In the Mouth of the Wolf. Michael Morpurgo
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and settle back on my pillows. I know I won’t sleep.
This is a night for remembering. I want to remember everyone who wasn’t here at my party, all my good companions in life who held my hand, stroked my brow, helped me through. I want to see them again, be with them again, live all my life with them again, from my sandpit days to now. Ninety years.
Papa, are you there, Papa? You missed a good party. I think of you, and you are sitting there in your tweed suit, with your bird’s nest of a beard, wreathed in pipe smoke. I always wanted to be like you, Papa, smoke a pipe, write fine poetry, stories and plays, be wise. You were so wise about most things – but not everything. For a start, you had far too many children. Four daughters, all of them loud with laughter and full of opinions – Marie, Elizabeth, Catherine, Jeanne – and then there was Pieter and me; ‘the boys’, you called us. There were children tumbling everywhere, crowding me out of the sandpit, and forever making plays where I always had to be a tree, because I was tall.
The sisters chose the plays, took the main parts too. Pieter was the best actor, but they made him play the log that Bottom sat on in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Do you remember that, Papa? And I was a tree again of course. You said Pieter made a very fine log, but you said nothing about me being a very fine tree.
I always liked to have you to myself, but hardly ever could. You never read the poems and stories just to me, always to all of us. I loved the stories, loved the poems, but I loved you more.
You remember those summer holidays in Belgium, Papa, the country walks in the Ardennes forest where you had grown up as a child? Those were the best times, Papa, just you and me, and Pieter trailing along behind, waving a stick. He always had a stick. I asked him once why he was fencing with it, and he said he was fighting off the wolves. And I said there was no need to fight them, that he could turn and face them, and clap his hands and look brave. And Pieter said no, that if they came close and bared their teeth, if they wanted to eat him up, if they wanted to tear our family to pieces, he had to fight them.
You said, Papa, in your wisdom, in your desire always to be fair, that we were both right. But you had told me all my life that it was ignorance and ancient hatreds and power politics that had dragged Europe into the horrors of the Great War, and that in that war, as in all wars, there were never winners, only sufferers. You set me on my pacifist course early, Papa. It is a philosophy that has guided me and troubled me all my life.
Who knows why you sent me off to that boarding school, banishing me from the family home, from all that was familiar – from you? I was never so miserable, before or since. I lay in my bed each night and raged against you and Mama. I grew away from you, from home and family, more and more each night. In time, Pieter came to join me, and we should have been allies then. But I was older, taller, domineering, and I am ashamed to say, Papa, that I neglected him dreadfully. Worse, I turned my back on him as a brother. He was a new boy, a squirt. I treated him with disdain, disowned him sometimes. I have never forgiven myself.
If I am honest, I think there was jealousy there. I might have been a big cheese, was taller than any other boy in the school, a giant on the rugby field, always surrounded by friends, but Pieter was beautiful, with the face of a young god, kind-hearted always, Mama’s favourite, and at home so full of fun and laughter. But not at school. This was not a place for sensitive souls. He hated it as much as I did.
You didn’t know any of this, did you, Papa? We kept our school life separate, Pieter and I. At home I could be more like a proper brother to him again. Free from the tyranny of that school, we could be ourselves, be brothers, be the best of friends. But, away from you, Papa, I stopped knowing you. I stopped knowing you, even stopped loving you for a while. Home was a foreign land to me. You were busy becoming Emile Cammaerts, travelling up to London every day, the great professor and poet.
There were no more family holidays in the Ardennes, no more walks and talks in the forest, just you and me. There was civil war raging in Spain, Hitler’s bombs were falling on Guernica, on families, on old and young alike. And in Germany and in Italy, fascists were on the move. The world was resounding to the march of jackboots, the drums of war were beating.
I did my university degree in Cambridge, living the last of the good life, turning a blind eye, hoping for the best, but fearful already that the Great War into which I had been born was not going to be the war to end all wars. I turned to teaching, not out of conviction, not yet, but for lack of anything else to do. You approved, and told me I would make a great teacher. I wanted so much to believe that.
I hardly saw Pieter those days. He was going his own way, as a proper actor – not just a log any more – travelling the country. If I ever came home, you would show me his reviews proudly. You forgave me for drifting away, let me become whoever I was going to become. You trusted me, and that takes love, I know that now. You made me who I am, Papa. And Pieter? Well, Pieter changed the whole course of my life.
The scops owl is still hooting to the world, to me, wishing me a happy birthday. But the church bell has chimed one o’clock. So my birthday is well and truly over. A cloud is passing over the moon, darkening my room. I don’t like the dark, never have. Nor did Pieter. He hated to be alone at night. When he was little he often used to come into my room and crawl into my bed. I never told Pieter I was frightened of the dark too. We used to count the stars we could see to take our minds off the dark, and I would teach him the names of all the stars I knew. He told me once how much he longed to go there, to the stars.
You there, Pieter? You up there in the stars? Missed you at the party. Or were you there maybe? Been a long time, little brother. What is it, nearly seventy years since I watched you get on that chuffa-chuffa train, as you used to call them, at Radlett Station? I knew then, as the train pulled out and you were waving at me out of the window, that I wouldn’t see you again. As you disappeared into the smoke, I wanted to shout after you to come back. I glimpsed it in your face, that you knew what I feared, that you didn’t need me to warn you. You were doing what you believed was right. You didn’t need me at all, not any more. What you didn’t know, because I never told you, was how much I needed you then and have needed you since, every day, all my life.
We did everything together, didn’t we, Pieter? With Papa away at work up in London even during the school holidays,