Also by Michael Morpurgo
Arthur High King of Britain
Escape From Shangri-La
Friend or Foe
From Hereabout Hill
The Ghost of Grania O’Malley
Kensuke’s Kingdom
King of the Cloud Forests
Long Way Home
Mr Nobody’s Eyes
My Friend Walter
The Nine Lives of Montezuma
The Sandman and the Turtles
The Sleeping Sword
Twist of Gold
Waiting for Anya
War Horse
The War of Jenkins’ Ear
The White Horse of Zennor
Why the Whales Came
For younger readers
Animal Tales
Conker
Mairi’s Mermaid
The Marble Crusher
On Angel Wings
The Best Christmas Present in the World
First published in Great Britain in 1984
by Kaye & Ward Ltd
This edition published 2008
by Egmont UK Limited
239 Kensington High Street, London W8 6SA
Text copyright © 1984 Michael Morpurgo
Cover illustration copyright © 2008 Tom Hartley
Foxes image copyright © 2008 Shutterstock
The moral all of rights of the author have been asserted
ISBN 978 1 4052 3339 2
eBook ISBN 978 1 7803 1176 0
www.egmont.co.uk
www.michaelmorpurgo.org
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
Printed and bound in Great Britain by the CPI group
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For Basty, Ration and Ross
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
CHAPTER ONE
BILLY BUNCH CAME IN A BOX ONE WINTRY night ten years ago. It was a large box with these words stencilled across it: ‘Handle with care. This side up. Perishable.’
For Police Constable William Fazackerly this was a night never to be forgotten. He had pounded the streets all night checking shop doors and windows, but it was too cold a night even for burglars. As he came round the corner and saw the welcome blue light above the door of the Police Station, he was thinking only of the mug of sweet hot tea waiting for him in the canteen. He bounded up the steps two at a time and nearly tripped over the box at the top.
At first it looked like a box of flowers, for a great bunch of carnations – blue from the light above – filled it from end to end. He crouched down and parted the flowers. Billy lay there swathed in blankets up to his chin. A fluffy woollen bonnet covered his head and ears so that all Police Constable Fazackerly could see of him were two wide open eyes and a toothless mouth that smiled cherubically up at him. There was a note attached to the flowers: ‘Please look after him’, it read.
Police Constable Fazackerly sat down beside the box and tickled the child’s voluminous cheeks and the smile broke at once into a giggle so infectious that the young policeman dissolved into a high-pitched chuckle that soon brought the Desk Sergeant and half the night shift out to investigate. The flowers – and they turned white once they were inside – were dropped unceremoniously into Police Constable Fazackerly’s helmet, and the child was borne into the Station by the Desk Sergeant, a most proprietary grin creasing his face. ‘Don’t stand there gawping,’ he said. ‘I want hot water bottles, lots of ’em and quickly. Got to get him warm; and Fazackerly, you phone for the doctor and tell him it’s urgent. Go on, lad, go on.’ And it was the same Desk Sergeant who to his eternal credit named the child, not after himself, but after the young Police Constable who had found him. ‘I’ve named a few waifs and strays in my time,’ he said, ‘and I’ll not condemn any child to carry a name like Fazackerly all his life. But Billy he’ll be – not Billy Carnation, he’d never forgive us – no. Now let me see, how about Billy Bunch for short? How’s that for a name, young feller-me-lad?’ And Billy giggled his approval.
Billy did not know it, but that moment in his box on the table in the Interrogation Room with half a dozen adoring policemen bending over him was to be his last taste of true contentment for a long time. He was not to know it either, but he sent a young policeman home that night to his bed with his heart singing inside him. Billy Bunch was a name he was never to forget.
Billy Bunch was taken away to hospital and processed from there on. First there was the children’s home where he stayed for some months whilst appeals and searches were carried out to see if anyone would claim him. No one did. In all that time he had only one visitor. Once a week on his afternoon off Police Constable William Fazackerly would come and sit by his cradle, but as the months passed the child seemed to recognise him less and less, and would cry now when he reached out to touch him. So, because he felt he was making the child unhappy, he stopped coming.
