Morpurgo War Stories

I‘m not sure I ever really believed in God, even in Sunday school. In church I’d gaze up at Jesus hanging on the cross in the stained-glass window, and feel sorry for him because I could see how cruel it was and how much it must be hurting him. I knew he was a good and kind man. But I never really understood why God, who was supposed to be his father, and almighty and powerful, would let them do that to him, would let him suffer so much. I believed then, as I believe now, that crossed fingers and Molly’s stones are every bit as reliable or unreliable as praying to God. I shouldn’t think like that because if there’s no God, then there can be no heaven. Tonight I want very much to believe there’s a heaven, that, as Father said, there is a new life after death, that death is not a full stop, and that we will all see one another again.

It was while Molly was ill in bed with the scarlet fever that Charlie and I discovered that although in one way Molly’s stones had let us down, in another way they had indeed spoken the truth: with her, with the three of us together, we were lucky, and without her we weren’t. Up until now, whenever the three of us had gone out together poaching the Colonel’s fish, we had never been caught. We’d had a few close shaves with old Lambert and his dog, but our lookout system had always worked. Somehow we’d always heard them coming and managed to make ourselves scarce. But the very first time Charlie and I went out poaching without Molly, things went wrong, badly wrong, and it was my fault.

We had chosen a perfect poaching night, not a breath of wind so we could hear anyone coming. With Molly beside me on lookout I’d never felt sleepy, and we’d always heard old Lambert and his dog in plenty of time for Charlie to get out of the river, for us all to make good our escape. But on this particular night my concentration failed me. I’d made myself comfortable, probably too comfortable, in our usual place by the bridge with Charlie netting downstream. But after sitting there for a while I just fell asleep. I don’t drop off all that easily, but when I do sleep I sleep deeply.

The first I knew of anything was a dog snuffling at my neck. Then he was barking in my face, and old Lambert was dragging me to my feet. And there was Charlie way out in the middle of the moonlit river hauling at the nets.

“Peaceful boys! You young rascals,” Lambert growled. “Caught you red-handed. You’re for it now, make no mistake.”

Charlie could have left me there. He could have made a run for it and got clean away, but Charlie’s not like that. He never has been.

At the point of a shotgun Lambert marched us back along the river and up to the Big House, his dog snarling at our heels from time to time just to remind us he was still there, and that he’d eat us alive if we made a run for it. Lambert locked us in the stables and left us. We waited in the darkness, the horses shifting and munching and snorting around us. All too soon we saw the approaching light of a lamp, and heard footsteps and voices. Then the Colonel was there in his slippers and his dressing gown, and he had Grandma Wolf with him in her nightcap looking every bit as fierce as Lambert's dog.

The Colonel looked from one to the other of us, shaking his head in disgust. But Grandma Wolf had the first word. “I’ve never in all my life been so ashamed,” she said. “My own family. You’re nothing but a downright disgrace. And after all the Colonel’s done for us. Common thieves, that’s what you are. Nothing but common thieves.”

When she’d finished it was the Colonel’s turn. “Only one way to deal with young ruffians like you,” he said. “I could have you up before the magistrate, but since I’m the magistrate anyway there’s no need to go to all that trouble, is there? I’ll sentence you right now. You will come up here tomorrow morning at ten o’clock sharp, and I’ll give each of you the hiding you so richly deserve. Then you can stay and clean out the hunt kennels till I say you can go. That should teach you not to come poaching on my land.”

When we got home we had to tell Mother everything we’d done, everything the Colonel had said. Charlie did most of the talking. Mother sat listening in silence, her face stony. When she spoke, she spoke in little more than a whisper. “I can tell you one thing,” she said. “There’ll be no hiding. Over my dead body.” Then she looked up at us, her eyes full of tears. “Why? You said you’d been fishing in the brook. You told me. Oh Charlie, Tommo.” Big Joe stroked her hair. He was anxious and bewildered. She patted his arm. “It’s all right, Joe. I’ll go up there with them tomorrow. Cleaning out the kennels I don’t mind — you deserve that. But it stops there. I won’t let that man lay a finger on you, not one finger, no matter what.”

