The Classic Morpurgo Collection (six novels)

by Michael Morpurgo

  I was sailing into trade winds which didn’t make for comfortable sailing, but I didn’t mind. It wasn’t only the winds that were blowing us along now anyway—and Kitty Four was flying—it was the emails that came in all the time from everyone at home, and from Dr Topolski too, everyone contributing to my new sense of wellbeing, of euphoria almost. I never saw my turtle again, but I’ve never forgotten him. I can still see his face gazing up at me, a kind face, old and wise. Sometimes I think that turtle saved my life.

  With every day that brought me closer to England, I kept asking them about Kitty, but all I got back was that there was no real news. They had one or two hopeful “irons in the fire,” whatever that meant. It didn’t sound very hopeful. To be honest, I thought they were just stringing me along, trying to keep my spirits up, knowing perfectly well that the last thing I needed to hear was bad news about Kitty—that they couldn’t find any trace of her, or worse, that they had discovered she was dead. Often I’d sit there down in the cabin, Dad’s lucky key cupped in my hand, wondering what had been so important about this key. What did it mean? Why had Kitty given it to Dad that day all those years before when they were parted? What was so special about it? He had always called it his lucky key. I’d hold it and squeeze it tight, and every time I’d wish on it, just as Dad used to wish on it. I wished I’d find Kitty alive and well in England and that I’d find out at last what the key was for.

  I’d be lying if I said that my new euphoria didn’t from time to time give way to times of sadness. There was still an ache inside me, left by the loss of my albatross, that would not go away. I thought of him so often. Every bird I saw reminded me of him, of the majesty of his flight, of his grace and his beauty. And sitting in my cockpit in a cold grey North Atlantic, I looked out and saw an albatross of a different kind, an albatross of the north, a gannet, diving down to fish, splicing the sea. He was magnificent, but not as magnificent as my albatross.

  “London Bridge is Falling Down”

  It was a good thing I was so buoyed up now and so determined, because in those last couple of thousand miles just about everything that could go wrong did go wrong. First of all, the North Atlantic turned out to be every bit as vicious and hostile as the Southern Ocean. Kitty Four took a terrible battering. And it wasn’t just one storm, it was a whole succession of them. We’d sail out of one and straight into another. We got knocked down three times in three days, and the last time was very nearly the end of the story.

  Not many single-handed sailors go over the side and live to tell the tale. I did. It was my own fault it happened. As Dad used to say, I was a silly chump. I was in the cockpit in a storm and I wasn’t harnessed in properly. Yes, I was tired. I hadn’t slept for a couple of days. But that’s no excuse. I was just a chump and very nearly a dead chump. I was caught completely unawares when the wave came. As the boat lurched violently I was catapulted overboard. Somehow I managed to grab a safety wire and just clung on to it. But Kitty Four was on her side and I was dunked in the ocean. I remember hearing the roar of the sea in my ears, and I knew that was always the last sound a drowning sailor ever hears. Then Kitty Four righted herself. She flipped up and I found myself flung back into the cockpit still in one piece, just. But I was nursing a broken arm—I knew it was broken at once because it was completely useless—and I was cursing myself loudly. You’re a lucky chump, a very lucky chump, I thought, when I’d stopped my cursing. My survival was down to Dad’s key, I had no doubt about it, it was entirely down to Dad’s lucky key.

  I didn’t feel any pain in my arm at first. It was too cold after my dunking in the freezing waters of the North Atlantic. But when I’d dried off and warmed up down below in the cabin, then it began to hurt like hell. I knew I’d need help, so I picked up the Satphone and rang home. Grandpa answered. I told him all I needed was a doctor to tell me what to do, and I’d manage. No arguments, Grandpa said, he was going to have me airlifted off. “You can’t sail a boat with a broken arm,” he said. I don’t think I’d ever shouted at Grandpa before (or since) but I did now. I told him that we were only fifty miles or so off the coast of England, off the Scilly Isles, which was less than a hundred miles from Falmouth; that Kitty Four and I were going to finish this thing together, and that I’d never speak to him again if he did it. Mum and Grandpa had a little talk about it—and five minutes later I had Dr Topolski on the phone. It turned out he was a doctor of medicine as well as a doctor of physics and engineering and just about everything else. He “examined” me by asking me dozens of questions. Then he talked me through how to make a splint, how to bandage it to my arm—not easy one-handed, but I did it.

