Dear Olly

Every uncle, every aunt, every grandmother, every grandfather, came and gave their dire warnings. Matt sat and listened to each of them in turn, and then said, as politely as he could, that it was his life and that he would have to live it his way. He argued only with his mother. With her, it was always fierce and fiery, and so loud sometimes that they would wake Olly up with it, and she’d go downstairs crying and begging them to stop.

Then one morning, when they called him down for breakfast, he just wasn’t there. His bed was made and his rucksack was gone. He had left a letter for each of them on his bedside table. Olly’s mother sat down on his bed and opened her envelope.

“He’s gone, Olly,” she said. “He’s gone. He says he’s taken out all his savings and gone to Africa.”

Olly had seen her cry before, but never like this. She clung to Olly as if she would never let go. “I’m so angry with him, Olly,” she said, and then: “but I’m so proud of him, too.” It wasn’t at all what Olly expected her to say.

Olly read her letter again, sitting up in the privacy of Matt’s hide at the back of the garage.

Dear Olly,

I’ve got to go, I must. I don’t suppose I’ll write very often. I’m hopeless at letter writing, you know that. So don’t expect to hear much. But I’ll miss you a lot, I know I will. I’ll tell you all about everything when I get back. Time passes very quickly. I’ll be back before you know it. And don’t worry about me. I’ll watch out for all those lions and snakes and crocodiles, I promise. I’ll be fine. Look after Mum for me. And look after my swallows too. Make sure they all fly off safe and sound before the winter comes. See you soon.

Love, Matt

Olly tried to do all he had asked of her, but none of it was easy. In those first days her mother was completely distraught. Olly kept telling her the same thing over and over again. “He’ll be all right, Mum, he’ll be all right, you’ll see.” It was all she could think of to say. But Olly didn’t even believe it herself. Night after night she lay awake, sick with her own worry, and as sad as she’d ever been. Without Matt there was no laughter in the house any more, no joy.

She did make sure that nothing and no-one disturbed the fledgling swallows. Like Matt before her, she sat for hours at a time up in the hide, watching them, guarding them, shooing away any marauding cats. Day after day she witnessed the comings and goings of the parent birds, how they would swoop down to dive into the garage, and then flutter briefly at the nest, feed their young and be off again. Olly loved the sudden screeching chorus of excitement as the parent birds arrived, and the silence and stillness that followed. The young grew fast. Very soon the nest was impossibly full, full of beaks, gaping beaks.

Then one day, as Olly climbed up the ladder into the hide, she saw they were not there. They had flown. She found them lined up on the garage roof waiting to be fed. She could watch them better from her bedroom window now. It wasn’t long before the five fledglings were quite indistinguishable from all the other swallows and swifts and martins soaring and screaming around the chimney pots on a summer’s evening.

In all this time there had been no word from Matt, no address, nothing. Olly’s mother was fretting herself to a frazzle. Olly tried to reassure her that no news must be good news. They speculated endlessly, where he might be, what he might be up to, whether he was all right.

There was a succession of unwelcome visits to endure. Gaunty Bethel came round almost every other evening. If she could, Olly would escape to her room and hide, but sometimes there was no avoiding her. Gaunty Bethel was so loud, so opinionated, so judgmental. “If you ask me,” – and no-one had, of course – “I put it down to the schools, the teachers. Children come out of school these days thinking the world’s their oyster. Not like it was, I can tell you. When I think, Olly, of all your mother has done for that boy, brought him up practically single-handed and then he just ups and goes off like that. And to Africa! To be a clown! What is he thinking of? It’s just not right, not responsible, plain thoughtless. I don’t know” – and then came the pained sigh – ”I don’t know. Young people these days.”

These were difficult times for Olly. She was missing Matt more than she ever thought possible. She found herself alone in the house more than ever – there was always some crisis at the surgery that meant her mother was having to work even longer hours than usual. She went often to Matt’s room and sat on his bed. She felt closer to him there, but it didn’t help. It made it worse if anything. She went round to see her friends, but they were holiday happy and she wasn’t. So that made her miserable too. Sometimes, to cheer herself up, she would go out on call with her mother, to carry her “bag of tricks” as she called it – her bag of medicines. They went to the bird sanctuary to mend a swan’s wing, to a dairy farm to help with a difficult calving – a breech birth. But once back in the car, talk would soon turn to Matt, and one or other, or both of them, would always end up in tears.

It was three weeks to the day since Matt left that the cards arrived, one each, from Rwanda. Olly read hers over and over again, soaking in every word. His writing was tiny, as always, and very difficult to read.

Dear Olly,

I finally got here. I’m working in an orphanage run by Irish nuns and nurses. Sister Christina is the boss nun. She’s over sixty, but you wouldn’t know it. I’ve never seen anyone work so hard. She never stops. There are over two hundred children here. I help feed them and teach them, and every evening I do my clowning show and try to send them to bed happy. Some of them find going to sleep very difficult – not surprising when you think what they’ve been through. One of the boys, Gahamire, doesn’t speak at all because he’s been so frightened. I want to help him speak again if I can. From my window, I can see a big mountain with clouds around the top. They say lots of gorillas live up there. Haven’t seen one yet though. Lots of love, Matt

P.S. Did my swallows fly?

The card to Olly’s mother said more about the orphanage, about the plight of the children, how undernourished and weak some of them were, how terribly wounded – some without legs after stepping on landmines. He gave no address. He just said he would write again. They put their cards on the mantelpiece either side of the silver framed photograph of Olly’s father and, for a while at least, Matt’s cards were enough to lift the gloom about the house.

Olly went off to school for the new term with a spring in her step. The dark rings of anxiety under her mother’s eyes all but vanished. Now both of them could at least picture the place where Matt lived, and what he was doing. One evening, they took out the atlas. Olly’s mother remembered a film she’d seen about a mountain in Rwanda where gorillas lived. She worked out it must be somewhere in the Virunga range, near Lake Kivu. So now they knew roughly where he was. All of this helped, for a time; but then fresh doubts and anxieties began to surface once again.