Mother was as good as her word. How she did it and what was said we never knew, but the next day after Mother and the Colonel had had a meeting in his study, she made us stand in front of him and apologise. Then after a long lecture about trespassing on private property, the Colonel said that he’d changed his mind, that instead of the hiding we would be set to cleaning out the Colonel’s kennels every Saturday and Sunday until Christmas.

As it turned out we didn’t mind at all because, although the smell could be disgusting, the hounds were all around us as we worked, their tails high and waving and happy. So we often stopped work to pet them, after we’d made quite sure no one was looking. We had a particular favourite called Bertha. She was almost pure white with one brown foot and had the most beautiful eyes. She would always stand near us as we scraped and swept, gazing up at us in open adoration. Every time I looked into her eyes I thought of Molly. Like Bertha, she too had eyes the colour of heather honey.

We had to be careful, because Grandma Wolf, now more full of herself than ever, would frequently come out into the stable yard to make sure we were doing our work properly. She’d always have something nasty to say: “Serves you right,” or “That’ll teach you,” or “You should be ashamed of yourselves,” always delivered with a tut and a pained sigh. To finish there’d be some nasty quip about Mother. “Still, with a mother like that, I suppose you’re not entirely to blame, are you?”

Then Christmas Eve came and our punishment was over at last. We said fond farewells to Bertha and ran off home down the Colonel’s drive for the last time, blowing very loud raspberries as we went. Back in the cottage we found waiting for us the best Christmas present we could ever have hoped for. Molly was sitting there smiling at us as we came in through the door. She was pale, but she was back with us. We were together again. Her hair was cut shorter. The plaits were gone, and somehow that changed the whole look of her. She wasn’t a girl any more. She had a different beauty now, a beauty that at once stirred in me a new and deeper love.

I think, without knowing it, I had always charted my own growing up by constant comparison to Molly and Charlie. Day by day I was becoming ever more painfully aware of how far behind them I was. I wasn’t just smaller and slower than they were — I had never liked that, but I was used to it by now. The trouble was that it was becoming evident to me that the gap between us was more serious, and that it was widening. It really began when Molly was moved up into the Bigguns’ class. I was stuck being a Tiddler and they were growing away from me. But whilst we were still at the village school together I didn’t mind all that much because at least I was always near them. We walked to school together, ate our lunch together as we always had — up in the pantry in the vicarage, where the vicar’s wife would bring us lemonade — and then we’d come home together.

I looked forward all day to that long walk home, the school day done, their other friends not with us, with the fearsome Mr Munnings out of sight and out of mind for another day. We’d hare down the hill to the brook, pull off our great heavy boots and release our aching feet and toes at long last. We’d sit there on the bank wiggling our toes in the blessed cool of the water. We’d lie amongst the grass and buttercups of the water meadows and look up at the clouds scudding across the sky, at the wind-whipped crows chasing a mewing buzzard. Then we’d follow the brook home, feet squelching in the mud, our toes oozing with it. Strange when I think of it now, but there was a time when I loved mud, the smell of it, the feel of it, the larking about in it. Not any more.

Then quite suddenly, just after my twelfth birthday, the last of the larking was all over. Charlie and Molly left school and I was alone. I was a Biggun, in Mr Munnings’ class and hating him now even more than I feared him. I woke up dreading every day. Both Charlie and Molly had found work up in the Big House — almost everyone in the village worked up there or on the estate. Molly was under-parlour maid, and Charlie worked in the hunt kennels and in the stables looking after the dogs and the horses, which he loved. Molly didn’t come round to see us nearly so often as before — like Charlie, she worked six days a week. So I hardly saw her.

Charlie would come home late in the evenings as Father had before him, and he’d hang his coat up on Father’s peg and put his boots outside in the porch where Father’s boots had always been. He warmed his feet in the bottom oven when he came in out of the cold of a winter’s day, just as Father had done. That was the first time in my life I was ever really jealous of Charlie. I wanted to put my feet in the oven, and to come home from proper work, to earn money like Charlie did, to have a voice that didn’t pipe like the little children in Miss McAllister’s class. Most of all though I wanted to be with Molly again. I wanted us to be a threesome again, for everything to be just as it had been. But nothing stays the same. I learnt that then. I know that now.

