshire, UK. The centre can accommodate 405 people and is the main removal centre for women and families who are awaiting deportation from the UK. The complex includes healthcare and educational facilities for detainees.

  Since Yarl’s Wood opened in November 2001 a number of protests and hunger strikes have been staged by detainees at the centre in response to alleged poor conditions including separation from their children and lack of access to legal representation.

  A report by the Chief Prisons Inspector found that some children were being held at Yarl’s Wood unnecessarily, and raised concerns over their welfare. In July 2010 the British government pledged to end the detention of children at Yarl’s Wood.

  pringer Spaniels like Shadow are commonly used as sniffer dogs by the police, prison services and the armed forces. A sniffer dog has been trained to use its sense of smell to detect substances such as the explosives used in bombs, and to signal their presence to its handler. There are about 200 Military Working Dogs including sniffer dogs in the British Army, and they are trained at the Defence Animal Centre in Leicestershire and in Cyprus.

  In 2010, Treo, an eight-year-old black Labrador, was awarded the Dickin Medal, the animal equivalent of the Victoria Cross, for saving soldiers’ lives.

  In November 2009 Michael Morpurgo read a newspaper story that ended up becoming one of the inspirations for Shadow. The story was about Sabi, a black Labrador who had worked as a sniffer dog with Australian Special Forces in Afghanistan. The previous year, Sabi had gone missing in action after an ambush in which nine people including her handler were injured. Sabi was presumed dead, but fourteen months later she was found alive and healthy, having apparently been well cared for and returned to her unit. The person who looked after her, and eventually gave her back, was never identified. But perhaps – just perhaps – it was a boy a little like Aman…