I asked him about. Mad Jack wasn’t on his wall. Mrs Parsons’s shop was still there but now sold antiques and bric-a-brac. I went to the churchyard and found the graves of the colonel and his wife with the black pencilled eyebrows, but I’d remembered her name wrong. She was Veronica, not Valerie. They had died within six months of each other. I got chatting to the man who had just finished mowing the grass in the graveyard and asked him about the atomic power station and whether people minded living alongside it.
“Course I mind,” he replied. He took off his flat cap and wiped his brow with his forearm. “Whoever put that ruddy thing up should be ashamed of themselves. Never worked properly all the time it was going anyway.”
“It’s not going any more then?” I asked.
“Been shut down, I don’t know, maybe eight or nine years,” he said, waxing even more vehement. “Out of date. Clapped out. Useless. And do you know what they had to do? They had to wrap the whole place under a blanket of concrete, and it’s got to stay there like that for a couple of hundred years at least so’s it doesn’t leak out and kill the lot of us. Madness, that’s what it was, if you ask me. And when you think what it must have been like before they put it up. Miles and miles of wild marshland as far as the eye could see. All gone. Must’ve been wonderful. Some funny old lady lived out there in a railway carriage. Chinese lady, they say. And she had a donkey. True. I’ve seen photos of her and some kid sitting on a donkey outside her railway carriage. Last person to live out there, she was. Then they went and kicked her out and built that ugly great wart of a place. And for what? For a few years of electricity that’s all been used up and gone. Price of progress, I suppose they’d call it. I call it a crying shame.”
I bought a card in the post office and wrote a letter to Mother. I knew she’d love to hear I’d been back to Bradwell. Then I made my way past the Cricketers’ Inn and the school, where I stopped to watch the children playing where I’d played; then on towards St Peter’s, the old chapel by the sea wall, the favourite haunt of my youth, where Mrs Pettigrew had taken me all those years before, remote and bleak from the outside, and inside filled with quiet and peace. Some new houses had been built along the road since my time. I hurried past trying not to notice them, longing now to leave the village behind me. I felt my memories had been trampled enough.
One house name on a white-painted gate to a new bungalow caught my eye: New Clear View. I saw the joke, but didn’t feel like smiling. And beyond the bungalow, there it was again, the power station, massive now because I was closer, a monstrous complex of buildings rising from the marsh, malign and immovable. It offended my eye. It hurt my heart. I looked away and walked on.
When I reached the chapel, no one was there. I had the place to myself, which was how I had always liked it. After I had been inside, I came out and sat down with my back against the sun-warmed brick and rested. The sea murmured. I remembered again my childhood thoughts, how the Romans had been here, the Saxons, the Normans, and now me. A lark rose then from the grass below the sea wall, rising, rising, singing, singing. I watched it disappear into the blue, still singing, singing for Mrs Pettigrew.
I still think of the house on the Essex coast where I grew up as my childhood home. But in fact it was my home for just four months of every year. The rest of the time I spent at my boarding school a whole world away, deep in the Sussex countryside. In my home by the sea they called me Michael. In my boarding school I was Morpurgo (or Pongo to my friends), and I became another person. I had two distinctively different lives, and so, in order to survive both, I had to become two very different people. Three times a year I had to make the changeover from home boy to schoolboy. Going back to school was always an agony of misery, a wretched ritual, a ritual I endured simply because I had to.
Then one evening at the beginning of the autumn term of 1953 I made up my mind that I would not endure it any longer, that I would run away, that I would not stay at my school and be Morpurgo or Pongo any more. I simply wanted to go home where I belonged and be Michael for ever.
The agony began, as it always began, about ten days before the end of the holidays – in this case, the summer holidays. For eight blessed weeks I had been at home. We lived in a large and rambling old house in the centre of a village called Bradwell-juxta-mare (near the sea). The house was called New Hall – new being mostly seventeenth century, with lots of beams and red bricks. It had a handsome Georgian front, with great sash windows, and one or two windows that weren’t real windows at all but painted on – to save the window tax, I was told. House and garden lay hidden and protected behind a big brick wall.
Cycling out of the gate, as I often did, I turned left on to the village street towards Bradwell Quay and the sea, right towards the church, and the American airbase, and then out over the marshes towards the ancient Saxon chapel of St Peter’s near the sea wall itself. Climb the sea wall and there was the great brown soupy North Sea and always a wild wet wind blowing. I felt always that this place was a part of me, that I belonged here.
My stepfather worked at his writing in his study, wreathed in a fog of tobacco smoke, with a bust of Napoleon and a Confederate flag on his leather-topped desk, whilst my mother tried her very best to tame the house and the garden and us, mostly on her own. We children were never as much help as we should have been, I’m ashamed to say. There were great inglenook fireplaces that devoured logs. So there were always logs for us to fetch in. Then there were the Bramley apples to pick and lay out in the old Nissen huts in the orchard. And if there was nothing that had to be harvested, or dug over or weeded, then there was the jungle of nettles and brambles that had to be beaten back before it overwhelmed us completely. Above all we had not to disturb our stepfather. When he emerged, his work done for the day, we would play cricket on the front lawn, an apple box for a wicket – it was six if you hit it over the wall into the village street. If it rained, we moved into the big vaulted barn where owls and bats and rats and spiders lived, and played fast and furious ping-pong till suppertime.
I slept up in the attic with my elder brother. We had a candle factory up there, melting down the ends of used-up candles on top of a paraffin stove and pouring the wax into jelly moulds. At night we could climb out of our dormer windows and sit and listen to the owls screeching over the marshes, and to the sound of the surging sea beyond. There always seemed to be butterflies in and out of the house – red admirals, peacocks. I collected dead ones in a biscuit tin, laid them out on cotton wool. I kept a wren’s nest by my bed, so soft with moss, so beautifully crafted.
My days and nights were filled with the familiarity of the place and its people and of my family. This isn’t to say I loved it all. The house was numbingly cold at times. My stepfather could be irritable, rigid and harsh; my mother anxious, tired and sad; my younger siblings intrusive and quarrelsome; and the villagers sometimes very aggressive. What haunted me most, though, were stories of a house ghost, told for fun, I’m sure; but nonetheless, the ghost terrified me so much that I dreaded going upstairs at night on my own. But all this was home. Haunted or not, this was my place. I belonged.
The day and the moment always came as a shock. So absorbing was this home life of mine, that I’d quite forgotten the existence of my other life. Suddenly I’d find my mother dragging out my school trunk from under the stairs. From that moment on, my stomach started to churn. As my trunk filled, I was counting the days, the hours. The process of packing was relentless. Ironing, mending, counting, marking: eight pairs of grey socks, three pairs of blue rugby shorts, two green rugby shirts, two red rugby shirts, green tie, best blazer – red, green and white striped. Evenings were spent watching my mother and my two spinster aunts sewing on name tapes. Every one they sewed on seemed to be cementing the inevitability of my impending expulsion from home. The name tapes read: M. A. B. Morpurgo.