  Of course it wasn’t just me that was beaten up and hurting. It was Kitty Four too. Not the boat herself, she was fine. She’d just rocked and rolled, and bobbed up again, like she always did. She’d been built to be indestructible and unsinkable, and she was. It was all the bits and pieces that were beginning to fail as we neared the English Channel. Neither the generator nor the desalinator was reliable any more. The self-steering was in pieces. I’d tried mending it, but with one arm I couldn’t do it, so it meant I had to be up there in the cockpit almost all the time. In fact I’d have had to be there anyway, because there was a lot of shipping about now, more than I’d had on the whole trip, and for a little yacht, for any yacht, that’s dangerous. I could see them, but in seas like this I’d be lucky if they saw me before they ran me down.

  I didn’t tell anyone how bad things were really getting. I knew how Grandpa would react, how upset Mum would be. Instead I wrote chirpy emails, sounded deliberately upbeat and jokey on the Satphone. I think maybe that having to sound chirpy was very good for me. The truth was that I was now really worried that I might not be able to make it. My arm pained me every time I moved. Every sail change I made was sheer agony. I came to a decision.

  I emailed home saying I’d put into Scilly, and not go on to Falmouth. After all Scilly was England. It was as good a port as any to end the first half of my voyage. Mum phoned me back. She said she and Grandpa had thought about it and they were flying over to England as soon as possible, and they would let me know when they’d landed. I said I didn’t want any fuss, and that they weren’t to tell anyone what had happened. I was already dreading a welcoming flotilla coming out to meet me. Grandpa said that even with no website up there, there was huge interest in the papers everywhere.

  “Just don’t tell them I’m coming into Scilly,” I told him. “Promise me, Grandpa.” He promised, but I wasn’t convinced. I knew the temptation of having “Stavros Boats” on the television news in big letters, and his little Allie, the apple of his Greek eye, standing on deck and waving, would be too much to resist. To be honest I expected the worst, but I’d come to terms with it. Maybe it would be quite fun anyway, and even if I didn’t like it, I could stand back and smile through gritted teeth—after all, I’d done that before in Hobart.

  So there we were the next day tootling along with a bit of a limp, but happy as Larry (I do sound like Dad sometimes I know, but I love the phrases he used. I inherited them. They’re mine now.) All the storms were behind us. The forecast was set fair all the way to Scilly. Sunshiney day, clear skies, and not a sign of a welcoming flotilla—amazing, Grandpa had kept quiet. I had just sighted land, not much land, but land all the same, and it was the land I wanted to see—the Scilly Islands. I toasted the occasion with a mug of hot chocolate. The Scillies looked like little grey dumplings lying there low in the sea, about ten miles off. We were going nicely, about five knots. It was early morning. I was so nearly there. I’d seen a whale, or perhaps a basking shark, in the distance the day before and was looking out for him again. What I saw instead was a school of porpoises playing off my starboard bow, giving me quite a show. This was the kind of unexpected, spontaneous welcome I really wanted.

  But I was enjoying it so much that I wasn’t keeping a good look-out all around. That was when a sickening shudder shook the boat. She reared up and rolled, and then crashed
down into the sea, where she stopped dead, as if the life had suddenly gone out of her. The tiller was light in my hand, so I knew at once that we’d lost the rudder. Then I saw pieces of it floating away astern of us. I thought at first we must have hit the whale, but we hadn’t. The dark shape I saw lurking just beneath the surface rose then and showed itself. It was a dirty orange with flat sides and sharp edges. A container, a lousy stinking container. I cursed that container ship wherever she was, then I cursed all container ships wherever they were. Cursing over, I checked below. At least we weren’t holed. We hadn’t lost buoyancy. We were rudderless and helpless, but still afloat. I hoped we could drift in on the tide at first, but a quick look at my chart confirmed what I already knew, that there were rocks all around Scilly, thousands and thousands of them.

