Michael Morpurgo: War Child to War Horse

‘There’s lots more like this,’ Belinda said. Piet snatched the letter out of my hand. ‘You shouldn’t be reading it,’ he said, and there were tears in his voice. ‘It’s private.’

That’s when Piet spotted the photograph lying there in the trunk in among the letters. He reached down and picked it up.

‘It’s their wedding,’ he said. ‘That’s him, our real father, in the uniform. And that’s our mum.’

We stared at it in silence.

‘She looks so beautiful,’ Belinda whispered.

‘That’s private too,’ Piet said, as he dropped the photograph and the letter back into the trunk, and shut the lid.

I should never have said it, but I did. ‘That letter, it looked dry, it felt dry,’ I said. ‘If that one was dry, they’ll all be dry.’

That’s how we got the fire going, Mum, with your letters. So that’s my first confession. I’m not sure even now exactly what made us do such a terrible thing. Make no mistake, we all knew it was terrible, not just me. Piet didn’t want to do it. I’ve got to tell you that. But I talked him round. I persuaded him that burning your letters wouldn’t really matter because they couldn’t be that important. After all, why would they be left in a trunk in the basement if they were? Eventually he gave way, but only reluctantly and because, like Belinda and me, he really wanted to get that fire lit and the cauldron bubbling.

We all wanted that, but if I’m honest I think there was another reason too. There were things in that letter, and probably in all the others, that I didn’t want to hear about or even know about. I prefer to think of course that after failing so often to get a fire lit, we burned the letters in the trunk because they were our last hope. Anything that would burn was all right. But I know now that wouldn’t be entirely true. What is true is that if we hadn’t burned them, none of the rest of this would have happened.

Remember when we were a little older and you used to read us those C. S. Lewis books, the Narnia books? And how, although you loved them, I never really got on with them? Well, maybe what happened next was our Lion, Witch and Wardrobe moment. Only we didn’t walk through the back of a bedroom cupboard into a never-never land and discover a rather goody-two-shoes lion walking about – I could never believe in that lion or the never-never land either. Our Narnia was real bricks and mortar, and we didn’t get to it through a cupboard, but through a wall.

Piet was kneeling down, ready to light the letters we’d piled in the fireplace, and Belinda and I were scouting around for any bits of wood we could find – I broke up an empty tea chest, I remember. And there was our old playpen already in pieces, so we used that. The letters caught fire at once, and within moments there was smoke billowing out into the basement. Soon we were all coughing and choking, frantically trying to wave the smoke away. Piet saw it first because he was closer to the fireplace than we were.

‘It’s not going up the chimney at all,’ he spluttered. I noticed then that he was leaning forward, hand over his mouth, peering into the chimney. ‘It’s going out the back. The smoke, it’s going out through the bricks at the back of the fireplace. Look!’

Crouching down, through the clearing smoke, we could see that he was right. Piet had picked up the old chair leg he’d been using as a poker and began prodding at the bricks. ‘They’re loose,’ he said. ‘You can see them, they’re moving – look!’

Now he was not just prodding, he was poking at them hard. That was when there was a sudden avalanche of bricks and the whole back wall behind the fireplace fell away. We were looking out through a huge hole into the bomb site beyond.

The bomb site next door had that high chain-link fence on the street side of it, remember? The sign read ‘Keep Out’. You told us again and again never to climb the fence and go in there, that the walls were dangerous and could collapse at any moment, that there might even be unexploded bombs. More than once you told us about Malcolm, the teenage boy from down the street who used to go climbing the walls in there before the fence was put up, and how he’d fallen and broken his neck and how his legs didn’t work any more – you pointed him out once in his wheelchair outside the corner shop. So Piet and I had never dared venture in there.

Belinda had though. She’d crawled in lots of times, she said, through a hole in the fence, and nothing had happened to her. And I’d stood there often enough, gazing into the bomb site from the street, fingers hooked into the fence, just longing to go in and explore. Now was our chance. More than a chance. That hole in the wall was an open invitation.