By his first birthday Billy Bunch had entirely lost the smile he had come with. A grim seriousness overshadowed him and he became pensive and silent, and this did nothing to endear him to the nurses who, try as they did, could find little to love in the child. Neither was he an attractive boy. Once he had lost the chubby charm of his infancy, his ears were seen to stick out more than they should and they could find no parting for his hair which would never lie down.
He did not walk when it was expected of him, for he saw no need to. He remained obstinately impervious to either bribes or threats and was quite content to shuffle around on his bottom for the first two and a half years of his life, one leg curled underneath him acting as his rudder, thumb deep in his mouth and forefinger planted resolutely up his left nostril.
And speech did not come easily to him as it did with other children in the home. Even the few words he spoke refused to leave his mouth without his having to contort his lips and spit them out. This stutter made him all the more reluctant to communicate and he turned to pictures and eventually, when he could read, to books for comfort.
No foster family, it seemed, wanted to keep him for long; and each time his case was packed again to return to the children’s home, it simply confirmed that he was indeed alone and unwanted in this world.
School made it worse if anything. The frequent changes from one foster home to another spoiled any chances he might have had of making firm friends in those early years. And certainly he was not proving to be a favourite with the teachers. He was not bright in the classroom, but most of the teachers could forgive him that. The trouble w
as that he seemed completely uninterested and made little attempt to disguise it. All he wanted to dowas to read, but he would never read what they wanted him to read.
And with his fellows he was no more popular, for he was neither strong nor agile and had little stomach for competitive games of any kind. At play time he would wander alone, hands deep in his pockets, his brows furrowed. The other children were no more beastly to him than they were to each other, in fact they paid him scant attention. Were it not for his stutter he would have gone through each day at school almost unnoticed.
Mrs Simpson, or Aunty May as she liked to be called, was the latest in the long line of foster mothers. She had thin lips, Billy noticed, that she made up bright scarlet to look like a kiss, and she wore curlers every Sunday night in her fuzzy purple hair. She was a widow with grown-up children who lived away. She kept a clean enough house on the tenth floor of a block of flats that dominated that wind-swept estate on the outskirts of the city. The estate had been built after the War to accommodate the workers needed for the nearby motor factory, and accommodate was all it did. It was tidily organised with rank upon rank of identical box houses, detached and semi-detached, spread out like a giant spider’s web around the central block of flats where Billy now lived. There was little grass to play on and what there was was forbidden to him because he might get muddy, and Aunty May did not like that. ‘After all, you know,’ she was continually reminding him, ‘they only give me so much to keep you each week, Billy, and I can’t be for ever spending on extra washing just because you go out and get yourself in a state. I can’t think why you don’t go and play in the adventure playground with the other children. It’s all concrete there, and much better for you. It’s not fair on me, Billy, not fair at all. I’ve told you before, Billy, if you can’t do as you’re told, you’ll have to go.’
That was always the final threat, and not one to which Billy was usually susceptible, for most of his foster homes had meant little more to him than a roof over his head and three meals a day. Seen like that, one such home was much like any other. But this home was the only one that had ever been special to him. This one he wanted very much to stay in, not on account of Aunty May who nagged him incessantly, and certainly not on account of the school where he lived in dread of the daily torture Mr Brownlow, his frog-eyed teacher, inflicted upon him. ‘Stand up, Billy,’ he would say. ‘Your turn now. Stand up and read out the next page, aloud. And don’t take five minutes about it, lad. Just do it.’ And so he did it, but the inevitable sniggers as he stuttered his waythrough added yet more tissue to the scar of hurt and humiliation he tried so hard to disguise. No, he endured all that and Aunty May only because he had his Wilderness down by the canal to which he could escape and be at last amongst friends.