At nights as Charlie and I lay in bed together Charlie just slept. We never made up our stories any more. When I did see Molly, and it was only on Sundays now, she was as kind to me as she always had been, but too kind almost, too protective, more like a little mother to me than a friend. I could see that she and Charlie lived in another world now. They talked endlessly about the goings on and scandals up at the Big House, about the prowling Wolfwoman — it was around this time they dropped the “Grandma Wolf” altogether and began to call her “Wolfwoman”. That was when I first heard the gossip about the Colonel and the Wolfwoman. Charlie said they’d had a thing going for years — common knowledge. That was why the late “Mrs Colonel” had kicked her out all those years before. And now they were like husband and wife up there, only she wore the trousers. There was talk of the Colonel’s dark moods, how he’d shut himself up in his study all day sometimes, and of Cook’s tantrums whenever things were not done just so. It was a world I could not be part of, a world I did not belong in.

I tried all I could to interest them in my life at school. I told them about how we’d all heard Miss McAllister and Mr Munnings having a blazing argument because he refused to light the school stove, how she’d called him a wicked, wicked man. She was right too. Mr Munnings would never light the stove unless the puddles were iced over in the school yard, unless our fingers were so cold we couldn’t write. He shouted back at her that he would light the stove when he thought fit, and that anyway suffering was part of life and good for a child’s soul. Charlie and Molly made out they were interested, but I could tell they weren’t. Then one day down by the brook, I turned and saw them walking away from me through the water meadows holding hands. We’d all held hands before, often, but then it had been the three of us. I knew at once that this was different. As I watched them I felt a sudden ache in my heart. I don’t think it was anger or jealousy, more a pang of loss, of deep grief.

We did have some moments when we became a threesome again, but they were becoming all too few and far between. I remember the day of the yellow aeroplane. It was the first aeroplane any of us had ever seen. We’d heard about them, seen pictures of them, but until that day I don’t think I ever really believed they were real, that they actually flew. You had to see one to believe it. Molly and Charlie and I were fishing down in the brook, just for tiddlers, or brown trout if we were lucky — we’d done no more salmon poaching, Mother had made us promise.

It was late on a summer evening and we were just about to set off home when we heard the distant sound of an engine. At first we thought it was the Colonel’s car — his Rolls Royce was the only car for miles around — but then we all realised at the same moment that this was a different kind of engine altogether. It was a sound of intermittent droning, like a thousand stuttering bees. What’s more, it wasn’t corning from the road at all; it was coming from high above us. There was a flurry of squawking and splashing further upstream as a flight of ducks took off in a panic. We ran out from under the trees to get a better look. An aeroplane! We watched, spellbound, as it circled above us like some ungainly yellow bird, its great wide wings wobbling precariously. We could see the goggled pilot looking down at us out of the cockpit. We waved frantically up at him and he waved back. Then he was coming in lower, lower. The cows in the water meadow scattered. The aeroplane was coming in to land, bouncing, then bumping along and coming to a stop some fifty yards away from us.

The pilot didn’t get out, but beckoned us over. We didn’t hesitate. “Better not switch off!” he shouted over the roar of the engine. He was laughing as he lifted up his goggles. “Might never get the damn thing started again. Listen, the truth is I reckon I’m a bit lost. That church up there on the hill, is that Lapford church?”

“No,” Charlie shouted back. “That’s Iddesleigh. St. James.”

The pilot looked down at his map. “Iddesleigh? You sure?”

“Yes,” we shouted.

“Whoops! Then I really was lost. Jolly good thing I stopped, wasn’t it? Thanks for your help. Better be off.” He lowered his goggles and smiled at us. “Here. You like humbugs?” And he reached out and handed Charlie a bag of sweets. “Cheerio then,” he said. “Stand well back. Here we go.”

And with that, off he went bouncing along towards the hedge, his engine spluttering. I thought he couldn’t possibly lift off in time. He managed it, but only just, his wheels clipping the top of the hedge, before he was up and away. He did one steep turn, then flew straight at us. There was no time to run. All we could do was throw ourselves face down in the long grass. We felt the sudden blast of the wind as he passed above us. By the time we rolled over he was climbing up over the trees and away. We could see him laughing and waving. We watched him soaring over Iddesleigh church tower and then away into the distance. He was gone, leaving us lying there breathless in the silence he’d left behind.

For some time afterwards we lay there in the long grass watching a single skylark rising above us, and sucking on our humbugs. When Charlie came to share them out we had five each, and five for Big Joe, too.

