My Friend Walter

by Michael Morpurgo

  I was lying on my bed before I noticed the note on my bedside table, and on top of it was a small bottle. The writing was difficult to read, the letters tall and regular but strangely formed. I could read it only slowly.

  Dearest Cousin,

  I have wronged you and your family most dreadfully, and your anger towards me was deserved and your hatred justifiably fierce. I do deserve no better. I ask no pardon, but to say that all I did I did for you as I trust you will one day discover. I pray you make haste to administer the elixir in the bottle to your grandmother. Delay not for I fear she has dire need of it. A few drops in her tea will suffice for a full recovery. Do it now and you will see my time spent collecting plants and herbs and all the hours in your brother’s laboratory were not entirely wasted.

  Your humble and most affectionate cousin,

  W.R.

  The liquid in the bottle was of a dark, mushy green colour, as much like pond water as anything else. I did not think twice about it. I put it at once into my skirt pocket and made my way along the corridor to Gran’s room. I went on tip-toe as the kitchen was right below, and I could hear Mother still sobbing quietly and Father trying to comfort her.

  Gran lay propped up on a bank of pillows, her face as white as her hair. Her eyes were closed. The tea was still warm in the cup by her bed. She had not drunk any. As I tried to release a few drops the bottle trembled in my hand and too much came out all at once.

  ‘Come on, Gran,’ I whispered, shaking her shoulder gently. Her eyes opened. ‘You’ve got to have a cup of tea. You know you like a nice cup of tea.’ She shook her head. ‘It’ll do you good. I made it specially for you. “Waste not, want not”. That’s what you always tell me, remember.’ A suggestion of a smile moved her lips and that was enough to encourage me. I put my arm around her neck and helped her to drink it down. She spilt some down her nightie, but she took almost half a cup before she fell back against the pillows. ‘That was nice, dear,’ she said. And she closed her eyes again. I left her and went back to my bedroom. I opened the bottle and smelt it. It smelt like minty cough mixture. I pondered again and again over the note. I do not know why, but I had absolute and complete faith in my friend Walter. I never doubted, not for one minute, that his medicine, his ‘elixir’, would work.

  It couldn’t have been more than an hour later when I heard Gran calling from her room. Will raced along the passage outside my door. Mother and Father were taking the stairs in twos with Humph close on their heels. By the time I reached Gran’s room they were all there. I was not at all surprised at what I saw. Gran was sitting up in her bed, her face still pale but her eyes bright and alert.

  ‘I had the strangest dream,’ she said looking somewhat bemused. ‘There was this old man bending over me. Dressed all in black he was, and with a handsome beard on him. He had earrings just like a pirate. I don’t usually like men with earrings. It’s not proper. Anyway, he told me I’d be quite all right just so long as I drank a cup of tea; and then he disappeared, vanished into thin air. Then soon after in comes Bess – it was you, dear, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, Gran,’ I said.

  ‘I thought so. And she told me to drink a cup of tea and so I did, and I’m right as rain now.’ Mother and Father and Will looked at each other in utter amazement. ‘I could eat a horse,’ Gran said, smiling, ‘honest I could.’

  ‘Sally perhaps?’ said Will, and we all laughed or cried – it was difficult to tell which.

  Again and again that night I coughed for my friend Walter, so much so that Mother came in to give me some cough medicine in the early hours. ‘You’ve been coughing a lot lately,’ she said. The cough linctus made me feel very sleepy, but I forced myself to stay awake. I tried calling him softly by name. ‘Walter! Sir Walter!’ But he never came. ‘I didn’t mean it, Walter,’ I said as sleep overcame me. ‘Honest I didn’t. Come back, please come back.’

  But he never came. I had banished my best friend, my only friend, and I had only myself to blame.

  CHAPTER 5

  DOCTOR RODERICK CAME FIRST THING THE NEXT morning, an old man with more hair growing out of his ears than on his head.

  ‘Remarkable,’ he said shaking his head as he came downstairs into the kitchen. ‘She’s as bright as a button. Quite remarkable.’ And he patted me on the head as he passed by. ‘You got her to take a cup of tea, your Mother tells me, Bess.’ I nodded. ‘Must’ve been something you put in it,’ he said, and everyone laughed except me. Little Jim squawked in his chair and bit harder on the edge of his bowl. ‘Still teething is he, Mrs Throckmorton?’ the doctor asked.