CHAPTER TWO
THE CHAPEL OF ST CUTHBERT, OR WHAT was left of it, lay in the remotest corner of the estate, a gaunt ancient ruin that was crumbling slowly into oblivion. Like everything else standing on the site it would have been bulldozed when the estate was built, but a preservation order had ensured its survival – no one was quite sure why. So they erected a chain-link fence around the graveyard that surrounded the ruins and put up a warning sign: ‘Keep out. Danger of falling masonry.’ And, for the most part, the children on the estate didkeep out, not because of the sign – few of them knew what masonry was anyway – but rather because it was common knowledge that there were ghosts roaming around the graveyard. And the few who had ventured through the wire and into the Wilderness beyond returned with stories of strange rustlings in the undergrowth, footsteps that followed them relentlessly, and head-high whispering nettles that lashed at intruders as they tried to escape. This was enough to discourage all but the most adventurous children.
Billy was by no means adventurous, but he no longer believed in ghosts and like most children he had always been intrigued by anything that was forbidden. He was on one of his solitary evening wanderings shortly after he came to live with Aunty May when he saw a great white owl fly over his head and into the vaulted ruins. It passed so close to him that he could feel the wind of its wings in his hair. He saw it settle on one of the arched windows high up in the ruins. It was because he wanted a closer look that he pulled up the rusty wire and clambered into the Wilderness.
Since that first evening Billy had returned every day to his Wilderness; skulking along the wire until he was sure no one would see him go in, for the magic of this place would be instantly shattered by any intrusion on his privacy. He would dive under the wire, never forgetting to straighten it up behind him so that no one would ever discover his way in, and would fight his way through the undergrowth of laurels and yew out into the open graveyard. Hidden now from the estate, and with the world wild about him, Billy at last found peace. Here he could lie back on the springy grass the rabbits had cropped short and soft, and watch the larks rising into the sky until they vanished into the sun. Here he could keep a lookout for his owls high in the stone wall of the chapel itself, he could laugh out loud at the sparrows’ noisy warfare, call back at the insistent call of the greenfinch and applaud silently the delicate dance of the wagtails on the gravestones.
In the evenings, if he lay quite still for long enough, the rabbits would emerge tentative from their burrows and sniff for danger, and how his heart leapt with the compliment they paid him by ignoring him. No need ever to bring his books here. It was enough for him to be a part of this paradise. He did not need to know the name of a red admiral butterfly or a green woodpecker in order to enjoy their beauty. He came to know every bird, every creature, that frequented his Wilderness and looked upon them as his own. In spring he took it upon himself to guard the fledglings against the invasion of predatory cats from theestate. A stinging shot from his catapult was usually sufficient to deter them from a return visit. He was lord of his Wilderness, its guardian and its keeper.
Beyond the chapel was the canal. The ruin itself and the graveyard were screened on that side by a jungle of willows and alder trees, and nearer the canal by a bank of hogweed and foxgloves. Hidden here, Billy could watch unobserved as the moorhens and coots jerked their way through the still water, their young scooting after them.
But his greatest joy was the pair of brilliant kingfishers that flashed by so fast and so straight that at first Billy thought he had imagined them. All that summer he watched them come and go. He was there when the two young were learning to fish. He was there when the four of them sat side by side no more than a few feet from him, their blazing orange and blue unreal against the greens and browns of the canal banks. Only the dragonflies and damselflies gave them any competition; but for Billy the kingfishers would always be the jewels of his Wilderness.
One summer’s evening he was kingfisher-watching by the canal when he heard the sound of approaching voices and the bark of a dog on the far side of the canal, and this was why he was lying hidden, face down in the long grass when the cygnet emerged from the bullrushes. She cruised towards him, surveying the world about her with a look of mild interest and some disdain. Every now and then she would browse through the water, lowering her bill so that the water lapped gently over it, then her head would disappear completely until it re-emerged, dripping. Although a dark blue-grey, the bill tinged with green, she looked already a swanin the making. No other bird Billy knew of swam with such easy power. No other bird could curve its neck with such supreme elegance. Billy hardly dared to breathe as the cygnet moved effortlessly towards him. She was only a few feet away now and he could see the black glint of her eye. He was wondering why such a young bird would be on its own and was waiting for the rest of the family to appear when the question was unequivocally answered.