Once we’d scrambled through the hole and out into the bomb site we found we were not overlooked at all. We were well hidden from the road by the ruins and the thick undergrowth and trees, which seemed to be sprouting everywhere, even out of the walls themselves. The place was like a jungle and there was no one in it but us. Belinda discovered another fireplace, just like ours in the basement of the ruins of the house adjoining ours. We knew we couldn’t light a fire for fear of discovery, but we had our cauldron and our hats and our ‘Bubble, bubble’ spell. We’d look for frogs and toads, find whatever we could and then imagine the rest, she said. We got lucky and found a frog and a few beetles and caterpillars. We managed to drag our cauldron through the hole, set it in the fireplace in the basement of the bombed-out house, and very soon we had collected enough hopping and wriggling and crawling things to make a proper witches’ spell. But there was no water in the cauldron and no fire. We’d have to see if the spell would work without.

So there we sat, the three of us, in our witches’ hats. We held hands around the cauldron, closed our eyes and chanted our ‘Bubble, bubble’ witches’ ditty. Then, believing in these dark powers as hard as we could (the technique for me was much the same as praying, it had to be done with eyes squeezed shut), we put spells on all the people we hated. Belinda chose Miss Cruickshank because she was always picking on her in class for having inky fingers or a blunt pencil. She turned her into a frog – it would serve her right, she said, because she had poppy eyes. Piet chose Ma Higgins at the corner shop who we were sure cheated us whenever we went in to buy three pennyworth of lemon sherbets or humbugs or liquorice. She had a wart on her nose and he used his spell to make her grow at least twenty more. As for me, I chose Aunty B because she kept saying that Piet and I should be more grateful to our stepfather, that he was a much better father than our real dad because our real dad had gone off and left us. I knew that was a lie. So I decided to put my witch’s spell on her. She had a big nose anyway. My spell would make her nose grow longer and longer, just like Pinocchio’s when he told fibs. We sat there, eyes squeezed, for ages, until it came on to rain. Then we decided it was time to let the little creatures go and we went back through the hole into our basement, dragging the cauldron with us.

The days that followed were disappointing. Miss Cruickshank did not turn into a frog. Ma Higgins still only had one wart, and Aunty B’s nose stayed just about the same. Our spells hadn’t worked. We knew exactly why things hadn’t gone as well as they should have done: we needed to light a real fire, to boil the water so that it bubbled and so that we could do the whole spell properly. Piet said that maybe it was also because we were being mean with our spells, that witches didn’t have to do bad things, that maybe we could make good wishes come true using the same spells.

In any case, we knew we couldn’t light a fire because we’d be seen. So for quite a while, even though we went on playing in the bomb site, we forgot about being witches and casting spells. Instead we played war games among the ruins – that was my idea. I liked war games and I liked hide-and-seek. So I decided one of us would be a German and go and hide while the other two counted to a hundred. Then the German would be hunted down and killed – shot or bayoneted. Bayoneted was best. I liked it when it was Piet’s turn to be the German, and then Belinda and I could hunt him. But my turn always came round. Being the German could be a bit scary. One afternoon Belinda and Piet just left me hiding there in the bomb site and it got darker and darker and they never found me. I was there for hours. Afterwards they told me they’d given up because they couldn’t find me, but I reckoned they were just having me on. I sulked for a long time after that. I was good at sulking, remember, Mum?

Then one day we woke up to the thickest, yellowest London smog we’d ever had, and we decided we’d chance it. Smoke and fog – it would look the same. It even smelt the same. We’d light a fire in the bomb site and do the whole witches’ spell as it should be done. We used the rest of your letters from the trunk and got a good fire going, filled the cauldron with water from the tap, and collected any little creatures we could find – worms mostly and snails (not the right creatures perhaps, but the best we could manage) and we boiled them, I’m ashamed to say. We sat there in our pointed hats, the smog and smoke swirling around us, waiting for the water to bubble. When it did, we joined hands and did our ‘Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble’ chant several times. Then we squeezed our eyes tight shut and each of us made a wish – a good wish, as Piet reminded us it had to be, not a wicked one, and we had to tell one another what our wish was.