  ‘He’s got six now,’ said Mother proudly.

  ‘Six of his very own,’ said the doctor. ‘Well, that’s splendid. Splendid. That’s more than I have now, you know. A fine-looking boy you’ve got there Mr Throckmorton. Make a good farmer by the look of him.’

  Father nodded. ‘That’s if there’s anything left to farm, doctor,’ he said.

  ‘Hard times, eh?’ said the doctor.

  ‘Could be better,’ said Father.

  ‘Still, you’ve got your health,’ the doctor said. ‘And that’s the main thing. Without your health you can’t do anything.’

  ‘I suppose so, Doctor,’ said Father, but he did not sound convinced. The doctor sat down at the table beside me and wrote out a prescription. ‘She’s to take this four times a day, and she’s to stay in bed,’ he said. ‘And lots more of your tea, Bess. She needs lots of liquids.’ I smiled weakly.

  ‘Bess has got a bit of a cough, Doctor,’ said Mother. ‘Been coming on for some time. She was coughing all night last night, weren’t you dear?’

  ‘Better have a look at it then, whilst I’m here,’ said the doctor. And he got me to say ‘aaah’, and put a lolly stick on my tongue and peered deep into my mouth. He had lots of little purple veins all over his nose. ‘Looks healthy enough to me,’ he said after a moment or two. ‘Need some of your own medicine perhaps, Bess. The dust from the hay I shouldn’t wonder. A good cup of tea will help.’ He smiled at me. And sure enough his teeth were far too white and too even to be real. I’d never noticed before. Still, I thought, there’s not many people who admit to having false teeth. Gran would die if you even mentioned hers.

  Father accompanied the doctor to the door. ‘I’ve got to go to the bank this afternoon,’ he said, ‘so I’ll pick up the prescription when I’m in town.’

  ‘Soon as you can,’ said the doctor, and he was gone. Mother sent me upstairs a few minutes later with Gran’s breakfast tray. As I went past my room I noticed the door was open. I always shut it to keep Humph off my bed. Someone must be in there. I could see a shadow on the floor by the bed. Someone was sitting on my bed. Walter had come back after all! I put the tray down on the floor of the passage and rushed in.

  But it wasn’t Walter. It was Will. He was sitting cross-legged on my bed and he was reading Walter’s letter. Humph was on the bed beside him.

  ‘Well, little sister,’ he said, waving it at me. ‘What have you been up to, then? And who is this W.R. who wrote this letter?’ I’d forgotten to hide it away. What a fool I’d been! What an idiot! He picked up the bottle and opened it. ‘Smells of mint,’ he said. ‘And it’s one of my bottles from my lab. So it was you messing about down there, wasn’t it?’ I said nothing because there was nothing I could say. ‘I thought so. But why, that’s what I want to know? You’ve never showed any interest in chemistry before, have you? Something’s going on here, Bessy, and you’d better tell me, else I’ll take these downstairs and show them and I don’t think you’d want that, would you?’

  ‘You’ve got no right to be in here,’ I said. ‘It’s my room. I don’t come in your room, do I?’

  ‘I only came in to find out what Humph was up to,’ he said. ‘I saw him whining and scratching at your door. Thought that was a bit funny. So I opened the door and let him in. He came straight to your table and started sniffing at this letter. Don’t suppose I’d have noticed it otherwise. Now what’s it
all about? You can tell me. You can trust me. I promise I won’t tell. Cross my heart I won’t.’

  ‘You wouldn’t believe me anyway,’ I said. ‘You’d just think I was telling stories. You always think I’m telling stories.’ I was playing for time. I had run out of ideas. I’d promised Walter I wouldn’t tell anyone about him. He’d kept his side of the bargain and I’d keep mine. He was my secret friend, and like he’d said they’d think I was mad if I told them about him – and it could finish Gran off for good if she ever found that there was a ghost living with us in the house.

  Luckily, Humph chose this moment to take matters into his own hands (or paws, I suppose). He sprang off the bed and made for the open door and Gran’s breakfast tray outside in the passage. He had his nose in the toast before I could stop him. I ran after him and shouted to him to get off, which he did, but so clumsily that he blundered all over the breakfast tray sending everything scattering and crashing in all directions; and as I lunged for him he fled, tail between his legs, with a piece of toast still in his mouth. He met Mother and Father coming up the stairs.

