Such Stuff: A Story-Maker's Inspiration

  In the camps, there were lectures, concerts, gardening and handicrafts. Sport was popular, with football, boxing and wrestling being the main activities, and chess and playing cards were common pastimes. There were opportunities for education as well in some camps, with lessons in English, shorthand, mechanics, physics and forestry. Making toys for the local children was another feature of life as a POW. Work was optional but most chose to do it as it passed the time more quickly. Prisoners received the same amount of daily rations as British servicemen – more than the civilian population received.

  At the end of the war, the prisoners who decided to stay in Britain became known as “DPs” or “displaced persons”. The most famous of these was former Luftwaffe paratrooper Bernhard “Bert” Trautmann, who played 545 matches for Manchester City between 1949 and 1964. In 2004, he was awarded an honorary OBE for his promotion, through football, of Anglo-German understanding.

  Out of the Ashes

  THE DREAM

  Spring 2001

  I remember we were on holiday in St Ives in Cornwall when we first heard about it on the news. There had been an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease up in the North somewhere. A long way away, we thought. It won’t affect us on the farm in Devon. We’ll be fine. At the time we lived and worked on a farm, so we felt considerable sympathy and solidarity for those farmers up in the North whose animals were already being slaughtered to prevent the spread of the disease. They could not move their animals to market; they could not even leave the farm or have visitors; they were prisoners on their own farms. Their lives and businesses were in turmoil. But it was up North, we kept telling ourselves, hundreds of miles from Devon. Nothing to worry about. This disease couldn’t affect farmers around us in Iddesleigh. Could it? For that to happen, infected animals would have to come down to the South-West, and there was a ban on all movement of farm animals. It couldn’t happen. Could it? We would stay in Cornwall, finish our holiday.

  But within just a few days, we heard of the first case of foot-and-mouth in Devon, and not five miles from our village. We rushed back home. There were piles of straw soaked in disinfectant, stinking of it, at the end of the lane, at every farm gate. The siege was on. There was tension on every face. People spoke about nothing else except this threat that everyone knew could spell disaster for so many farmers and animals. And, for us, for all of us who worked at Farms for City Children, we knew it could spell disaster too. Already, the government was discouraging all unnecessary visits to the countryside, to farms, in particular. And the disease was being spotted now in hotspots all over the country, in areas to which infected animals had been transported before that first case in the North Country had been discovered. Our part of Devon was one of the hottest spots of all.

  Despite all the precautions, the disease was taking hold, spreading from farm to farm, village to village. And wherever it was found, the mass killings of all cloven-hoofed animals took place and the fires began to burn. Closer and closer it came. You had only to look out of the window to see the smoke drifting down the Ockment Valley. Until now, we had always thought of our place in deepest Devonshire as a paradise in the heart of England, a paradise of trees and fields and rivers and valleys and hills, a place of buzzards and herons and swallows and larks, of deer and foxes and badgers, unchanged for a thousand years, farmed for a thousand years. And now paradise was becoming hell before our eyes. Dead sheep and cows lay piled up in the fields. The stench of death and smoke was everywhere. This was how I had always imagined the plague might be, how living in a war zone might feel. Our lives were not in danger, of course, but our livelihoods were, our whole way of life was.

  For some twenty years before the outbreak of foot-and-mouth we had worked alongside our farmer partners, the Ward family, at Farms for City Children. Like all the other farmers in the parish, I knew how much they cared for their animals, how much pride they had in their farms and their way of being. Standing with them, leaning on a farm gate, as I had so often done, and watching their cows and sheep grazing, I had sensed how deeply they felt about their stock, how close and complex is the relationship between a farmer and his farm and his animals, what pleasure it gives farmers to see their herds and flocks healthy and thriving, to see a field of barley growing tall and golden in the sun. Now they went out every day with dread in their hearts to see their stock, looking for those telltale signs of foot-and-mouth disease: limping, listlessness, lesions on tongues and hooves. Gone were the smiles, the merry quips, the cheery chat. They waited, we waited, for the inevitable. Neighbouring farms all around were struck down one by one. It was only a matter of time, we thought. There were ever more fires, more smoke – and ever more stories too of farmers falling into depression under the strain of it all.

  It was during this time of terrible tension that I read a story in a local newspaper about a farmer’s daughter in a village near by. Those dreaded telltale signs of the disease had been discovered on her farm. The vets had come and confirmed the family’s worst fears. It was foot-and-mouth. All the animals would have to be slaughtered, every sheep and lamb, every cow and calf on the farm. They were distraught. But the farmer’s daughter had a plan. She had been bringing up an orphan lamb, her pet lamb, on the bottle. There was no way she was going to allow the lamb to be killed. So, on the morning when the vets came to do the killing, she hid her lamb away upstairs in her bedroom cupboard, without anyone knowing, and turned up the CD player so that the bleating of the lamb would not be heard. Her plan so nearly worked. What she hadn’t realized, though, was that the vets had already counted all the animals on the farm when they first came, and now, on this second visit they discovered that one lamb was missing.

