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

I was asleep on No Worries when it happened. Marty had gone out for his last nightwatchman’s check around the boatyard. It must have been about midnight, I guess. The two of us always took it in turns, and Marty was on duty that night. All you did was walk around the yard with a torch for half an hour. It was a routine neither of us liked much, but for doing it we were living on No Worries almost rent free, so we couldn’t complain.

The first I knew of it, Marty was shaking me awake. I could see the flames straightaway through the skylight. I thought at first it was the boat that was on fire. When we got up on deck of No Worries you could see the whole boatyard was on fire from end to end. By the time we got down there, the fire fighters were already there. There was nothing they could do, nothing anyone could do. Luckily there were no boats inside. They were all out on the apron or in the water. Marty kept saying over and over that he’d only been down there an hour before and checked the place. He couldn’t understand it. I saw Mr Dodds standing there still in his pyjama tops watching his whole world going up in flames before his eyes.

The police took Marty and me in and questioned us separately. I told them what I knew, which was nothing of course, except that each of us would go out last thing on alternate nights to check the boatyard, that we’d shared the nightwatchman duties for years and years. When they asked me whose turn it had been that night I told them that it had been Marty’s. It was only after I’d said it that I realised what they might be thinking. I regretted it at once. But it was too late.

They arrested Marty that night on suspicion of arson. They wouldn’t let me see him either. When I told Mr Dodds what the police had done, he just looked at me, then turned away without saying a word. It wasn’t at all the reaction I had been expecting. I’d never known him to be heartless before. I couldn’t understand it.

It turned out they were dead right about the arson, just wrong about Marty. I was wrong about Mr Dodds too,couldn’t have been more wrong. He walked into the police station the next morning, and confessed to it all. Brilliant designer and boat builder that he was, good and kind man that he was too, it seemed he had got himself into a serious financial mess. It was an insurance scam. The poor man was trying to save his shirt. But once he’d heard they’d arrested Marty, he couldn’t go through with it. Like I said, he was a good man. But they sent him to prison for seven years. Marty and I went to visit him, but they told us he didn’t want to see anyone. We never saw him again. We tried again and again but he refused to see us every time.

So that was the end of the boatyard, the end of the good times, the happy times. One night was all it took for our whole world to fall apart. That one night in a prison cell for Marty was a night he never got over. I never got over it either. I felt I had betrayed Marty, that I’d locked him in that police cell as sure as if I’d turned the key myself. I told him how bad I felt but he never blamed me. “Forget it,” he said. I couldn’t. Marty was never quite the same after that night. Nothing was.

They let Marty and me live on for a while on No Worries . By day we’d be out looking for work in other boatyards. But times were hard. There was just no work to be had in any of the boatyards in Newcastle or Sydney, nor anywhere else so far as we could discover, and boat-building was all we could do. Letters came from Aunty Megs saying we could always come home for a while if we wanted to, that there was always a place for us there, and plenty of work too. I can’t believe how stupid we were not to have taken her up on her offer. I remember reading her letters over and over again, trying to decide whether to go. But for all sorts of reasons, Marty and I decided against it. He said, and at the time I thought he was right about it too, that you should never go back, that it’d be like giving up. And we both loved the sea, loved boats. We were determined to find work that kept us near the sea, or even on it preferably.

Those months we trudged the harbours and boatyards of Sydney looking for work took their toll on us both, but on Marty in particular. He was always the one who had kept me going through our most difficult times, ever since we were little. Now he just about gave up. I was the one who had to get him up in the morning when he wanted to just lie there. With every fruitless day, with every rejection, I watched him sinking deeper into the silence of despair. I tried to pull him out of it, to joke him out of it, tried to keep him positive. But it was no good.

Every night now he’d want to stay out drinking late. Time and again I had to drag him out of bars, and more than once he got into fights, usually over some girl. Drink did that to him. It didn’t make him happy; it made him angry. Money, the little we had saved, was fast running out. Worse, I could feel that the two of us were beginning to drift apart. Before we’d always done everything together. But now he’d go out in the evenings on his own. I could tell he didn’t want me around. We never fell out, not as such. He was just going his own way and there was nothing I could do about it.

There was one morning when I couldn’t get him out of bed no matter what I did. So I left him there and went off job hunting on my own. As usual I didn’t find anything, but I was gone all day. When I came back home to No Worries in the evening, Marty had gone. I thought he’d gone out drinking, that he’d be back later. Even when a couple of policemen came the next morning, early, and woke me up, I wasn’t that worried. I just thought he’d picked another fight and ended up in a police station for the night. I recognised one of the policemen – he’d interviewed me on the night of the fire.

I was half-asleep when they told me, so I didn’t really understand, not at first. It was about Marty, they told me, and I had to come with them. I still couldn’t understand. “We’ve got a witness who saw it happen,” said the policeman I had met before, “someone who knew him. But all the same, we need you to come and take a look.”

Then they told it to me straight. Marty had been drunk. He’d been doing the dinghy dance, leaping from boat to boat in the harbour, messing around. He’d fallen in, and just never came up again. They’d tried to find him, but it was dark. Then this morning a body had been found. I’m still trying to believe it happened. Even now, all these years later, the shock of it and the pain of it goes through me every time I think of it.

They took me to see him in the hospital. It wasn’t Marty. It was just his body. I felt nothing then. I tried to feel something; I stayed there with him for hours. But you can’t feel emptiness. They brought me back to No Worries , and I found Aunty Megs sitting on her suitcase waiting for me. It was the strangest thing. She’d woken up a couple of nights before and had known at once that we needed her. When I told her, all she said was, “I’m too late then.”

There were just the two of us there for Marty’s funeral. We buried his ashes up on the hill where the bushmen had left us that day, where Aunty Megs had first found us. I recited a few verses from The Ancient Mariner , ending with the line I knew he loved most of all: “Alone on a wide, wide sea”. I’m glad I did that, because that poem is not just about a sea voyage, it’s about the journey through life, and about the loneliness of that journey. It was the right thing to read.