  ‘What the dickens is going on up there?’ Mother said as the tea ran across the floorboards and began to trickle down the stairs towards her. As you can imagine I was in a very difficult position. To blame Will would have been like waving a red rag to a bull – he would have been bound to tell them everything there and then, just out of spite. So I blamed Humph instead.

  ‘It was Humph,’ I said, starting to pick myself up. ‘He ran right into me. Knocked me over. I couldn’t help it. Honest.’ I peeled a piece of toast off my elbow.

  ‘You all right, dear?’ said Mother running up the stairs with Father close behind. ‘I’ve said time and again that dog should be shut out the back.’ She was helping me up. ‘It’s dangerous for Gran. She’s always tripping over him. And he licks Little Jim like he’s a lollipop. It’s not healthy, and he’s always the wrong side of every door. He should stay outside.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ It was Gran calling from her room. ‘What’s going on out there?’

  ‘Nothing, dear,’ said Mother. ‘A little accident that’s all. No one’s hurt. Don’t you worry, we’ll bring you your breakfast in a minute.’ Will had said nothing so far, and I thought the danger was over. But then he saw his milk jug. It was the milk jug that made him do it – he told me as much later on. Miraculously it was the only thing that was broken, but unfortunately for me it was the milk jug Will made in pottery class at school and he’d given it to Mother for her birthday only a few weeks before. He was very, very proud of it.

  There were tears in his eyes as he bent down and picked up the pieces. He looked up at me and I knew right away what he was going to do. ‘Got something to show you, Father,’ he said. ‘In Bessy’s room. Come and look.’ And he got up and went into my room. Mother and Father followed him. I couldn’t stop him now. ‘Look,’ I heard him say. ‘There’s this letter and this . . .’ I dared not go in. I didn’t want to look.

  ‘What letter?’ said Father. ‘What are you rabbiting on about?’

  ‘But it was here, Father,’ said Will, a rising panic in his voice. ‘On the bed it was. Honest. And there was this little bottle too and it was full of green stuff.’ My heart rose. I understood at once what had happened, and I knew instinctively who had come to my rescue.

  ‘What bottle?’ I asked innocently as I went into my bedroom. Will was on all fours looking under the bed.

  ‘It was here! I know it was!’

  ‘Getting as bad as your sister, Will,’ said Father looking around the room. ‘Lives in a world of her own, don’t you Bessy? Always telling stories and making things up. Not like you to be fanciful, Will. Can’t see any bottle, can you, dear?’

  ‘All I can see,’ said Mother, ‘is that you haven’t made your bed yet, Bess. You promised me you’d keep your room tidier. You know I haven’t got time to clear up after you, not now, not with Little Jim to look after. I’ll tidy up that mess outside, if you tidy up in here.’ And she went over to open the window. ‘Smells of Humph in here, and tobacco smoke,’ she said sniffing the curtains. ‘You haven’t been smoking, have you Bess?’ I shook my head.

  ‘It’s Will that has a fag on the sly from time to time,’ said Father, ‘isn’t it Will?’ And he put his arm around Will’s shoulder. Will opened his mouth to deny it but didn’t even bother. No one would believe him and he knew it. ‘Still, no great harm in that,’ Father went on. ‘We all have one or two when we’re young just to try it. But best not to do it up here, Will. Not safe to smoke in bedrooms.’

  ‘Don’t you go encouraging him,’ said Mother. ‘It’s not safe to smoke anywhere. It’s a horrible habit and it kills you.’ And then Little Jim began crying downstairs and she ran out. Will kept looking over his shoulder at me as he left the room. He was as much bewildered as angry I think, though I know he’d have cheerfully killed me at that moment given half a chance. They were gone at last and I was alone in my room.

  I coughed loudly four times and my friend Walter appeared. He was leaning on the mantelpiece, the remains of a smile on his lips. He threw back his cloak. The letter was tucked in his belt and he had the bottle in his hand. ‘One day that dog of yours will be the cause of our undoing, Bess,’ he said with a laugh, and he puffed purposefully on his pipe. I put my finger to my lips for fear we would be overheard.

