The Classic Morpurgo Collection (six novels)

by Michael Morpurgo

  “Will? Is it really you?” Grandma breathed – she could barely speak.

  “Course it’s him,” Grandpa said, walking straight up to me. “Who else would it be?” He put his arms round me then, and held me. Both of us were choking back our tears. “I always knew you were alive, Will. I always knew.” Then he was holding me at arm’s length, and looking me up and down. “You’re a sight for sore eyes, Will,” he said. “You’ve grown too. Young man almost. Nearly as tall as me, you are. Isn’t he, Grandma?” But Grandma had her hands over her face and was sobbing. I went to her at once and hugged her. She felt thinner than I had remembered her.

  “What did I do to you, Will?” she cried. “What did I do?” I felt her head heavy on my shoulder. “If I hadn’t sent you off like that, on that stupid, stupid holiday. If only I hadn’t done it, she would still be with us. You’d still have a mother.”

  “She blames herself, Will,” Grandpa said. “Ever since, she’s always blamed herself.”

  Until that moment I think I had always been a little frightened of Grandma. But now I knew she needed comforting, that I was the only one who could do it. I chose my words carefully.

  “You’re wrong, Grandma,” I told her. “It was the tidal wave that killed Mum, not you. I don’t know who made that happen, Grandma, but you didn’t.”

  Dr Geraldine waited for a while before she came over and shook them both by the hand. “I’m the one who phoned you. I don’t know if you remember me, but I’m Geraldine,” she said. “Welcome back. It’s lovely to see you again.”

  “We remember you, of course we do. And we remember this place too, so well.” Grandma was still trying to collect herself as she spoke. “We remember the little orang-utans. We went to lots and lots of places along the river, delivering those leaflets. But this one we never forgot. We’ve talked about it ever since, haven’t we, Grandpa?”

  But Grandpa wasn’t listening. He was looking up at Oona, who had wandered across towards us. “So this is her then, the one who saved your life. How d’you go about thanking an elephant, Will?”

  “You just tell her,” I told him. “She’ll understand.”

  And that’s what Grandpa did. He reached up and laid his hand gently on her trunk. “Thank you. Thank you.” He said it softly, looking her right in the eye. He turned back to me then. “Don’t hardly need a tractor any more do you, Will, not with a giant like this for a friend?” He laughed at that. I knew he was only laughing to hide his emotion, but even so I couldn’t laugh with him. I couldn’t even smile, and that troubled me.

  I felt troubled all evening as the four of us sat eating our supper in Dr Geraldine’s house. “We’ve looked you up on Google, Geraldine,” Grandpa was saying. “Will taught us to do all that. You remember, Will? That’s how we found out all about the orang-utans and the orphanage. To be honest, the last time we came, I don’t think we understood much of what was going on here. We had our minds on other things, I suppose. Quite a set-up you’ve got, Geraldine. Must have taken a lot of work, and … well, dedication. Yes, that’s the word I was looking for, dedication. Marvellous what you’ve done. Marvellous.”

  Grandma seemed to have quite recovered her composure by now, and was becoming more and more her old self as the evening went on, more the Grandma I remembered. She was doing most of the talking, interrupting Grandpa, contradicting him. It was all very familiar. Only now I didn’t have Mum there to wink back at me across the table in solidarity. I missed her suddenly, achingly, and was finding it very difficult to concentrate on what Grandma was telling me.

  “Will?” she was saying, “Will, are you listening to me? We’ve got so much to tell you, about the farm, about your new school. It’s difficult to know where to begin. But it’s all going to be fine, you’ll see. I’ve arranged everything. Your old room’s waiting for you, just as you left it.”

  I could hear Oona rumbling and groaning outside, letting me know she was there, reminding me, not allowing me to forget. I was hoping she would fart. It would be the perfect moment, I thought. Amazingly, just as I was thinking that, she did it, one of her longest and loudest. Dr Geraldine’s eyes were pleading with me not to laugh, and I knew why – she wouldn’t be able to help herself if I did. I contained myself, just.

  “What on earth was that?” Grandma said, her eyes wide with alarm.

