Michael Morpurgo - Of Lions and Unicorns - A Lifetime of Tales from the Master Storyteller

Later on as I came out of the bathroom I heard Amandine crying in her room. I hated to hear her crying, so I knocked on the door and went in. She was lying curled up on her bed hugging her pillow.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to upset you.” She had stopped crying by now.

“It wasn’t your fault, Yannick,” she said, still sniffing a bit. “It’s just that I hate it when Papa’s cross with me. He hardly ever is, only when I’ve done something really bad. I shouldn’t have blamed you. I’m sorry.”

And then she smiled at me. Amandine smiled at me!

I lay awake all night, my mind racing. Somehow I was going to put it all right again. I was going to make Amandine happy. By morning I had worked out exactly what I had to do and how to do it, even what I was going to say when the time came.

That morning, I didn’t go for my walk in the hills. Instead I made my way down through the village towards the chateau. I’d often wondered what it was like behind those closed gates. Now I was going to find out. I waited till there was no one about, no cars coming. I climbed the gates easily enough, then ran down through the trees. And there it was, immense and forbidding, surrounded by forest on all sides. And there he was, the old man with very little hair I had seen the night before. He was sitting alone in the sunshine at the foot of the steps in front of the chateau, and he was sketching. I approached as silently as I could across the grass, but somehow I must have disturbed him. He looked up, shading his eyes against the sun. “Hello, young man,” he said. Now that I was this close to him I could see he was indeed old, very old, but his eyes were young and bright and searching.

“Are you Monsieur Cézanne?” I asked him. “Are you the famous painter?” He seemed a little puzzled at this, so I went on. “My mother says you are the greatest painter in the world.”

He was smiling now, then laughing. “I think your mother’s probably right,” he said. “You clearly have a wise mother, but what I’d like to know is why she let a young lad like you come wandering here on his own?”

As I explained everything and told him why I’d come and what I wanted, he looked at me very intently, his brow furrowing. “I remember you now, from last night,” he said, when I’d finished. “Of course I’ll draw another picture for Bruno. What would he like? No. Better still, what would you like?”

“I like sailing boats,” I told him. “Can you do boats?”

“I’ll try,” he replied with a smile.

It didn’t take him long. He drew fast, never once looking up. But he did ask me questions as he worked, about where I’d seen sailing boats, about where I lived in Paris. He loved Paris, he said, and he loved sailing boats too.

“There,” he said, tearing the sheet from his sketchbook and showing me. “What do you think?” Four sailing boats were racing over the sea out beyond a lighthouse, just as I’d seen them in Brittany. But I saw he’d signed it Picasso .

“I thought your name was Cézanne,” I said.

He smiled up at me. “How I wish it was,” he said sadly. “How I wish it was. Off you go now.”

I ran all the way back to the village, wishing all the time I’d told him that I was the one who had made the crème brûlée he’d liked so much. I found Amandine by the washing line, a clothes peg in her mouth. “I did it!” I cried breathlessly, waving the drawing at her. “I did it! To make up for the one I burned.”

Amandine took the peg out of her mouth and looked down at the drawing.

“That’s really sweet of you to try, Yannick,” she said. “But the thing is, it’s got to be done by him, by Picasso himself. It’s no good you drawing a picture and then just signing his name. It’s got to be by him or it’s not worth the money.”

I was speechless. Then as she turned away to hang up one of Uncle Bruno’s aprons, Aunt Mathilde came out into the garden with a basket of washing under her arm.

“Yannick’s been very kind, Maman ,” Amandine said. “He’s done me a drawing. After what happened last night. It’s really good too.”

Aunt Mathilde had put down her washing and was looking at the drawing. “Bruno!” she called. “Bruno, come out here!” And Uncle Bruno appeared, his hands white with flour. “Look at this,” said Aunt Mathilde. “Look what Yannick did, and all by himself too.”

Bruno peered at it closely for a moment, then started to roar with laughter. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Yannick may be a genius with crème brûlée , but this is by Picasso, the great man himself. I promise you. Isn’t it, Yannick?”

So I told them the whole story. When I’d finished, Amandine came over and hugged me. She had tears in her eyes. I was in seventh heaven, and Uncle Bruno waggled his moustache and gave me six crystallised apricots. Unfortunately Aunt Mathilde hugged me too and pinched my cheek especially hard. I was the talk of the inn that night, and felt very proud of myself. But best of all Amandine came on my walk in the hills the next day and climbed trees with me and collected acorns, and held my hand all the way back down the village street, where everyone could see us, even the motor-scooter boys in their blue jeans.

They still have the boat drawing by Picasso hanging in the inn. Amandine runs the place now. It’s as good as ever. She married someone else, as cousins usually do. So did I. I’m a writer still trying to follow in Jean Giono’s footsteps. As for Cézanne, was my mother right? Is he the greatest painter in the world? Or is it Picasso? Who knows? Who cares? They’re both wonderful and I’ve met both of them – if you see what I’m saying.

Some years ago, we got to know Elisabeth Frink, a wonderful sculptor, particularly of horses, and a kind and generous person too. She became a great friend and ally in life. Sadly, she died all too young. Her very last work now hangs above the west door of Liverpool Cathedral. It is a Risen Christ.

am sometimes asked these days how I got started. I should love to be able to say that it was all because I had some dream, some vision, or maybe that I just studied very hard. None of this would really be true. I owe what I am, what I have become, what I do each day of my life, to a bicycle ride I took a long time ago now, when I was twelve years old – and also to a pile of muck, horse muck.

The bike was new that Christmas. It was maroon, and I remember it was called a Raleigh Wayfarer. It had all you could ever dream of in a bike – in those days. It had a bell, a dynamo lamp front and rear, five gears and a silver pump. I loved it instantly and spent every hour I could out riding it. And when I wasn’t riding it, I was polishing it.

We lived on the edge of town, so it was easy to ride off down Mill Lane past the estate, along the back of the soap factory where my father worked, and then out into the countryside beyond. How I loved it. In a car, you zoomed past so fast that the cows and the trees were only ever brief, blurred memories. On my bike I was close to everything for the first time. I felt the cold and the rain on my face. I mooed at the cows, and they looked up and blinked at me lazily. I shouted at the crows and watched them lift off cawing and croaking into the wind. But best of all, no one knew where I was – and that included me sometimes. I was always getting myself lost and coming back at dusk, late. I would brace myself for all the sighing and tutting and ticking off that inevitably followed. I bore it all stoically because they didn’t really mean it, and anyway it had all been worth it. I’d had a taste of real freedom and I wanted more of it.

After a while I discovered a circuit that seemed to be just about ideal. It was a two-hour run, not too many hills going up, plenty going down, a winding country lane that criss-crossed a river past narrow cottages where hardly anyone seemed to live, under the shadow of a church where sometimes I stopped and put flowers on the graves that everyone else seemed to have forgotten, and then along the three-barred iron fence where the horses always galloped over to see me, their tails and heads high, their ears pricked.