  ‘Where were you last night?’ I whispered. ‘I called you and called you.’

  ‘Your grandmother is well again I trust?’ he asked. I nodded. ‘I’m glad of it.’ He held up the bottle. ‘The elixir I discovered whilst I was a prisoner in the Tower. It took years of work to perfect it. They allowed me to use a shed underneath the wall for my experiments. There is something to be said for imprisonment. It is a life without distraction and concentrates the mind most wonderfully. I administered this medicine to my friends and family, even to my jailors, and they were glad of it.’

  ‘Why didn’t you come last night?’ I asked. ‘I only wanted to say sorry. I didn’t really mean all those things I said, and I wanted to thank you for saving Gran like you did.’

  ‘Sweet cousin,’ he said, putting his hands on my shoulders and kissing me on the forehead. ‘I cannot in truth be thanked for restoring to health one whom I myself brought so nearly to the point of death. You see before you a miserable fellow whose life was wasted in many fruitless schemes. They came to nothing and through mine own vanity too. In truth, I had hoped in my spirit life to improve myself, to mend my ways. But I see now my character is quite unredeemable. You were right indeed to scold me as you did, and you should not thank me now, cousin. I have repaired the damage I myself have caused, and even in so doing I have placed you again under threat of discovery. I had not thought to destroy the letter and the elixir. I had not thought they might be discovered nor even how you would explain it if they were. I am an old fool, cousin. I am a blundering, vain old fool, the same as I ever was. Blame not your brother, dear Bess, for he is much perplexed by what has passed. In truth I see in him something of myself as a boy – quick to temper and quick to tears, but he has a kind heart and will grow to a fine man.’

  ‘He’s a pig,’ I said. ‘Wasn’t my fault his jug broke. It was Humph. And he goes and tells everyone like that. Serves him right.’

  ‘The dog again,’ said Sir Walter. ‘That miserable cur follows me everywhere, even though I do not feed him any more. I had not thought a spirit has enough scent about him for a dog to follow.’

  ‘Probably the tobacco,’ I said. ‘I told you not to smoke in the house, and you said you wouldn’t.’

  ‘Indeed I did, cousin, and truly I meant to keep my word.’ Walter took the pipe out of his mouth and looked at it ruefully. ‘But I do it without thinking. ’Tis a habit of three hundred years or more, chick, and not easy to break. For certain it can no longer do me much harm.’ And he chuckled.

  ‘Last night I thought you had gone for ever,’ I said. ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘To
the river, for I had much to think on and it is a fine place to do it,’ he said; and then he looked at me long and hard. ‘I fear I must leave you, cousin. Whether it be the dog, the smell of tobacco or your brother Will, were I to stay here there can be little doubt that one day we will be discovered and that might prove grave indeed for your grandmother. I mean not to play on words, but it is apt enough. You know that I have come close to killing her once already. To stay would risk only a greater disaster. I shall meddle no more, sweet cousin. I had meant to stay and do you and your family some service if I could, but I may not risk another day here. I must be gone from this place before it is too late.’

  ‘No!’ I protested and too loudly.

  Walter held his finger to his lips. ‘It must be so, chick. If I go now, our secret is safe and no harm is done. I have tasted again the sweet air of my youth and I have found such a friend in you, dear Bess, that I do not wish to leave your side nor ever to leave this place; but it needs must be. It is not safe to stay, and besides, I have matters at home that call me back.’

  ‘Home?’ I said. ‘What home?’

  ‘Why, the Tower, cousin. I delude myself if I think otherwise. The Tower is my home. I have none other.’

  ‘Am I ever going to see you again?’ I asked, fighting to hold back my tears.

  ‘You know where you can find me,’ he said, ‘if ever you have need of me. You have but to come and I shall be there.’ I turned away from him and wiped my eyes. ‘You should be brave. It is I that should weep for it is I that must go. You have much to rejoice in here – a fine father and a loving mother, and a brother who also loves you, but who knows not yet how to say it or to show it. Little Jim loves only his food, but I would wager you will be the apple of his eye as the years pass.’ He took my chin in his hand and lifted it. ‘But I warn you, dear cousin. There are storms ahead. You will have need of all your courage. So no more tears.’