  I had no choice. I used the Satphone and called out the lifeboat. Within half an hour they were alongside and threw me a line. So with a busted rudder and a busted arm I arrived on the Scilly Isles, came into St Mary’s Harbour, towed in ignominiously by the lifeboat. Because of that, of course, there was a lot of interest, and very soon they found out who I was. No flotilla, thank goodness, but any hope I might have had of slipping in unnoticed was gone. They whisked me up to the hospital to have my arm looked at and told me I had to stay there the night, but I said I didn’t want to. I’d had a better offer. Matt Pender, the lifeboat coxswain, said he could put me up at home with his family. So after my arm was set and plastered he came to fetch me, and we went straight to a pub where they feted me as if I was Ellen McArthur. “Proper little hero” they called me. Everyone made a fuss of me and I loved it. I tried phoning home, but no one answered. They’d probably left already. I didn’t mind. I was so happy to have got to England, so happy the boat was in one piece, just about.

  I did some TV and radio interviews the next day, got them over with. Then I went down to the jetty to tidy Kitty Four before she went off for repairs. There were crowds all around her, dozens of people photographing her, and she was just bobbing up and down loving it all, taking her bows.

  I waited about till everyone had gone before I went on board. Then we had a quiet time together, just Kitty Four and me. I emailed Mum, emailed Dr Topolski, told everyone that repairs would take a couple of weeks at least, that I would catch the ferry the following day from Scilly to Penzance, and then the night train to London Paddington getting in at seven o’clock on the Wednesday morning. If they were there by then, they could meet me, and we could go off to Bermondsey and start looking for Kitty right away. I told them something else too, something I knew neither of them would want to hear. I’d decided that once Kitty Four was repaired, once my arm was better, I would be sailing Kitty Four home. I’d do the whole thing just as I’d planned, the whole circumnavigation, and nothing anyone could say would stop me. “I mean it, Grandpa,” I wrote. Before I left Kitty Four I got an email back.

  “Whatever you say, Allie. See you at Paddington seven a.m. Wednesday morning. There’s a big clock there on platform one. Meet you there. Love Mum and Grandpa.” They’d given in just like that. I couldn’t believe it.

  Matt and the whole lifeboat crew came to see me off on the ferry to Penzance. I’d never been hugged so much in all my life. I liked it, I liked it a lot. I had to wait around a while until I could get on the night train for London. So I was quite tired by the time I got into my seat. I was getting out my laptop. I wanted to send another email to Mum. When I looked up, there was this bloke sitting opposite smiling at me. We got talking as you do. His name was Michael McLuskie.

  The rest you know already, just about all of it, anyway. What you don’t know is what happened when I’d finished telling him my story, when we got into Paddington Station the next morning. The train came into platform one, and we got out together, Michael carrying my rucksack as well as his. (He wasn’t just good-looking, he was thoughtful too, still is—mostly.) I could see Mum and Grandpa under the clock waiting, looking around for me.

  “That them?” Michael asked.

  “That’s them,” I said.

  “So it’s true, all if it, everything you told me. None of it made up?”

  “None of it.”

  “Then,” he said, looking straight at me, and meaning every word he said, “then you are the most incredible person I’ve ever met, and I’d like to see you again, if that’s alright.”

  I don’t know to this day what made me say it. “Look,” I said. “I’m hungry. Why don’t you come and have breakfast with us, with Mum and Grandpa and me?” He didn’t say no, which was why, after Mum and Grandpa had each hugged me again and again, and after we’d all cried and laughed Cretan style under the clock at Paddington, we all piled into a taxi, and went off to their hotel for breakfast.

  They seemed, I thought, a little nervous. Grandpa kept looking away whenever I caught his eye. I thought he was cross with me because I’d insisted on doing the whole circumnavigation. He’d always been so much against it. Mum couldn’t seem to find her voice at all, just sat there patting my hand fondly. I exchanged glances with Michael who shrugged with his eyes, as only he can do.

  It was one of those huge modern hotels, made entirely of glass, and was right on the river. We walked into the breakfast room which was full of laid up tables, all of them empty except for a large round table near the window. Sitting around it were what looked like a family with a couple of kids and all of them were looking at me very intently, which was odd, I thought. And Mum and Grandpa weren’t leading us to one of the empty tables, as I expected they would. Instead they were leading us directly towards the round one by the window. “And this,” Mum said to them, not trying to disguise the pride in her voice, “this is Allie, my daughter Allie. Arthur’s daughter, Allie.”