  Her mother suspected at once what her daughter might have done – she knew how passionately fond of the lamb she was. The game was up, the lamb was discovered in the bedroom cupboard and put down with all the others. It was a story of such dreadful, powerful sadness, a story I could not forget.

  In the end, the Ward family was lucky. The precautions taken to halt the spread of the disease seemed to have worked, but they had lived through terrible times for months on end. And for months on end, nearly a year, Farms for City Children had to close its doors to the children. It was a while before we were once again allowed to have our visitors from the cities on the farm, and during this time, the charity was forced to make a lot of people redundant. They was no money to pay them. This unemployment happened all over the countryside, the collateral damage caused by the disease. It had been a time of great anxiety and misery for all of us. But the Wards’ farm had survived and so, in the end, did Farms for City Children, with the help of very many helpers and supporters who believed in what we were doing and wanted to enable the city children to keep coming down to the farm, to live in the countryside for a week, to work as farmers. They, like us, could see how much good it was doing for the lives of those children, how important it was.

  Just after the outbreak was over and we were all getting back to some kind of normality, I received a large envelope in the post – opened it and out flew a bat, right up into my face. It came from an editor friend of mine, Marion Lloyd, at Macmillan. There was a letter with this bat, asking me if I would write a horror story – bats, vampires, monsters, ghosts, that sort of story. I’m still not sure why she asked me, because I really don’t write stories like that. To be honest, I can’t take horror stories seriously. I’ve never been keen on fantasy of any kind – I don’t know why. Maybe I really do lack imagination – that is, after all, what my teacher told me often enough at my junior school at St Matthias on the Warwick Road in London. Anyway, I was about to ring her up to say no to her horror story idea, when I thought again. Hang on, I said to myself. Haven’t I just lived through the greatest horror story of my life, not a fantasy horror, but a horror right there outside my window? Haven’t I seen it with my own eyes, felt it in my heart, breathed it in almost?

  I decided I would tell the story of that girl, that farmer’s daughter, tel
l the story of the foot-and-mouth epidemic through the eyes and voice of a child caught up in the middle of it. I would tell it in diary form – I had done this before in The Wreck of the Zanzibar. It helped me to become her as I was writing it, to feel it as she must have felt it, as so many farmers’ children must have witnessed it. I wrote the story by hand, as I always do, which works wonderfully well for me, especially when I am writing a story as a diary. And maybe because I had just lived through the crisis of foot-and-mouth myself, I wrote it fast, inside a week. I saw it all so clearly in my mind’s eye, no further research needed, very little dreamtime. I took the exercise book up to London, my hastily scribbled story filling every page of it. At the publisher’s, I suggested reading it to Marion aloud. She called in everyone from the office and I began. I could tell as I was reading it that they were quickly lost in the story and all were as moved by listening to it as I had been writing it.

  Within weeks, Michael Foreman had done the most wonderful and heartbreaking drawings for the book, and my granddaughter Lea had proved to be the perfect face for the cover – behind the photograph of her, the countryside in flames. No book I have ever written has been produced faster. Even to this day, I cannot read it, though. It takes me back to a time of such suffering that I would rather not go there. But all the same, I am glad I wrote it. It may be a hard book to endure, but for most people who read it, the experience of such suffering is remote. Most people are urban by background and culture and very separated now from how people live on farms and in the countryside. It is from books, from stories, that we can learn about the lives of others. We learn empathy and understanding and that is important, I think.

  OUT OF THE ASHES

  Tuesday, March 13th

  I’ll never be able to think of this date without thinking of the Angels of Death. So much has happened and all of it so fast and so final. Today began yesterday. Last night after I’d finished writing my diary, I made a decision. I was lying in my bed at Auntie Liz’s and thinking about Little Josh, and home and Mum and Dad. I just decided I had to go home, that I had caused this, that I had to be there with them.

  I waited till everyone was in bed and asleep. I left a letter on my pillow explaining everything to Auntie Liz, telling her I was going home. Then I got dressed, packed my things, and crept downstairs. I ran out of the village, up through the graveyard and on to the footpath – no one would see me if I went that way. I thought I’d find the way home easily – I’d done it hundreds of times before – but never in the dark. As it turned out, it was a good thing that I lost my way. The footpath should have brought me out on to the road right opposite our gate, but instead I came out on the road further up. I looked back down the road towards our farm gate and there was a police car parked right across the gateway, and a policeman standing by the car smoking a cigarette. I waited until he got back in the car, then sprinted across the road and up through Front Field and home.