  “Oona,” I told her. “It’s only Oona, Grandma. It’s how she talks.”

  “Oh dear, oh deary dear. She gave me a turn, quite a turn. Now, as I was saying,” she went on, “before the elephant interrupted, everything will be just as you want it, Will. Do you know what I did before we came away? I rang up the local school and told them all about you. The head teacher sounded very nice. She can’t wait to have you there. They’re over the moon. Lovely uniform too – striped blazers, maroon and black. Very smart, isn’t it, Grandpa? You’ll like it, Will. Before you know it you’ll have lots of new friends. You’re quite a celebrity back home in England, you know. In fact you’re quite a celebrity all over the world, come to think of it.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. I couldn’t understand what she was talking about.

  “Well, you’ve been in all the newspapers, dear, Sun, Mirror, The Times even. Front page too. We’ve saved all the press cuttings, every one of them. You’re big news. It’s a big story, all about how that elephant ran off with you when the tsunami came in, and about you being lost in the jungle all this time. ‘Little Tarzan’ they’re calling you. And when we get to the airport tomorrow, there’ll be photographers, Will, dozens of them. Isn’t that exciting? I wanted to bring them here to see you, you know, with all the orang-utans and the elephant; but Grandpa said no, said you’d need a bit of time to get used to things. I’m still not sure he was right. But anyway, we’ve got to be back by six o’clock tomorrow evening for a press conference at the airport. The embassy in Jakarta have arranged it all. Very nice man, the ambassador, wasn’t he Grandpa?”

  “Tomorrow?” I said. “We’re going tomorrow?”

  “Yes, dear. We must,” she replied, reaching across then, and touching my hair. “Your hair, it’s the same colour as your father’s, Will – a little lighter maybe, but that’d be the sun. He had his long like yours – well, not as long as yours maybe – before he went into the army. But they wouldn’t let him have it long in there, would they, Grandpa? He hated having it cut off, just hated it. They’re still fighting that war in Iraq, you know. It’s all madness. Young soldiers dying, and all for nothing.”

  Her voice was trembling now. “And they’re all sons, and brothers, daughters, and husbands, every one of them. Don’t mind me,” she said, wiping her eyes, “I’ll be fine in a moment.” Grandpa put his hand on her shoulder to comfort her. It was a while before she could bring herself to go on. “Where was I? Oh yes. Your hair, Will. I mean, we’ll have to get you a haircut, you know, before you go back to school.”

  “Why?” I said, and I spoke sharply, more sharply than I’d intended. “I don’t need a haircut, Grandma.”

  Everyone was looking at me. I knew I’d upset her. I said nothing else all evening, because I didn’t trust myself.

  That last night I went to sit down outside on the step with Oona. I couldn’t sleep – I didn’t want to. I think I talked to her all night long, speaking all my thoughts and feelings as they came tumbling into my head, as I always had. There was never anyone else I could talk to like that, and I knew there never would be. I wanted that night to last for ever, for morning never to come. But it did, all too soon.

  We had a hurried breakfast together the next morning, but I didn’t feel like eating a thing. Oona was waiting for me outside all the while. When the time came to say goodbye, it felt to me as if I was betraying her, abandoning her. All I wanted to do was get it over quickly. I couldn’t bear to look at her. I just closed my eyes and hugged her trunk. “I want you to stay here, Oona,” I whispered. “If you come down to the boat with me, I’ll cry. And I don’t want to cry.” When I opened my eyes,
I saw Other One at the edge of the forest, watching.

  I left Oona and walked away, down towards the jetty. Everyone was there, everyone who worked at the orphanage. They were all lined up there, all the foster mothers with the little orang-utans in their arms. I found Mani walking alongside me, and then Charlie was there too, holding my hand all the way, gripping it tight. I wanted to stop and say goodbye to Bart and Tonk, but I didn’t dare, because I knew I couldn’t hold myself together for much longer. But Tonk reached out as I passed by and grabbed my arm. It was a while before his foster mother could persuade him to let go of me.

