Michael Morpurgo - Little Manfred

They were arm in arm, and leaning into the wind. Mannie was barking at them by now. I told him to shut up and, to my surprise, he did exactly as I said. He came to sit close to me, his head against my leg for reassurance. Then Alex was beside me too.

“Who are they?” he whispered. The taller of the two had spotted Alex’s football by now and picked it up.

“Yours?” he called out.

The men looked a little older than Dad. City people, I thought – they had on muddied city shoes, not wellies. Alex nodded and put his finger in his mouth, which he always did when he was nervous.

“I’ll bring it down to you,” said the man. “Not so good at kicking these days.”

Then the one in the hat took the football off him. “ Nein, Nein , Marty, I shall kick it,” he said. “A football should be kicked. It is what a football is for.”

He dropped the ball on to the ground, took a step or two back and kicked it. It was a perfectly judged kick, the ball ending up so close to us that Alex had only to bend down to pick it up. The two men laughed, waved at us, and went on their way, down towards the sea, where they stood for a few moments with their backs to us, looking up and down the beach. That was when I heard one of them saying, “It was about here. I think it was about here that it happened. Ja, Ja . Here. I am sure.”

For a while nothing more was said. Then he went on, “I am so glad that I came back. This was a good idea of yours, Marty. I did not think it was going to be, but it is.” He spoke English with a foreign accent of some kind. I could understand him all right, but it wasn’t the kind of accent I was used to at all.

“Did I tell you what he was doing, Marty?” the man went on, his voice a little lower. I felt a little guilty eavesdropping like this on their conversation, but I couldn’t resist it. I had to go on listening. “He always liked to bounce the stones across the water. He said that this reminded him of his childhood. We were working all morning on the barbed wire that was up there behind us, taking it away, and we were on lunch break. We were all sitting back up at the top of the beach, by the path there, near the boat. There was a boat then too, maybe this one, maybe not. Who knows? He said he had found a nice flat stone and he was going to bounce it across the sea, all the way to Germany. And then he walked away from us down to the water to where we are standing now, maybe a little further out because it was low tide that day.”

I was close enough to hear that the words were catching in his throat, that he was struggling to control his voice.

“You know what you should do, Walter?” said his friend, and he bent down and picked up a pebble. “Here, this is a good one. Why don’t you throw one for him, right now, all the way to Germany, just like he did?”

Even as he was throwing the stone I knew exactly what Mannie would do, but I was too slow to stop him. Mannie was after it in a flash. He was already plunging into the shallows before the pebble landed in the sea. I was yelling at him to stop, “Mannie! Mannie! Manfred! Come back!”

But no amount of shouting would be any use – I knew that. He would come back when he felt like it and not before. The two men had turned, and were coming up the beach towards us now, the one in the hat waving his stick at us. As they came closer I could see that both of them were frowning. They weren’t angry frowns exactly, but it was obvious they weren’t at all pleased with us. I felt Alex’s hand steal into mine as they came nearer.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but if you throw something, Mannie goes after it. He’s like that. He can’t help himself.”

Then Mannie made it worse. He came bounding up to them, shaking himself all over them, and then sat down in frantic anticipation at their feet, tongue hanging out, longing for another stick or stone to be thrown.

“You called this dog Manfred?” said the man in the hat, the one with the strange accent. The feather in his hat, I noticed then, was green, just like the hat.

“Yes,” I told him. “Manfred or Mannie – we call him both – Manfred when I’m cross with him. He’s a farm dog really. He rounds up the sheep and the cows for Dad. But he chases anything. Like I said, he can’t seem to stop himself.”

The man was shaking his head in disbelief. “Marty, did you hear that?” he said. “This is wundebar . It was the name of the dog, the name she chose for him herself! You remember? I told you.” Then he turned to us again. “And so you live also on a farm? I must know where it is, this farm.”

Alex suddenly found his voice and his courage, and spoke up. “Course we live on a farm, else we wouldn’t have sheep and cows, would we?”

It sounded a bit cheeky so I squeezed Alex’s hand to shut him up. I wasn’t at all sure I should say where we lived – after all they were both complete strangers to us then. I thought about it. There was nothing threatening about them, and from the look on their faces, I could tell that this was something they really wanted to know, that it was important to them. That’s why I told them, I suppose. “It’s on the edge of the village,” I said, “behind the school and the church. About a mile away. Not far.”

“I thought so. I thought so,” said the man. “It is near the church, in Kessingland, nicht wahr ?” he asked me. His eyes were bright with excitement now. “And the farm you live on, it is called Mayfield Farm, perhaps?”

“How do you know that, Mister?” Alex asked him, rather bluntly. “We haven’t never even seen you before.”

“No, young man,” he replied with a smile. “I have not seen you before, but if I am not mistaken, I have been to your farm. I think I know every ditch on this farm, every hedge, every barn.” He turned to his friend. “This is wonderful, Marty, ausgezeichnet .” Then back to me again. “And I think maybe your mother, she is called Grace, ja ? Am I right?”

I couldn’t believe it. The man seemed to know so much about us – our home, even our mum’s name – and I hadn’t told him anything. As he turned away from us I could see he was near to tears. He walked away on his own up to the top of the beach, where he sat down by the upturned rowing boat.

That was when his friend spoke up. “I think Walter needs a little time on his own,” he said – he spoke English a bit more like we did. “This was always going to be a difficult day for him. Coming back, it is never easy, you know.”

I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about, and I think it must have showed, because, without my even asking, he went on to explain.

“Well,” he said. “This is going to be difficult for you to believe, but it looks to me as if my friend Walter over there must have known your mother a long time ago when she was a girl. All he has told me, all I know for sure – and he hasn’t told me much – is that a long, long time ago, just after the war, Walter lived for a while on a farm round here, near Kessingland. And it’s looking to me now, and to him I think, very much as if it might have been on your farm. He lived there for nearly two years, I believe. And he did say something about a dog there called Little Manfred and a girl called Grace. So when he comes here to this beach – which he clearly remembers so well – and he meets a dog called Manfred, and then he discovers you very probably live in the actual farmhouse where he lived, and that your mother is called Grace – well, you can imagine, it must have come as quite a shock to him. A nice shock, but a shock all the same. We’ll go and see how he is, shall we?”