Michael Morpurgo - King of the Cloud Forests

I do not think it was the bombing itself that frightened me so much. Indeed I remember feeling momentarily exhilarated that I had survived. It was the growing fear that my father was dead that fetched up the terror from inside me. With my free hand I shook his shoulder and screamed at him to wake up, but he did not. His eyes remained obstinately closed and his body limp and heavy around me. Exhausted at last by my own fear I lay still. Only then did I feel Father breathing rhythmically on top of me. In my confused state of mind it took me some time to understand that if he was breathing then he must at least be alive. I tried again to shake him awake and was rewarded at long last with a murmur and a half smile.

That was how Uncle Sung and the others found us some minutes later. Through a forest of timbers I saw Uncle Sung’s sandalled feet, the sun on his dusty toes. He was standing where the chapel wall should have been. There was the sound of whimpering and wailing from the compound beyond and then they were pulling away the timbers to get to us. But they were taking so long, and Father’s weight was making it difficult for me to breathe. Uncle Sung was constantly there, encouraging me, reassuring me, and I heard the strident voice of the Chinese army doctor as he organised the rescue. I remember how Lin and I used to imitate his strutting gait and squeaky voice. I’d never really liked the man ever since his argument with Father on the hospital steps. We had put him down as an arrogant, unfeeling man who cared for little except his own dignity. Now here he was urging his men on to yet greater efforts as bit by bit they pulled away the timber and fought their way through to us. Lin and I had been a bit unfair on him I decided.

The rescue was painfully slow – each timber it seemed had to be extracted carefully for fear of further collapse – but at last the table top was being lifted and there were hands grasping at Father’s shoulders and pulling him off me. Uncle Sung asked me whether I was all right. I tried to speak but could find no voice. I felt suddenly free of Father’s body and saw Uncle Sung’s smiling face above me. ‘Playing hide-and-seek?’ he said. ‘Bit old for that aren’t you?’ A searing, sudden pain invaded my chest. Uncle Sung’s face swam into a dark void full of distant echoes and I slipped away from him. If this is dying I thought, then it’s not so bad, just a pity that’s all.

I woke to find myself in the hospital. I could feel there was a bandage tight around my chest and my arm was held in a sling. There were three figures at the bottom of my bed who came into focus as they spoke. ‘At least he was the only one,’ said the Chinese army doctor. ‘We were lucky,’ he went on. ‘The only bomb that fell in the town itself did not explode. They think nothing of bombing towns. Life is cheap to them. It was more to frighten us than anything else. The nearest Japanese soldiers are a hundred miles away, maybe more. Headquarters have assured me they are no closer.’

‘But they’ll be back, won’t they?’ said Father. ‘And you have no planes to stop them with, have you?’ There was a white bandage across his head and he was leaning heavily on a stick. ‘If they can do it once, they can do it again. What’s to stop them? You tell me that. And next time we might not be so lucky – it might not be just one boy. One bomb in that warren of a town and there’d be hundreds dead.’

‘I have faith in our soldiers,’ said the Chinese army doctor, stiffening. ‘The Japanese will come no closer, Mr Anderson, I can assure you.’

‘I have faith only in God, Major,’ said Father. ‘Fifty yards the other way and every one in the compound, everyone in the hospital would have been killed. The chapel we can rebuild – we will rebuild; but the first thing we must do after the funeral is over is to paint a red cross on the roof. There’ll be some safety in that surely.’

‘I doubt it,’ said the army doctor. ‘The Japanese are barbarians, but you can try.’

‘Mr Anderson,’ said Uncle Sung, who had his back to me. He spoke softly, almost secretly. ‘What do we say to Ashley? How do we tell him about Lin?’

‘Let’s wait till he’s better,’ said my father, ‘though God knows where I’ll find the courage from to tell him even then.’

‘I can’t think what made him do it,’ said the army doctor. ‘Everyone hid when the planes came, everyone except that boy. He was warned. They told him to keep down. They told him it was no use shooting at planes, but he wouldn’t listen. He ran out into the open and began firing. You might as well spit at a tiger. Someone said he was only fourteen years old, just a boy.’

I wished at that moment that I had died in the ruins of the house. I closed my eyes and swallowed the scream inside me.

‘He was sixteen,’ I said as they walked away. ‘He told everyone he was fourteen because he was so small.’ The three of them turned and stared at me and then my father came back and sat on the bed beside me. ‘Fourteen or sixteen, he was still too young, Ashley. But we must thank God he was the only one killed. It could have been much worse.’

‘Not for Lin,’ I said. ‘And why did God pick on Lin, Father? What did Lin ever do to God to make him that angry?’ There was pain and bewilderment in Father’s eyes and I regretted at once the venom in my question.

‘I don’t know what Lin did, Ashley,’ he said, the tears coming into his eyes, ‘any more than I know why your mother was taken away from us so young. I don’t know all the answers, but I do know they are together now, Lin and your Mother. They are both with God. There’ll be no pain for either of them, no more sorrow, and that is why we must be happy for them.’

But no matter how I reasoned it during those long days lying on my back in the hospital, I could not be happy for Lin, for Mother or for me. Lin was gone. My best friend had been taken from me. I was bitter at a God I no longer loved nor cared to understand.

It was essential, the Chinese army doctor said, that I kept still for I had broken two ribs and there was a serious risk of infection from the gash in my right arm. So I sat in the shade of the hospital veranda whilst my father directed the rebuilding of the chapel and the house. Uncle Sung and the Chinese army doctor ran the hospital together that spring whilst Father turned carpenter, builder and painter. He painted red crosses on the roof of every building in the Mission compound, just in case the Japanese planes came back.

As the weeks passed though I could sense in Father a growing feeling of unease. In spite of the army doctor’s continuing reassurances that all was well in the east and that the Japanese were being held in the south, there was increasing evidence to the contrary. The new timber for the chapel did not come through on the train. There had been no post from the Mission Headquarters in Shanghai for nearly two months and the vital medical supplies Uncle Sung had asked for never arrived. The post arrived, but weeks late. More and more wounded soldiers poured in through the gates of the Mission and all the news they brought was bad. The Japanese advances had not been halted and the Chinese were retreating on all fronts. Even the government had been forced to leave Peking and move west. As well as this there was the terrible news of the burning of a mission not more than fifty miles away. Two French nuns had been killed in the blaze so the story went. No one was sure whether it was the mob that turned on the mission or a band of brigands. Thinking back I think it was probably this atrocity rather than the Japanese threat that finally persuaded my Father to send me away.

It all happened so quickly and without any warning. It was in the middle of the night that Uncle Sung came to fetch me from the hospital and walked me across the moonlit compound into the chapel that was still waiting for its new roof. Father was pacing up and down, his hands clasped behind his back. He stopped when he saw me and sat me down beside him on a bench.