‘You go first then, Piet,’ Belinda whispered after a while. Eyes closed, Piet chanted the ‘Bubble, bubble’ spell, and then began: ‘I wish … I wish that when I grow up I’ll be a famous actor. I want to be like that one we saw in the film of Henry V – Laurence something. I’ll wear armour like he did and a helmet, and charge into battle on my horse waving my sword, and I’ll be shouting, “For Harry, England and St George!”’ He opened his eyes and smiled at us. ‘Be good, that,’ he said. ‘Your go, Michael.’

But I didn’t want my go yet because I still hadn’t made up my mind. The truth was that Piet’s wish sounded so good that now I found myself wanting almost the same as he had wished for. But there was a difference. I didn’t want only to be an actor playing Henry V, I wanted to be him, the real king, Henry V himself. I knew it would sound silly – I understood even then that it was an impossibility to make a wish like that come true, even if we got the witches’ spell right this time. I’d have to think of another wish, one that had a chance of coming true. I needed time.

‘No. You go next, Belinda,’ I said.

Belinda rattled through the spell and then made her wish. ‘I want to be like Florence Nightingale,’ she said quietly. ‘I want to nurse all the soldiers and sailors and pilots who were wounded in the war. I want to make them better again like she did.’

I could tell as she said it that Belinda meant every word. And that was what I had to do, I thought. I had to mean it. That way it might come true.

‘All right,’ I began, my eyes as tight shut as they would go, willing my wish to happen, ‘I want to be like my uncle Pieter. I want to be a Spitfire pilot and shoot down German planes, and then the King would give me the Victoria Cross.’

I opened my eyes to find Piet frowning at me, angrily almost, and I knew it must have upset him somehow.

‘You can’t be him. He’s dead,’ he said. ‘And I’m the one who’s named after him, not you, so you’ve got to make another wish. It’s all silly anyway. You can’t be someone you’re not. And besides, you didn’t say the “Bubble, bubble” spell, so it won’t work.’

I was about to argue with him when we heard the voice. It came from somewhere above us. We looked up. Through the smog we could see a young man sitting high up on a window ledge on the top of the ruins.

‘Your brother’s right, Michael,’ he said. ‘You can’t be someone you’re not, not your uncle Pieter, not Laurence Olivier either, not Florence Nightingale. I reckon you’ve got to be yourself.’

He climbed down and came over to us. He was wearing a light blue overcoat and a scarf. His face broke into a smile. ‘I like the hats,’ he said, crouching down beside us. ‘And you make fine witches. You did all the “Bubble, bubble” baloney really well. Almost had me believing in it myself.’

Struck dumb, the three of us just sat there, simply gaping at him.

‘All those spells,’ the stranger went on, ‘it’s a load of twaddle, y’know. Nothing but hocus-pocus. And by the way, it’s not “Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble”, it’s “Double, double toil and trouble”. I was in the play once. I’m an actor; I know. I played Banquo, got myself murdered on a late-night walk. All this wishing you do – it’s fine, and hoping is fine, too. And you’re right, you can try, you must try to make your hopes and your wishes come true. But you have to be careful what you wish for. You have to think things through. They mustn’t be just flights of fancy. Dangerous stuff, fancy. I’ve been watching you three for quite a while now, sitting and chanting your spells around your cauldron, playing your war games all around the bomb site. I know I shouldn’t have been eavesdropping, but I haven’t got much else to do these days. And when I heard you making your wishes just now, I thought I’d better speak up, tell you what I think, tell you what I know.’

We still couldn’t say a word. He was holding out his hands over the fire to warm them.

‘It really upsets me, y’know, to see you playing your war games,’ he went on. ‘And all of you just now, all of your wishes, one way or another, had something to do with war. And that worries me. I’ve been in a war. These ruins, that’s what war does. That’s bad enough, but it does more than that. Look around you.’

As he spoke, out of the smog the ruins seemed to grow and take shape and form roofs, chimneys, windows, doors. The houses rebuilt themselves before our eyes. We were still sitting over the cauldron, but now we were in the back garden of a house. There was blue sky above and butterflies chasing one another and sparrows bickering on the lawn. Nearby there were children playing in a sandpit, and a mother in a headscarf was calling out of the window for them to come in for tea. By the back door an old man, mouth wide open, lay fast asleep in a deckchair, his slippers on, an open book resting on his chest.

