Morpurgo War Stories. Michael Morpurgo

      Charlie is taking me by the hand, leading me because he knows I don’t want to go. I’ve never worn a collar before and it’s choking me. My boots are strange and heavy on my feet. My heart is heavy too, because I dread what I am going to. Charlie has told me often how terrible this school-place is: about Mr Munnings and his raging tempers and the long whipping cane he hangs on the wall above his desk.

      Big Joe doesn’t have to go to school and I don’t think that’s fair at all. He’s much older than me. He’s even older than Charlie and he’s never been to school. He stays at home with Mother, and sits up in his tree singing Oranges and Lemons, and laughing. Big Joe is always happy, always laughing. I wish I could be happy like him. I wish I could be at home like him. I don’t want to go with Charlie. I don’t want to go to school.

      I look back, over my shoulder, hoping for a reprieve, hoping that Mother will come running after me and take me home. But she doesn’t come and she doesn’t come, and school and Mr Munnings and his cane are getting closer with every step.

      “Piggyback?” says Charlie. He sees my eyes full of tears and knows how it is. Charlie always knows how it is. He’s three years older than me, so he’s done everything and knows everything. He’s strong, too, and very good at piggybacks. So I hop up and cling on tight, crying behind my closed eyes, trying not to whimper out loud. But I cannot hold back my sobbing for long because I know that this morning is not the beginning of anything — not new and exciting as Mother says it is — but rather the end of my beginning. Clinging on round Charlie’s neck I know that I am living the last moments of my carefree time, that I will not be the same person when I come home this afternoon.

      I open my eyes and see a dead crow hanging from the fence, his beak open. Was he shot, shot in mid-scream, as he began to sing, his raucous tune scarcely begun? He sways, his feathers still catching the wind even in death, his family and friends cawing in their grief and anger from the high elm trees above us. I am not sorry for him. It could be him that drove away my robin and emptied her nest of her eggs. My eggs. Five of them there had been, live and warm under my fingers. I remember I took them out one by one and laid them in the palm of my hand. I wanted them for my tin, to blow them like Charlie did and lay them in cotton wool with my blackbird’s eggs and my pigeon’s eggs. I would have taken them. But something made me draw back, made me hesitate. The robin was watching me from Father’s rose bush, her black and beady eyes unblinking, begging me.

      Father was in that bird’s eyes. Under the rose bush, deep down, buried in the damp and wormy earth were all his precious things. Mother had put his pipe in first. Then Charlie laid his hobnail boots side by side, curled into each other, sleeping. Big Joe knelt down and covered the boots in Father’s old scarf.

      “Your turn, Tommo,” Mother said. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was holding the gloves he’d worn the morning he died. I remembered picking one of them up. I knew what they did not know, what I could never tell them.

      Mother helped me to do it in the end, so that Father’s gloves lay there on top of his scarf, palms uppermost, thumbs touching. I felt those hands willing me not to do it, willing me to think again, not to take the eggs, not to take what was not mine. So I didn’t do it. Instead I watched them grow, saw the first scrawny skeletal stirrings, the nest of gaping, begging beaks, the frenzied screeching at feeding time; witnessed too late from my bedroom window the last of the early-morning massacre, the parent robins watching like me, distraught and helpless, while the marauding crows made off skywards cackling, their murderous deed done. I don’t like crows. I’ve never

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