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

Aunty Megs took me in again. She took care of me all she could. But now there were two spirits in that house with us, Mick and Marty. She had photos of them on the mantelpiece, side by side. But they were omnipresent, particularly, I remember, when we were sitting in silence together as we often did of an evening.

So much was the same. But so much wasn’t. Henry’s hole was still there under the verandah steps, still full of his beloved hats. Barnaby wandered the paddock shadowing Big Black Jack. The two had clearly become quite inseparable. But Aunty Megs’ old horse had gone.

Aunty Megs and I still did everything the three of us had always done together. She didn’t have the cows any more, just one nanny goat for her milk. But we still went up to the main road to rescue the orphan marsupials, her little fellows. We still kept them in the compound, and from time to time we’d make the long journey up to Marty’s hill, as we called it now, to see if one or two of them would go back to the wild.

I had never been quite sure of Aunty Megs’ age, but she must have been about seventy-five or eighty by now, and I’d have been in my late twenties. As the years passed she stayed just as active in her mind, just as spirited. But as she said, her “poor old body doesn’t work like it should”. She didn’t go out walking much these days. Her legs pained her. She never said anything much about it, but I could see it. She moved more slowly, more stiffly.

But she could ride all day though, and it wouldn’t bother her a bit. On the contrary, she was happier up on a horse than anywhere else. She told me once that God had given her four legs to gallop with and a tail to whack the files with, that he’d just made a big mistake with the rest of the human race, that’s all. And gallop she did too. Nothing she liked better. She said it made her feel alive. And I knew what she meant, because that’s exactly how I’d felt out sailing with Marty on Mr Dodds’ boats, with the wind in my face, and the sails straining above me and the salt spray on my lips. My longing for the sea never left me.

Aunty Megs had a good quick end, the best you can have, the doctor said when he came. She’d gone out with her torch to check her family of animals in the compound as she always did in the late evening. I was sitting, stargazing on the verandah when she came back. She sat down beside me, and said she thought she smelt rain in the air. Then she fell silent. I thought she’d gone to sleep – she’d often do that out on the verandah on warm evenings. And in fact that’s just what she had done. She’d gone to sleep, but it was the long sleep, the final sleep.

The whole town came up to Marty’s hill the day she was buried, and there were dozens of bushmen there too. I don’t think I quite realised until then just how much she was loved. I put her ashes next to Marty’s, a photo of Mick with them. When everyone left I stayed up there and recited the whole of The Ancient Mariner for them both. As I walked away I felt like an orphan all over again, a grown-up one maybe, but an orphan just the same.

If there’s one part of my life I’d like to forget entirely it was the next fifteen years or so. I suppose you could call them my years in the wilderness. I shan’t enjoy writing about them, but I’ve got to do it. Like it or not, I can’t just miss it out. Luckily for me, quite a lot of it is lost in a fog of forgetfulness. Perhaps that’s what happens sometimes. Perhaps it’s an automatic survival system that helps you muddle through. Maybe the memory just says: that’s enough. I’m overloading with pain here and I can’t cope, so I’m switching off. But it doesn’t switch off entirely. So you remember, but thankfully only dimly, through the fog. Sometimes, though, the fog does clear, and you see the icebergs all around. You can hear them groaning and grinding and you just want to sail through the field of icebergs and out the other side, or you just long for the fog again. I’ll tell you about the icebergs now. And like most icebergs are, they were unexpected and very unwelcome.

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