“Was that real?” Molly breathed. “Did it really happen?”

“We’ve got our humbugs,” said Charlie, “so it must have been real, mustn’t it?”

“Every time I eat humbugs from now on,” Molly said, “every time I look at skylarks, I’m going to think of that yellow aeroplane, and the three of us, and how we are right now.”

“Me too,” I said.

“Me too,” said Charlie.

Most people in the village had seen the aeroplane, but only we three had been there when it landed, only we had talked to the pilot. I was so proud of that — too proud as it turned out. I told the story, several embellished versions of it, again and again at school, showing everyone my humbugs just to prove all I’d said was true. But someone must have snitched on me, because Mr Munnings came straight over to me in class and, for no reason at all, told me to empty out my pockets. I had three of my precious humbugs left and he confiscated them all. Then he took me by the ear to the front of the class where he gave me six strokes of the ruler in his own very special way, sharp edge down on to my knuckles. As he did it I looked him in the eye and stared him out. It didn’t dull the pain, nor I’m sure did it make him feel bad about what he was doing, but my sullen defiance of him made me feel a lot better as I walked back to my desk.

As I lay in bed that night, my knuckles still throbbing, I was longing to tell Charlie about what had happened at school, but I knew that everything about school bored him now, so I said nothing. But the longer I lay there thinking about my knuckles and my humbugs the more I was bursting to talk to him. I could hear from his breathing that he was still awake. For just a moment it occurred to me this might be the time to tell him about Father, and how I’d killed him in the forest all those years before. That at least would interest him. I did try, but I still could not summon up the courage to tell him. In the end all I told him was that Mr Munnings had confiscated my humbugs. “I hate him,” I said. “I hope he chokes on them.” Even as I was speaking I could tell he wasn’t listening.

“Tommo,” he whispered, “I’m in trouble.”

“What’ve you done?” I asked him.

“I’m in real trouble, but I had to do it. You remember Bertha, that whitey-looking foxhound up at the Big House, the one we liked?”

“Course,” I said.

“Well, she’s always been my favourite ever since. And then this afternoon the Colonel comes by the kennels and tells me … he tells me he’s going to have to shoot Bertha. So I ask him why. Because she’s getting a bit old, a bit slow, he says. Because whenever they go out hunting she’s always going off on her own and getting herself lost. She’s no use for hunting any more, he says, no use to anyone. I asked him not to, Tommo. I told him she was my favourite. ‘Favourite!’ he says, laughing at me. ‘Favourite? How can you have a favourite? Lot of sentimental claptrap. She’s just one of a pack of dumb beasts, boy, and don’t you forget it.’ I begged him, Tommo. I told him he shouldn’t do it. That’s when he got really angry. He said they’re his foxhounds and he’d shoot them as and when he felt like it, and he didn’t want any more lip from me about it. So you know what I did, Tommo? I stole her. I ran off with her after dark, through the trees so no one would see us.”

“Where is she now?” I asked. “What’ve you done with her?”

“Remember that old forester’s shack Father used, up in Ford’s Cleave Wood? I’ve put her in there for the night. I gave her some food. Molly pinched some meat for me from the kitchen. She’ll be all right up there. No one’ll hear her, with a bit of luck anyway.”

“But what’ll you do with her tomorrow? What if the Colonel finds out?”

“I don’t know, Tommo,” Charlie said. “I don’t know.”

We hardly slept a wink that night. I lay there listening out for Bertha all the while. When I did drop off, I kept waking up suddenly thinking I had heard Bertha barking. But always it turned out to be a screeching fox. And once it was an owl hooting, right outside our window.

I haven’t seen a fox while I've been out here. It’s hardly surprising, I suppose. But I have heard owls. How any bird can survive in all this I‘ll never know. I've even seen larks over no-man’s-land. I always found hope in that.

“He’ll know,” Charlie whispered to me in bed at dawn. “As soon as they find Bertha gone, the Colonel will know it was me. I won’t tell him where she is. I don’t care what he does, I won’t tell him.”

Charlie and I ate our breakfast in silence, hoping the inevitable storm wouldn’t break, but knowing that sooner or later it must. Big Joe sensed something was wrong — he could always feel anxiety in the air. He was rocking back and forth and wouldn’t touch his breakfast. So then Mother knew something was up as well. Once she was suspicious Mother was a difficult person to hide things from, and we weren’t very good at it, not that morning.