  I think it was then, as Tonk was trying to cling on to me, that I changed my mind. As Dr Geraldine came to say her goodbyes, I stood up on tiptoe and whispered to her. “I’m an elephant’s child. I belong here with Oona, with the orang-utans, with you. I’m staying. I’ll be your eyes and ears in the jungle.”

  I turned to Grandpa and Grandma then. I could see at once in their faces that both of them understood what I had in mind, what I was going to do.

  “I’m sorry, Grandpa, sorry, Grandma. But this is my home now,” I told them. Grandma reached out to me, pleading with me. But Grandpa put his arms round her and held her.

  “You stay, Will,” he said, his eyes filled with sadness. “If it’s where you want to be, then stay. Be happy. Grandma and me, we’ll be happy, if we know you are.”

  I turned away and ran from them then, back down the jetty. Oona was waiting for me, where I had left her outside Geraldine’s house. She saw me coming, and was kneeling for me already. I was up and on to her neck in a trice, and she was striding out across the lawn, and then we were into the jungle, Other One swinging through the trees above us, and we were running now, running wild.

  Postscript

  Written by Will’s grandfather January 1st, 2009

  I wish with my whole being that this story had never happened at all. But it did happen. And as it turned out, while it is a story that began with a tragedy, it has been in so many ways the most joyous, certainly the most important happening of my entire life, and that’s in over sixty-five years. We lost a dear son, then a wonderful daughter-in-law, and we very nearly lost Will too, our grandson. But miraculously he survived, and we found one another again. Out of sorrow can come sweetness.

  Then almost as soon as we’d found him again, it seemed we might be losing him, this time for ever. Once he’d disappeared into the jungle with Oona that day, his grandmother and I could not bring ourselves to leave. We made a decision, as it turned out, the best decision of our lives, we think. The long and the short of it is that we went off home to England, back to Devon, for a couple of months to sell up the farm. Then we came back here to make our lives with Geraldine and her orphan orang-utans. We wanted to be as near as we could to Will.

  Geraldine always said she was sure he’d be back, and she was right. Come back he did, and he does, bringing in orphaned orang-utans from the jungle so that they can be cared for here at the orphanage. His grandmother became a minder – she’s fostered three of them now, trained them up to go out into the jungle again, to be wild again. She’s on her fourth. She loves it, and she does a fine job of it too – she was always good with orphan lambs back on the farm. And as for me, I bury myself in all the administration and fundraising for the orphanage, working alongside Geraldine. This is home for us now.

  Will comes back as and when he needs to. He’s over fifteen now, not a boy any more. Each time he comes, he stays for a few days, and tells us a little more about his great escape from the tsunami, and of the months he spent in the jungle with Oona. Some of it I could see he didn’t really want to talk about. I think it still hurt him too much. But bit by bit he told us more and more.

  It wasn’t Will’s idea that his story should be told, it was Geraldine’s. We were all there sitting around one evening, chatting after supper and Scrabble, Will leaning up against Grandma’s knee, Oona’s eye looking in at the window as usual. “I’ve been thinking, Will,” Geraldine began. “I think your story should be told; written down, I mean. It should be put in a book so people can read it. It’s an important story, Will, a story everyone in the world should know, because it’s full of hope and determination. And we need that. Someone should write it. It would be a very different kind of a book, because the end is still being decided, and that’s because it’s a living story that’s still going on. The book could be part of its own story, so to speak, it could change how things turn out, how the story ends.”

  “I think you should write it, Grandpa,” Will said. “You used to do a bit of writing, didn’t you?”

  “Only a little weekly column for the local paper,” I told him. “I can’t write a book.”

  “Course you can,” Grandma said, “you’re a good writer, and what’s more you’re the only one who can do it. I can’t write for toffee, and Will’s always coming and going on that elephant, so he can’t do it, can he? You know Will better than anyone, excepting that elephant perhaps. You know both the worlds he’s lived in, all the important people in his life. Go on, Grandpa, you can do it. Keep you out of mischief.”

  I was warming to the idea all the time they were speaking, but still unsure of myself. “What d’you really think, Will?” I asked him. “It’s your story.”

