Michael Morpurgo - Kensuke's Kingdom

‘We’ve got the money. I’ve done my sums. We’re going to do six months’ training. We’ll be away a year, eighteen months maybe, just so long as the money lasts.

We’re going to do it safe, do it properly. Mum, you’ll do your Yachtmaster’s certificate. Oh, didn’t I say? I didn’t did I? You’ll be the skipper, Mum. I’ll be first mate and handyman. Michael, you’ll be ship’s boy, and Stella – well Stella can be the ship’s cat.’ He was full of it, breathless with excitement. ‘We’ll train ourselves up. Do a few trips across the channel to France, maybe over to Ireland. We’ll get to know this boat like she’s one of us. She’s a forty-two foot. Bowman, best make, best design. Safest there is. I’ve done my homework. Six months’ time and we’ll be off round the world. It’ll be the adventure of a lifetime. Our one chance. We’ll never get another one. What do you think then?’

‘Ex . . . cell . . . ent,’ I breathed, and that was exactly what I thought.

And I’ll be skipper, you say?’ my mother asked.

‘Aye aye, Cap’n,’ and my father laughed and gave her a mock salute.

‘What about Michael’s school?’ she went on.

‘I’ve thought of that, too. I asked in the local school down here. It’s all arranged. We’ll take all the books he’ll need. I’ll teach him. You’ll teach him. He’ll teach himself. I’ll tell you something for nothing, he’ll learn

more in a couple of years at sea, than he ever would in that monkey school of his. Promise.’

She took a sip of tea, and then nodded slowly. ‘All right,’ she said, and I saw she was smiling. ‘Why not? Go ahead then. Buy her. Buy the boat.’

‘I already have,’ said my father.

Of course it was madness. They knew it, even I knew it, but it simply didn’t matter. Thinking back, it must have been a kind of inspiration driven by desperation.

Everyone warned us against it. Gran came visiting and stayed on board. It was all quite ridiculous she said, reckless, irresponsible. She was full of doom and gloom. Icebergs, hurricanes, pirates, whales, supertankers, freak waves – she heaped up horror upon horror, thinking to frighten me and so frighten off my mother and father. She succeeded in terrifying me all right, but I never showed it. What she didn’t understand was that we three were already bound together now by a common lunacy. We were going, and nothing and no one could stop us. We were doing what people do in fairytales. We were going off to seek adventure.

To begin with it all happened much as my father

had planned it, except that the training took a lot longer. We soon learned that handling a forty-two foot yacht was not just dinghy sailing in a bigger boat. We were tutored by a whiskered old mariner from the yacht club, Bill Parker (‘Barnacle Bill’ we called him, but not to his face, of course). He had been twice round Cape Horn and done two single-handed Atlantic crossings, and he’d been across the channel ‘more times than you’ve had hot dinners, my lad’.

To tell the truth, we none of us liked him much. He was a hard taskmaster. He treated me and Stella Artois with equal disdain. To him all animals and children were just a nuisance and, on board ship, nothing but a liability. So I kept out of his way as much as I could, and so did Stella Artois.

To be fair to him, Barnacle Bill did know his business. By the time he had finished with us, and my mother was given her certificate, we felt we could sail the Peggy Sue anywhere. He had inculcated in us a healthy respect for the sea but, at the same time, we were confident we could handle just about anything the sea could hurl at us.

Mind you, there were times I was scared rigid.

My father and I shared our terror together, silently. You can’t pretend, I learned, with a towering green wall of sea twenty feet high bearing down on you. We went down in troughs so deep we never thought we could possibly climb out again. But we did, and the more we rode our terror, rode the waves, the more we felt sure of ourselves and of the boat around us.

My mother, though, never showed even the faintest tremor of fear. It was her and the Peggy Sue between them that saw us through our worst moments. She was seasick from time to time, and we never were. So that was something.

We lived close, all of us, cheek by jowl, and I soon discovered parents were more than just parents. My father became my friend, my shipmate. We came to rely on each other. And as for my mother, the truth is – and I admit it – that I didn’t know she had it in her. I always known she was gritty, that she’d always keep on at a thing until she’d done it. But she worked night and day over her books and charts until she had mastered everything. She never stopped. True, she could be a bit of a tyrant if we didn’t keep the boat shipshape, but neither my father nor I minded that much, though we

pretended to. She was the skipper. She was going to take us round the world and back again. We had absolute confidence in her. We were proud of her. She was just brilliant. And, I have to say, the ship’s boy and the first mate were pretty brilliant too on the winches, at the helm, and dab hands with the baked beans in the galley. We were a great team.

So, on September 10, 1987 – I know the date because I have the ship’s log in front of me as I write – with every nook and cranny loaded with stores and provisions, we were at last ready to set sail on our grand adventure, our great odyssey.

Gran was there to wave us off, tearfully. In the end she even wanted to come with us, to visit Australia – she’d always wanted to see koalas in the wild. There were lots of our friends there too, including Barnacle Bill. Eddie Dodds came along with his father. He threw me a football as we cast off. ‘Lucky mascot,’ he shouted. When I looked down at it later I saw he’d signed his name all over it like a World Cup star.

Stella Artois barked her farewells at them, and at every boat we passed in the Solent. But as we were sailing out past the Isle of Wight she fell strangely

quiet. Maybe she sensed, as we did, that there was no turning back now. This was not a dream. We were off round the world. It was real, really real.

Chapter 2

Water, water everywhere

They say that water covers two thirds of the earth’s surface. It certainly looks like that when you’re out there, and it feels like it too. Sea water, rain water – all of it is wet. I spent most of the