“Is Molly coming over?” she asked, beginning to probe.

There was a loud and insistent knocking on the door. She could tell at once it wouldn’t be Molly. It was too early for Molly, and anyway she didn’t knock like that. Besides, I think she could already see from our faces that Charlie and I were expecting an unwelcome visitor. As we feared, it was the Colonel.

Mother invited him in. He stood there glaring at us, thin-lipped and pale with fury. “I think you know why I’ve come, Mrs Peaceful,” he began.

“No, Colonel, I don’t,” said Mother.

“So the young devil hasn’t told you.” He was shouting now, shaking his stick at Charlie. Big Joe began to whimper and clutched Mother’s hand as the Colonel ranted on.

“That boy of yours is a despicable thief. First of all he steals the salmon out of my river. And now, in my employ, in a position of trust, he steals one of my foxhounds. Don’t deny it, boy. I know it was you. Where is she? Is she here? Is she?”

Mother looked to Charlie for an explanation. “He was going to shoot her, Mother,” he said quickly. “I had to do it.”

“You see!” roared the Colonel. “He admits it! He admits it!” Big Joe was beginning to wail now and Mother was smoothing his hair, trying to reassure and comfort him as she spoke. “So you took her in order to save her, Charlie, is that right?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Well, you shouldn’t have done that, Charlie, should you?”

“No, Mother.”

“Will you tell the Colonel where you’ve hidden her?”

“No, Mother.”

Mother thought for a moment or two. “I didn’t think so,” she said. She looked the Colonel full in the face. “Colonel, am I right in thinking that if you were going to shoot this dog, presumably it was because she’s no use to you any more — as a foxhound I mean?”

“Yes,” the Colonel replied, “but what I do with my own animals, or why I do it, is no business of yours, Mrs Peaceful. I don’t have to explain myself to you.”

“Of course not, Colonel,” Mother spoke softly, sweetly almost, “but if you were going to shoot her anyway, then you wouldn’t mind if I were to take her off your hands and look after her, would you?”

“You can do what you like with the damned dog,” the Colonel snapped. “You can bloody well eat her for all I care. But your son stole her from me and I will not let that go unpunished.”

Mother asked Big Joe to fetch the money mug from the mantelpiece. “Here, Colonel,” she said, calmly offering him a coin from the money mug. “Sixpence. I’m buying the dog off you for sixpence, not a bad price for a useless dog. So now it’s not stolen, is it?”

The Colonel was utterly dumbfounded. He looked from the coin in his hand to Mother, to Charlie. He was breathing hard. Then, regaining his composure, he pocketed the sixpence in his waistcoat and pointed his stick at Charlie. “Very well, but you can consider yourself no longer in my employ.” With that he turned on his heel and went out, slamming the door behind him. We listened to his footsteps going down the path, heard the front gate squeaking.

Charlie and I went mad, mostly out of sheer relief, but also quite overwhelmed with gratitude and admiration. What a mother we had! We whooped and yahooed. Big Joe was happy again, and sang Oranges and Lemons as he gambolled wildly round the kitchen.

“I don’t know what you’ve got to be so almightily pleased about,” said Mother when we had all calmed down. “You do know you’ve just lost your job, Charlie?”

“I don’t care,” said Charlie. “He can stuff his stinking job. I’ll find another. You put the silly old fart in his place good and proper. And we’ve got Bertha.”

“Where is that dog anyway?” Mother asked.

“I’ll show you,” Charlie said.

We waited for Molly to come and then we all went off up to Ford’s Cleave Wood together. As we neared the shack, we could hear Bertha yowling. Charlie ran on ahead and opened the door. Out she came, bounding up to us, squeaking with delight, her tail swiping at our legs. She jumped up at all of us, licking everything she could, but right away she seemed to attach herself particularly to Big Joe. She followed him everywhere after that. She even slept on his bed at nights — Big Joe insisted on that no matter how much Mother protested. She’d sit under his apple tree howling up at him while he sang to her from high up in the branches. He only had to start singing and she’d join in, so from now on he never sang his Oranges and Lemons unaccompanied. He never did anything unaccompanied. They were always together. He fed her, brushed her and cleared up her frequent puddles (which were more like lakes). Big Joe had found a new friend and he was in seventh heaven.

