Michael Morpurgo - Unforgettable Journeys - Alone on a Wide, Wide Sea, Running Wild and Dear Olly

The last time I did it, she looked up at me and said: “Thank you, Arthur dear, I shan’t forget it.” I haven’t forgotten it either. She came into our room on the last evening, and put a book in each of our suitcases – mine was The Rime of the Ancient Mariner , Marty’s, The Yarn of the Nancy Bell . I have them by me now, as I am writing this. They are still my most treasured books.

Out of a leather shoelace I made a new tie for my lucky key that night, and hung it around my neck. I wasn’t at all sure I really believed in that kind of thing any more. At fifteen it seemed to me it might be a bit of a childish superstition, but I wasn’t sure enough of myself to abandon it. Besides, the key was my last link to my sister, to the Kitty I remembered, or imagined. Memory or imagination? Already I couldn’t be at all sure that Kitty had ever existed. Only the key told me she had. And the key had been lucky for us. Hadn’t it brought us to Aunty Megs all those years before? So I kept my key. And I’m glad I did, very glad indeed.

The last I saw of Aunty Megs she was holding her straw hat on her head and standing there, disappearing into the cloud of dust left behind by the bus. For Marty and me this was the first time we’d been on a bus since the day we first arrived in Australia ten years before. Then we were leaving Sydney. Now we were going back. As I remember Marty said just about the same thing to me that he’d said then. “We’ll be all right.”

We sat silent the whole way, neither of us believing this was happening. Both of us knew we were leaving our childhood behind us for ever. It felt just like we were heading off into the bush again, into the unknown.

Together we might have been, but each of us felt very alone on that journey. When I felt the tears welling inside me, I tried to cheer myself up by thinking of Henry’s horrible hat hole, or trying to get an ee-aw out of Barnaby. But sooner or later I’d think of Aunty Megs, and the moment that happened I’d be overwhelmed by a sadness I’d never felt before, a sadness so painful it gnawed at my stomach. I’ve only got to think about her even now, and I can feel the same pang, faint perhaps now like a distant echo, but still there. That’s how much I loved her, loved our glowing time with her.

Memory is a great and powerful magician. It plays tricks on you that you simply can’t understand, no matter how hard you try to work them out. In my case it obliterated my early beginnings almost entirely, the lucky key around my neck being the only clue that I’d even had a beginning at all. And of my sister Kitty, the memory magician left me nothing but a shadowy phantom, which became more shadowy with every passing year. Yet I can remember the nightmare years of Cooper’s Station and Piggy Bacon as if they all happened yesterday. But fortunately for my sanity, those healing, life-affirming years with Aunty Megs and Marty at the Ark are even more vivid to me than the nightmare time that preceded them.

I’m guessing now of course, but for me I think maybe it’s partly at least a question of intensity. During those periods of my early life, maybe before I built up my protective wall around me as most of us do as we get older, I felt everything so strongly, so deeply. Good, bad or ugly, it stays with me. But that still doesn’t explain why so much that has happened since those early years has been lost in a haze, that I seem to have forgotten as much as I’ve remembered. It’s as if time itself had taken its time during my childhood, but once I got off that bus in Sydney it picked up speed, and from then on it was a roller coaster of a ride, and a bumpy one too, that brought me from then to now, leaving me with only fleeting moments of clarity, the highs and the lows, with so much in between, but lost to me for ever.

Freddie Dodds was there to meet us off the bus in Sydney. He drove us to the boatyard down at Newcastle. Mr Dodds – I never heard anyone call him Freddie except Aunty Megs – was the most silent person I ever knew. He wasn’t unfriendly. On the contrary, he smiled a great deal, and he wasn’t ever off-hand or cold. He just didn’t say much, not to us, not to anyone. But he was a kind man through and through, and he ran his boatyard like a kindly ship’s captain. He was the sort of captain that led by example, not by shouting at people. Everyone knew what they had to do and how to do it, and that included Marty and me.

We started out as general dogsbodies, sweeping up, fetching and carrying, making tea – we made an awful lot of tea. And we were nightwatchmen too. That was mostly because of where we lived. It paid our rent.

Marty and I lived on a boat just down the creek from the boatyard, a stone’s throw, no more. It wasn’t much of a place, a bit of an old wreck really, a forty-five foot yacht built in the 1940s that had seen better days, and was falling apart and beyond repair. But we didn’t mind. It was home. We had a place of our own and we loved it.

No Worries she was called, and the name was perfect for her. And she was perfect for us too. We’d sit up there on deck in the evenings, the two of us, a cooling breeze coming in off the water, and up above us a sky full of stars. I’ve loved stars ever since. Down below we were as snug as a couple of bugs in a rug. Seventh heaven. What’s more we were earning money. Not much, but it made us feel good, made us feel suddenly grown up. But however grown up we may have felt, we both missed Aunty Megs and the Ark, and Barnaby and Big Black Jack and Poogly and Henry. How we laughed about Henry.

The other blokes in the yard didn’t treat us like that of course. To them we were just a couple of kids, particularly me, because I still looked like a kid. One or two of them would try to give me a hard time to begin with, but Marty was a good six feet tall now and big with it. He kept an eye out for me, they could see that. So they’d rib me a little from time to time, but that’s all it ever was. We soon settled in and became part of the place. I became a bit of a mascot, I think.

We’d hardly ever see Mr Dodds. He’d be up in his office designing the boats. The place was full of his model boats, mostly yachts, and we’d only ever go up there to collect our money at the end of the week, or to pick up a letter from Aunty Megs perhaps. She didn’t write often, but when she did her letters were full of news about Henry and Barnaby. It seemed now like news from another world.

It was while we were up there one day that he saw us looking at the models of the yachts he’d made. “Megs tells me you can make models too,” he said. And he showed us a design he was working on. “Do you think you can make this up for me?”

“Course,” said Marty at once. I thought he was mad. We hadn’t got a clue how to work from a design. We’d always had Aunty Megs alongside us in the shed back home. Now we were on our own. I didn’t think we could do it. But we did. We learned fast because we had to. After work we’d sit down together at the map table in No Worries , and make the model of Mr Dodds’ latest design. Eighth heaven now!

One way or another I’ve lived on boats more or less ever since, with a few prolonged and mostly unpleasant interruptions. I don’t know what it is, why I love living on boats so much. Perhaps I just feel safe, like I am a part of the boat and she’s a part of me. And I love the sound of the sea, the lapping of water above me, the movement below me, the clapping of the mast in the wind, and the birds. I love the birds. Ever since No Worries , I’ve woken up to the sound of seabirds. I could do without gulls mind. Dirty beggars. They always chose to park themselves on No Worries . There were dozens of boats all around to choose from and they always chose ours. And they didn’t just leave little messages. Oh no! Marty didn’t like cleaning up after them, so I had to do it. I didn’t much like Marty while I was doing that, and I’ve hated gulls ever since.