Michael Morpurgo - Listen to the Moon

It was already late afternoon and Jim was very aware that they had precious little to show for nearly an entire day’s fishing. Now that he wasn’t rowing, the wind was already chilling him to the bone. He pulled his collar up. It was cold for May, more like March, Jim thought. He looked at his son bending rhythmically, easily, to the oars, and envied him his strength and suppleness, but at the same time took a father’s pride in it too. He had been that young once, that strong.

He looked down at his hands, scarred, calloused and cracked as they were now, ingrained with years of fishing and years of farming his potatoes and his flowers. He baited the line again, his fingers working instinctively, automatically. He was thankful he could not feel them. They were numb to the cold and salt of seawater, numb to the wind. Some of those old cracks in his finger joints had opened up again and would otherwise be paining him dreadfully by now. It was good to be numb, he thought, and just as well. He was wondering why it was that his ears hurt, why they too hadn’t gone numb? He wished they would.

Jim smiled inside himself as he remembered how the day had begun, at breakfast. It had been Alfie’s idea in the first place. He didn’t want to go to school. He wanted to come fishing instead. He’d tried this on before, often, and rarely with any success. It didn’t stop him trying again. “Tell Mother you need me,” Alfie had said, “that you can’t do without me. She’ll listen to you. I won’t be no trouble, Father. Promise.”

Jim knew he wouldn’t be any trouble. The boy sailed a boat well, rowed strongly, knew the waters and fished with a will, with that wholehearted enthusiasm and confidence borne of youth, always so sure he would catch something. The fish seemed to like him too. It was noticeable that Jim often did better when Alfie was in the boat. With the fishing as disappointing as it had been recently in the waters around Scilly, Jim would go out fishing these days more in hope than expectation. Catches had been poor for all the fishermen in recent times, not just him. Anyway, Alfie would be company out there, good company. So he agreed to do what he could to persuade Mary to let Alfie miss school for a day, and come fishing with him.

But all pleading, all reasoning, proved to be quite useless, as Jim had warned Alfie it might be. Mary was adamant that Alfie had to go to school, that he’d missed far too much already, that he was always trying to find ways of not going. Any excuse would do: working out on the farm, or going fishing with his father. Enough was enough. When Mary insisted with that certain tone in her voice, Jim knew there was very little point in arguing, that she was immovable. He persisted only because he wanted Alfie to know he really wanted him out there in the boat with him, and to demonstrate his solidarity. When Alfie saw the argument wasn’t going his way, he joined in, trying anything he could think of that might change her mind.

“What does one day off school matter, Mother, one day?”

“We always catch more fish when there’s the two of us.”

“And anyway, out in an open boat it’s always safer with two – I heard you say so.”

“And I hate Beastly Beagley at school. Everyone knows he can’t teach for toffee. He’s a waste of space, and school’s nothing but a waste of time.”

“You let me stay home, Mother, and, after I’ve been fishing with Father, I’ll come back and clean out the henhouse for you, and fetch back a cartload of seaweed to fertilise the lower field, whatever you want.”

“What I want, Alfie, is for you to go to school,” Mary said firmly. It was quite futile. She wasn’t going to give in. There was nothing more to be said, nothing more to be done. So Alfie had trudged off reluctantly to school with Mary’s words ringing in his ears. “There’s more to life than boats and fishing, Alfie! Never heard of a fish teaching anyone to read or write! And your writing ain’t nothing to write home about neither, if you ask me!”

When he’d gone, she’d turned to Jim. “I’ll need nine good mackerel for tea, Jimbo, don’t forget,” she said. “And wrap up warm. Spring it may be, but there was a keen wind out there when I went to feed the hens. That boy of yours forgot to do it again.”

“He’s always my boy when he forgets,” said Jim, shrugging on his coat, and stepping into his boots.

“Where else do you think he gets it from?” she replied, buttoning up Jim’s coat. She gave him his peck on the cheek and patted his shoulders as she always did, as he always liked her to do. “And by the way, Jimbo, I promised Uncle Billy a crab for tomorrow – you know how much he loves his crab. Nice one, mind. Not too big. Not too small. He don’t like a crab all chewy and tough. He’s very particular. Don’t forget.”

“I won’t forget,” Jim muttered under his breath as he went out of the door. “Nothing’s good enough for big brother Billy, eh? You spoil that old pirate rotten, that’s the truth of it.”

“No more’n I spoil you, Jim Wheatcroft,” she retorted.

“Anyway,” Jim went on, “I’d have thought old and tough and chewy would have suited an old pirate like Long John Silver just perfect.”

When it came to Uncle Billy, it was always this kind of good-natured banter between them. They had sometimes to share the humorous side of it. The truth of what had happened to Uncle Billy in his life was often too painful.

“Jim Wheatcroft!” she called after him. “That’s my brother you’re talking about, and don’t you forget it. He ain’t neither old nor chewy, just in a world of his own. He’s not like the rest of us, and that’s fine by me.”

“Whatever you say, Marymoo, whatever you say,” he replied, and, with a cheery flourish of his cap, went off down the field towards Green Bay, mimicking Uncle Billy’s favourite ditty just loudly enough for her to hear: “Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum! Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!”

“Jim Wheatcroft, I heard that!” In response, Jim gave her another wave of his cap. “And you take care out there, Jimbo, you hear!” she shouted after him.

As he went down to the boat, Jim was marvelling at Mary’s endless patience and constant devotion to her brother, but at the same time he felt more than a little vexed, as he always did, at how oblivious Uncle Billy seemed to be to all Mary had done for him, and was doing for him every day of her life. He could hear him now, singing away out on his boat in Green Bay, “the good ship Hispaniola ”, as Uncle Billy called it.

It hadn’t been a ‘good ship’ at all, not to start with, just the remnants, the rotting hulk, of an old Cornish lugger, abandoned long ago on the beach on Green Bay. It was five years now since Mary had brought Uncle Billy home from the hospital and installed him in the boat shed. She had made a home for him up in the sail loft, and he’d been out there on Green Bay, just about every day since, whatever the weather, restoring that old lugger. It was she who had told him about the ship in the hospital, and, as soon as she got him home, encouraged him to get back to boatbuilding, which he’d loved so much as a young man. She was convinced that what he needed above all, she’d told Jim, was to keep busy, use his hands, be the craftsman he once was again.

Everyone, including Jim, had thought it was an impossible task, that out there in all weathers the lugger had deteriorated too much, was too far gone, and that anyway ‘Silly Billy’, as they called him all over the island, couldn’t possibly do it. Only Mary insisted he could. And soon enough everyone could see that she had been right. When it came to boatbuilding, Silly Billy – whatever you thought of him – knew well enough what he was doing. Day by day over the years, the old lugger in Green Bay was becoming young again, and sleek and beautiful.