After a few weeks going round all the farms in the parish looking for work, Charlie found a job as dairyman and shepherd at Farmer Cox’s place on the other side of the village. He would go off before dawn on his bicycle to do the milking and was back home late, so I saw even less of him than before. He should have been much happier up there. He liked the cows and the sheep, though he said that the sheep were a bit stupid. Best of all, he said, he didn’t have the Colonel or the Wolfwoman breathing down his neck all day.

But Charlie, like me, was very far from happy, because Molly had suddenly stopped coming. Mother said she was sure there could only be one reason. Someone must have put it about — and she thought it could only be the Colonel or the Wolfwoman or both — that Charlie Peaceful was a thieving rascal, and that therefore the Peaceful family were no longer considered fit folk for Molly to visit. She said Charlie should just let things cool down for a while, that Molly would be back. But Charlie wouldn’t listen. Time after time he went to Molly’s cottage. They wouldn’t even answer the door. In the end, because he thought I’d have a better chance of getting to see Molly, he sent me over with a letter. Somehow, he said, I had to deliver it to her. I had to.

Molly’s mother met me at the door with a face like thunder. “Go away,” she yelled at me. “Just go away. Don’t you understand? We don’t want your kind here. We don’t want you bothering our Molly. She doesn’t want to see you.” And with that she slammed the door in my face. I was walking away, Charlie’s letter still in my pocket, when I happened to glance back and saw Molly waving at me frantically through her window. She was mouthing something I couldn’t understand at all at first, gesticulating at me, pointing down the hill towards the brook. I knew then exactly what she meant me to do.

I ran down to the brook and waited under the trees where we’d always done our fishing together. I didn’t have long to wait before she came. She took my hand without a word, and led me down under the bank where we couldn’t possibly be seen. She was crying as she told me everything: how the Colonel had come to the cottage — she’d overheard it all — how he’d told her father that Charlie Peaceful was a thief; how he’d heard Charlie Peaceful had been seeing much more of Molly than was good for her, and that if he had any sense Molly’s father should put a stop to it. “So my father won’t let me see Charlie any more. He won’t let me see any of you,” Molly told me, brushing away her tears. “I’m so miserable without you, Tommo. I hate it up at the Big House without Charlie, and I hate it at home too. Father’ll strap me if I see Charlie. And he said he’ll take a gun to Charlie if he ever comes near me. I think he means it too.”

“Why?” I asked. “Why’s he like that?”

“He’s always been like that,” she said. “He says I’m wicked. Born in sin. Mother says he’s only trying to save me from myself, so I won’t go to Hell. He’s always talking about Hell. I won’t got to Hell, will I, Tommo?”

I did what I did next without thinking. I leant over and kissed her on the cheek. She threw her arms around my neck, sobbing as if her heart would break. “I so want to see Charlie,” she cried. “I miss him so much.” That was when I remembered to give her the letter. She tore it open and read it at once. It can’t have been long because she read it so quickly. “Tell him yes. Yes, I will,” she said, her eyes suddenly bright again.

“Just yes?” I asked, intrigued, puzzled and jealous all at the same time.

“Yes. Same time, same place, tomorrow. I’ll write a letter back and you can give it to Charlie. All right?” She got up and pulled me to my feet. “I love you, Tommo. I love you both. And Big Joe, and Bertha.” She kissed me quickly and was gone.

That was the first of dozens of letters I delivered from Charlie to Molly and from Molly to Charlie over the weeks and months that followed. All through my last year at school I was their go-between postman. I didn’t mind that much, because it meant I got to see Molly often, which was all that really mattered to me. It was all done in great secrecy – Charlie insisted on that. He made me swear on the Holy Bible to tell no one, not even Mother. He made me cross my heart and hope to die.

Molly and I would meet most evenings and exchange letters in the same place, down by the brook, both of us having made quite sure we were not followed. We’d sit and talk there for a few precious minutes, often with the rain dripping through the trees, and once I remember with the wind roaring about us so violently that I thought the trees might come down on us. Fearing for our lives, we ran out across the meadow and burrowed our way into the bottom of a haystack and sat there shivering like a couple of frightened rabbits.