‘That’s one of ’em,’ came a voice from the opposite bank of the canal. ‘You remember? We shelled them four swans, made ’em fly, didn’t we? ’S got to be one of ’em. Let’s see if we can sink him this time. Let’s get him.’ In the bombardment of stones that followed Billy put his hands over his head to protect hims
elf. He heard most of the stones falling in the water but one hit him on the arm and another landed limply on his back. Outrage drove away his fear and he looked up to see five youths hurling a continuous barrage of stones at the cygnet who beat her wings in a frantic effort to take off, but the bombardment was on the mark and she was struck several times leaving her stunned, bobbing up and down helpless in the turbulent water. The dog they launched into the river was fast approaching, its black nose ploughing through the water towards the cygnet, and Billy knew at once what had to be done. He picked up a dead branch and leapt out into the water between the dog and cygnet. Crying with fury he lashed out at the dog’s head and drove it back until it clambered whimpering up the bank to join its masters. With abuse ringing in his ears and the stones falling all around him Billy gathered up the battered cygnet in his arms and made for the safety of the Wilderness. The bird struggled against him but Billy had his arms firmly around the wings and hung on tight.
Once inside the ruins Billy sank to his knees and set the cygnet down beside him. One of her wings trailed on the ground as she staggered away and it appeared she could only gather it up with some difficulty. For a moment she stood looking around her, wondering. Then she stepped out high and pigeon-toed on her wide webbed feet and marched deliberately around the chapel. She shook herself vigorously, opened out and beat both her wings, and then settled down at some distance from Billy to preen herself. Shivering, Billy hugged himself and drew his knees up to keep out the cold of the evening. He was not going to leave until he was sure the cygnet was strong enough to go back in the canal. He sat in silence for some minutes, still simmering with anger, but his angervanished as he considered the young swan in front of him. He started speaking without thinking about it.
‘Must be funny to be born grey and turn white after,’ he said. ‘Not a bit like an ugly duckling, you aren’t. Most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen – so you can’t hardly be ugly, can you? Course you’re not as beautiful now as you’re going to be, but I ’spect you know that. You’ll grow up just like your mother, all white and queenly.’ And the cygnet stopped preening herself for a moment and looked sideways at him. ‘Did they kill your mother too, then?’ Billy asked. ‘They did, didn’t they? What did they do it for? I hate them. I hate them. Well I’ll look after you now. You got to keep close in to the bank whenever you see anyone – don’t trust anyone, I never do – and I’ll come by each day and bring some bread with me. I’m called Billy, by the way, Billy Bunch, and I’m your friend. Wish you could speak to me, then I’d know you can understand what I’m telling you. And you could tell me a few things yourself, couldn’t you? I mean, you could tell me how to fly for a start. You could teach me, couldn’t you?’ And suddenly Billy was aware that his words were flowing easily with not so much as a trace of a stutter. ‘Teach, teach, teach, teach . . .’ Billy repeated the word each time, spitting out the T. ‘But I stutter on my T’s, always have done. T’s and P’s and C’s – can’t never get them out. But I can now, I can now. Never mind the flying, you’ve taught me to speak. I can speak, I can talk. Billy Bunch can talk. He can talk the hind leg off a horse.’ And Billy was on his feet and cavorting around the chapel in a jubilant dance of celebration, laughing till the tears ran down his cheeks. He shouted out every word he could remember that had ever troubled him and every word he shouted buried more deeply the stutter he had lived with all his life. By the time he had finished he was breathless and hoarse. He turned at last to where the cygnet had been standing but she had vanished.