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

But if I think about it, and I often have, my love of the sea must go back to Aunty Megs, and to Mick, her husband. He’d been a sailor. He’d built model boats. Then she did it because he had. Then we did it because she did it. She taught us all that poetry of the sea too, gave us our books, The Yarn of the Nancy Bell , and The Ancient Mariner , which we both knew by heart. So it’s hardly surprising, I suppose, that Marty and I took to the sea like ducks to water.

Luckily Mr Dodds liked that first model we made. So we did the next one for him after that, and very soon we found ourselves working alongside all the other blokes in the boat-building shed, not dogsbodies any more, but like them, boat-builders proper.

Each of Mr Dodds’ boats was a real marvel to me. They were mostly yachts, thirty-to-forty footers. You’d see her first as a sketch on his desk, then developed on the drawing board. Marty and I would make the model, and the next thing you knew – it took months, but it never felt like it – the next thing you knew, there she was in the water. A miracle every time it happened, a man-made miracle, that’s what it was. For me it was like giving birth – as close as I ever got anyway! And Marty and I, and all the blokes in the yard, we were all so proud of them, like they were our children.

But their real father was Mr Dodds of course. I learned more about boats from Mr Dodds than I ever did from anyone else in all my life. There was never anything flash or fancy about his boats. They weren’t built for speed or looks. They were built to sail. And that’s the other thing I learned from Freddie Dodds. He didn’t just teach us how to build boats, he told us how to sail them too. And that was to change my life for ever, and Marty’s too.

I suppose there were about a dozen of us working in Mr Dodds’ boatyard, including Marty and me, and by and large we were a pretty close-knit team. One or two came and went, but for the most part, people liked it and stayed. And that was largely because Mr Dodds treated everyone right. The money wasn’t great – you could certainly earn more elsewhere in the fancier boatyards – but with Mr Dodds you got to build the whole boat, and best of all you got to sail it too. We had job satisfaction – that’s what they call it these days.

Once a boat was finished, Mr Dodds would ask two or three of us to take her out on sea-trials. He would often come along too. Everyone got his chance, but not everyone wanted to do it. Marty and I did though. Any opportunity to go out on sea-trials, and we’d take it. We were seasick of course, but after a while we’d find our sea legs and our sea stomachs, and once we’d settled into it, it was raw excitement – hard work we discovered – but always a pure pleasure.

So, thanks to Mr Dodds, both of us got to know boats from the keel up, from the inside out. We built them and we sailed them too. And when we sailed we learned from Mr Dodds how to sail in harmony with the wind and the sea. He told us once that it was living at sea, surviving at sea, that taught him all he knew about boat-building. You have to understand the sea, he said, to listen to her, to look out for her moods, to get to know her and respect her and love her. Only then can you build boats that feel at home on the sea.

Every time we went out on a new boat with Mr Dodds, I learned that each boat we built was different, had a personality of her own. Once she’s in the water she becomes a living creature, a unique creature. You ride her like you ride a horse. You have to know all her little quirks and fancies and fears, how she likes to ride the waves, how she likes to dance with the sea. That’s what sailing is, a dance, and your partner is the sea. And with the sea you never take liberties. You ask her, you don’t tell her. You have to remember always that she’s the leader, not you. You and your boat are dancing to her tune.

I’m not sure how much Mr Dodds ever actually told us of all this. He was just about as monosyllabic out at sea as he was back in the boatyard. But one way or another we picked up his sailing philosophy and his boat-building philosophy, and it’s stayed with me ever since. Everything I learned from him about the sea, about boats, has proved right. He was my sailing mentor, my tutor of the sea, a fine man and a fine seaman. The best.

He must have thought well of Marty and me too, because after about two or three years – Marty would have been about twenty-one by now, and I was seventeen – he called us up into his office and told us he thought we were ready to do one or two longer trips now, and on our own, just the two of us. We were young, he said, but he’d taught us well,he’d prepared us. A lot of the others didn’t want to do the long trips – most of them had families to go home to. From now on he didn’t just want us to trial his boats, he wanted us to deliver his boats to their new owners. As a result, Marty and I went all over – across to Hobart, up to the Whit Sunday Islands, and three times over to New Zealand.

It was on one of those New Zealand trips, to Auckland, that Marty first put an idea into my head, an idea that’s been there ever since. We were sailing just off Dunedin. “You know what?” he said. “If we wanted we could keep going all the way to England. We could go and find your sister. You could find Kitty.”

We never did, of course. But the idea stayed with me. Meanwhile, I was being paid for what I loved doing best, and I was doing it with my best friend on earth. Ninth heaven now. The two of us were becoming sailors through and through. And about that time, and partly because of the sailing I think, I stopped thinking of Marty as my elder brother, my bigger brother. The age difference between us that had meant so much at one time, and even set us apart a little for a while when we were younger, all but disappeared. On board the boats there was no skipper. We worked alongside each other, with each other, not younger and older brothers any more, but more like twins. We seemed to know instinctively what the other was thinking, what he was about to do. Our world had been the sea world for so long now. We’d shared so much. We’d been shaped by the same teacher.

Once a year for a couple of weeks’ holiday we’d go back home to Aunty Megs, usually at Christmas. Sadly Henry wasn’t around any more, but Barnaby was. Donkeys live longer than wombats. Barnaby still wouldn’t ee-aw however much we tried to make him. We’d sit on the verandah the three of us together, and watch the sun go down, and we’d tell her all about the places we’d been and the boats we’d sailed. And on our last night we would all three of us recite The Ancient Mariner , for a few verses each until we finished it. When we had to leave at the end of the holidays, we never wanted it to end. We never wanted to come away.

Then one January night just after we’d come back from staying with Aunty Megs, our world turned upside down. We’d have both been in our early twenties by then. One way or another, it’s been upside down most of my life ever since.

Thinking back, we should have read the signs. Just before Christmas, Mr Dodds had laid off a couple of the blokes, and he hadn’t been himself for some time. He’d been hiding away in his office, hardly showing himself. I thought he was probably just preoccupied with some new design – we all did. But there was no Christmas bonus that year, and no Christmas party in the boatshed either. We knew the boat business everywhere was going through a hard time, but we didn’t realise just how hard until that January night.