  “Go for it,” Will said, smiling up at me. “There’s no one else I’d want to do it. I’ll tell you everything you need to know, Grandpa, everything. Geraldine’s right, people have to know what’s going on out there in the jungle, before it’s too late. You tell them, Grandpa. But when you write it, I want you to be me, to tell my story as I lived it, as if you were me. Can you do that?”

  “I can try,” I said.

  Will looked up at Oona at the window.

  “She speaks with her eyes, Grandpa. She says, write the book. Tell them how it was, how it is. She’s fine with it. So am I.”

  I began writing the next morning.

  Author’s Note

  Several events seem to have come together and compelled me to write this book. Many years ago, sitting on my bed, my mother first read me ‘The Elephant’s Child’ from Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories.

  I loved that story with a passion, I still do, and as a consequence I have loved elephants all my life. Later I read for myself Kipling’s Jungle Book. I wasn’t a great reader, but this was one of those rare books I felt I was actually living as I read it. So in the back of my mind, ever since I began writing books, I have always harboured the idea that one day I might try to write a story about a boy lost in the jungle and living wild, perhaps with an elephant as a companion. But I could never find the way of making such a story my own, never felt that it could be anything other than a dim echo of Kipling’s two great stories. The truth is, I suppose, that I never felt compelled to write it.

  Then a series of tragic historical happenings conspired to persuade me that this was a book I had to write, and that I could write. I discovered that at the present rate of attrition, orang-utans would not survive in the wild for more than five years, destruction of habitat being the main cause of this genocide. I discovered, too, that there is an extraordinary woman who has spent her whole life living in the rainforest, trying to save and then rehabilitate orphan orang-utans.

  Then, on Boxing Day 2004, the Asian tsunami hit the coasts of Indonesia and Sri Lanka, killing hundreds of thousands of people. I learned that elephants and other animals seemed to sense the coming of the tsunami long before people did, many of them running up into the jungle, to high ground, to save themselves. And I heard the true story of an English boy, on holiday with his family, who was on an elephant ride along the beach when the tsunami came in, and whose life was saved when the elephant he was riding took fright and ran off into the jungle. It was a story of survival against all odds, a story of hope amidst the horror of a disaster that had such cruel consequences for the victims and their families, and for the countries and the people affected by it.

  All this was happening at the sa
me time as the six-year war in Iraq. The number of civilian casualties in the Iraq war is still fiercely debated, with some studies estimating the dead at more than half a million, and others denying such a shocking statistic. But whatever figure is right, it seems certain that at least 100,000 ordinary Iraqis – not soldiers – were killed between 2003 and 2006. We know much more accurately how many soldiers have died: to date, about 3,000 Americans and 200 British, with many thousands more injured and maimed.

  Somehow these dreadful events, as well as those favourite stories of my childhood, fused together to inspire Running Wild. Now there seemed a real reason to write it, a need even.

  Maybe, though, none of these was the true seed-corn of this story. Maybe it was a poster on the wall of my classroom when I was ten, a poster of the poem ‘The Tyger’, written and illustrated by William Blake. I used to look at it a lot when lessons became boring, which they often did. I think it was the only poem I knew by heart when I was young, and one of the most powerful I’ve ever read.

  Michael Morpurgo, May 2009

  Post postscript

  Many of you may want to know more about these real events, about the whole background to the making of Running Wild. So, in brief:

  The Iraq War

  Iraq is an Arab republic in South West Asia and is bordered to the north by Turkey, to the west by Syria and Jordan, to the south by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Persian Gulf, and to the east by Iran. Iraq is a fairly young country, only created in 1921 by the British Government. Iraq used to be part of a much larger region, ruled by the Turks, called The Ottoman Empire. When the Ottoman Empire fell, British rule took over – until Iraq was given independence in 1932. A number of different governments controlled the country after that, until Saddam Hussein seized power in 1979. The UK and USA supported him because he was helping them to fight a neighbouring country, Iran. But it was quickly apparent that Saddam Hussein was a ruthless tyrant. He used terror to suppress all opposition. However, when Iraq invaded Kuwait for its oil in 1991, many countries – including the US and UK – joined together to force Saddam Hussein’s army out of Kuwait, in what has come to be called the Gulf War.