‘And tell your grandad to come in too,’ the mother was saying. ‘And don’t forget to wipe your feet and wash your hands.’

There was music playing on a gramophone from inside the house, and we could hear the rag-and-bone-man’s horse clopping along the street: ‘Any old iron? Any old iron?’ came the cry.

As the sound of the horse’s hooves died away the children went inside, one of them stopping to shake Grandpa awake. The old man stood up, looking directly at us, but not seeing us, and there was a terrible sadness in his eyes as he looked up into the sky. The fog came swirling down again around him, and around us. He disappeared into it and the houses were suddenly ruins again. When the fog cleared, moments later, the stranger was gone too, vanished. But we heard his voice again from high up on the wall above us – only his voice. He was nowhere to be seen.

‘All of them are gone. Dead,’ he said. ‘One bombing raid, that’s all it took. Mum, grandad, the children, the rag-and-bone-man and his horse too. All gone in one night. That’s what war does. You remember that.’ Those were the last words he spoke.

The three of us were still holding hands, and we soon discovered we’d all seen and heard the same thing. We had imagined nothing. We made a pact there and then that we would never tell another living soul. For weeks afterwards, Piet and I, when we were alone at home, couldn’t talk about anything else. We were forever trying to puzzle it out. And at school, the three of us stuck together in the playground as if protecting our unspoken secret. When the usual war games started up around us, we never once joined in.

It was my idea to see if we could make it happen again, bring back the ghost of the stranger – because all of us agreed by now that that’s what he must have been, a ghost. Piet and Belinda were more nervous than I was, but I persuaded them. We needed to find out who he was and why he’d come to see us.

We decided it would be sensible to wait for the next smog and light the fire under the cauldron just as we had before. But the smog never came, and in the end we lost patience. We would try bringing him back without the cauldron. After all he’d said it himself: the witches’ spell was a lot of baloney.

Two or three times we sat there in the bomb site holding hands, the three of us willing him to come back, or at least to speak to us. Each time, nothing. We had no choice in the end but to risk it, to try the cauldron way again – it had worked before. And if we built the fire in the late evening, quite close to the hole in the wall, no one would see the flames from the street, nor the smoke in the gathering dark.

So one evening, that’s exactly what we did. We used the last of the letters from the trunk, along with bits of twigs we’d found in the bomb site, and lit our fire under the cauldron. A few creepy-crawly creatures – spiders and beetles – had found their way into the cauldron on their own. Because they’d almost volunteered to be boiled, we didn’t feel quite so bad about it. There we sat in the half-dark, holding hands, eyes closed and reciting ‘Double, double toil and trouble’, with the right words this time, and in unison, over and over again, wishing, hoping, willing the stranger to reappear.

But no voice spoke to us. No one came, nothing happened. We tried again and again. But it just didn’t work.

‘Maybe we imagined it all,’ Belinda said. But she knew, we all knew that we hadn’t. It must have been almost bedtime when we heard Aunty B and Aunty J calling for us up and down the street, and we had to give up. When we appeared, we made up a story about having been at choir practice in the church hall, which they seemed to believe (they always believed whatever we told them). Belinda went off home and that was that. Or so we thought.

That night Piet and I were shaken out of sleep by Aunty B and Aunty J. They were frantic, sobbing as they dragged us down the smoke-filled stairs and out into the cold night air. There we stood, shivering on the pavement. I was only half-awake and didn’t understand what was going on until we heard the bells of the fire engine. Our house was on fire! We watched in fascination and horror as the hoses were wound out and the firemen went running into our house. They broke down the fence in the bomb site.

There were dozens of people in the street by now, all in dressing gowns. Belinda’s mother, in her curlers, gave Aunty B and Aunty J tots of whisky to calm them down. As for Belinda and Piet and me, we stood together, watching the drama unfold, all of us knowing full well, of course, how the fire had started.