  Still they stared, and then, one by one the stares turned to smiles. “I think you had better introduce yourselves,” Mum went on.

  “Shall I start?” I knew who he was before he opened his mouth. I recognised him from his photograph. “I’m Marc, Marc Topolski. From up there, remember? And this is my family, Marianne, Molly and Martha, known in the neighbourhood back home in Vermont as the M&Ms.” I couldn’t speak, partly because I was so choked up. But there was another reason too.

  Even as he was talking, I was looking at the old lady sitting next to him. Her smile was Dad’s smile, from the eyes, from the heart.

  “And I’m Kitty,” she said. “Your dad’s sister.”

  She could hardly speak either, but smiled through her tears. “You got Arthur’s key, dear?” she said. “The one I gave him?” I took it off from around my neck and gave it to her. There was a small wooden box on the table in front of her, carved and painted with red and white flowers. She turned the key in the lock. It fitted. She smiled up at me again. She turned it, then she went on turning it, again and again, which seemed strange. Then she opened the lid, and I understood everything. The box played music. It was a musical box. And the tune it played was London Bridge is Falling Down. We listened until it slowed right down, and then finished mid-tune.

  “And that,” said the old lady pointing out at the river, and I noticed now that she too had a kind of American accent, “that is London Bridge, and it isn’t falling down. I was born just down the road in Bermondsey. It’s where your dad was born too. My mother and father were killed in a bombing raid in the war. This musical box was all that was left of our home. We were in the same orphanage together, Arthur and me. We loved listening to this, over and over. We’d listen to it for hours. Then they took your dad away. I gave him the key, and I told him I wouldn’t play our tune again until he brought the key back. Then I would wind it up for him and we would listen to it together—I was the eldest you see, I always did the winding up. I never heard it again until today. It’s yours now, Allie. And if you have children one day, then maybe you’ll pass it on to them, and you’ll tell them the story of how in the end the key found the musical box and the musical box found the key.”

  I was still unable to make sense of i
t all. “But how did they find you?” I asked. “I don’t understand.”

  “That was your astronaut friend here,” said my Aunty Kitty. “He went on television in the US when he came down from his space travels and told the whole world about you, this amazing eighteen-year-old girl from Australia called Allie Hobhouse, sailing single-handedly around the world on a little boat called Kitty Four, sailing all the way to England to find her father’s long lost sister to fulfil a promise she’d made to her father on his death bed. The father, he said, was called Arthur Hobhouse, his sister, Kitty Hobhouse. Anyone who can help, phone in. So I did. You see, when they sent your dad off to Australia all those years ago, a lifetime ago, they sent me to Canada. I got lucky. I landed up with a lovely family in Niagara-On-the-Lake. I live there still right by the shore in the same house I was brought up in. You must come and see it sometime.”

  I noticed then a copy of Dad’s story in front of her, right by her bowl of cornflakes.

  “Have you read it yet?” I asked.

  “I only just got it,” she said. “Trouble is, my eyes aren’t very good at reading any more. Maybe you could read it to me after breakfast.”

  So that’s what I did, an hour or so later. I read it to them, sitting there overlooking London Bridge and the Thames.

  * * *

  “‘The story of Arthur Hobhouse’,” I began. “‘Arthur Hobhouse is a happening. I should begin at the beginning, I know that. But the trouble is, I don’t know the beginning. I wish I did…’“

  Now you’ve read the book

  Now you’ve read the book, I want you to know something. The two stories we wrote were never intended to be published. We each of us wrote our story simply as a record of what had happened, first to my father, Arthur Hobhouse, and then to me. I thought long and hard about whether to publish. This is after all a family story. How much you tell the world about your family is a delicate matter for everyone concerned. But the family is happy about it, as I am, because our stories, Dad’s and mine, had already been acted out in public, to some extent at least. And certainly, had this not happened, our story could not possibly have ended as well as it did. In other words our private family story was never totally private in the first place. It was in the newspapers, on the radio, on television. But the whole of our story has never been fully told. And that’s why we all thought that it should be. Dad would have wanted it, I know, because he believed that we live on only as long as our story is told. I believe that too.