  The lights were still on in the kitchen. Mum and Dad were sitting there at the table and talking over a cup of tea. I just walked in and told them everything. I told them that it was me who’d brought back the foot-and-mouth after I’d been riding on Mr Bailey’s farm. I told them I was staying home no matter what. I don’t know how much they understood of what I said because I was crying so much. But they understood enough. Dad held my hands and told me it was no one’s fault, not mine, not anyone’s. The foot and mouth disease could have come on the wind, in the smoke, on bird droppings, car tyres – a hundred different ways, he said. And Mum said I shouldn’t have run away like I did, but I knew they were both really pleased I had and neither of them blamed me at all. I could tell that from the way they hugged me. It was a strange thing to be suddenly happy in the middle of all this, but I was.

  Today began again this morning. I was up early and went off to feed Little Josh, while Dad did the milking. Mum let all the ewes and lambs out into Front Field. We stood and watched them as they spread out over the field, the ewes at once busy at their grazing, the lambs springing and skipping, loving their sudden freedom, their last freedom. Neither of us said a word. We didn’t need to because we were both thinking the same thoughts. Little Josh wouldn’t stay with the others. He followed me home into the kitchen. So I fed him. But even when I’d fed him he wanted to stay by me.

  We saw the men in white – the slaughterers and the vets – walking up the farm lane as we finished our breakfast. Dad got up, pulled on his overalls, and went out without a word. Mum cried when he’d gone. I put my arms around her and tried to comfort her, but I didn’t cry. I didn’t cry because my mind was on other things and it was racing. I was looking down at Little Josh lying at my feet, and I was thinking. I was thinking about how I was going to hide him away, so that the men in white would never find him. I didn’t know where I would hide him, but I knew it had to be done. And it had to be soon, very soon. There wasn’t much time.

  My chance came when Mum got up from the table and said she just couldn’t sit there and let Dad do it on his own, that she had to go with him. The moment she’d gone, I scooped Josh up into my arms and ran upstairs. I cleared out everything I could from the bottom of my cupboard and laid down some newspaper. I sat on my bed and fed him again until he couldn’t drink another drop. I told him that he must be quiet, that he must go to sleep and keep quiet. He seemed happy enough – until I lifted him in and shut the cupboard door on him. Then he started, bleating on and on, like he’d never stop. It was muffled, but I could still hear him, and if I could hear him, so could they. So I put on my CD just loud enough to drown out his bleating and left him there. All I had to do now was to be sure that I kept my CD going.

  Later, more slaughtermen in white arrived – “Angels of Death”, Mum called them. She came in and told me the shooting would begin very soon, that I mustn’t on any account go outside from now on. She didn’t have to tell me. Nothing and no one could have made me go out and watch what they’d be doing. Just thinking of it was more than I could bear. I stayed in my room behind closed curtains, cradled Little Josh on my lap, put on my earphones and turned up my CD so loud that I couldn’t hear the shooting, so that I couldn’t feel or know anything except the thunder of the music in my head.

  But then I had to change the CD. I took off my earphones without thinking. That was when I first heard the shooting, not loud, not near, but the crack of every shot told me that this was really happening. They were killing out there, killing Dad’s family of animals.

  Suddenly I thought of Ruby. She’d be frightened out of her mind at all the shooting. I put Little Josh back in the cupboard, turned up the CD, ran downstairs, and out across the yard to her stable.

  Ruby was in a real state by the time I got there, all lathered up and terrified. I went in with her, closed the top of the stable door and hugged her, smoothing her, calming her all I could. After a while when the shooting stopped, she relaxed a little and rested her head on my shoulder. Even then I could hear her heart pounding as if she’d been galloping.

  Then I opened the door. I wish I hadn’t. Dad was there. Mum was there, her arm round his shoulder. The men in white were there. There was blood on their overalls, blood on their boots. One of them was holding a clipboard and he was the one doing the talking. “There’s no mistake, Mr Morley,” he was saying. “I’ve checked this list a dozen times now and we’ve counted the bodies. We’re one lamb missing, one ram lamb, a Suffolk.”

  It’s not their fault, I know, but if Mum and Dad hadn’t seen me in the stable at that moment, if they hadn’t looked at me like they did, no one would ever have guessed. Even Bobs was looking at me. Mum knew what I’d done the moment she caught my eye. She came over and explained that I had to give Little Josh up, had to say where he was, that every cloven-hoofed animal on the farm had to be killed. There couldn’t be any exceptions. I buried my face in Ruby’s neck. I was sobbing too much to say anything. I knew it was over, that it was hopeless, that sooner or later they would find him. So I told them I’d fetch him ou
t myself. And that’s what I did. I carried him out. He didn’t struggle, just bleated a little as I handed him over. The man in white who took him off me had a face. It was Brad and his eyes were full of tears. “It’ll be very quick,” he said. “He won’t know anything. He won’t feel anything.” And he carried him away around the back of the shed. A few moments later there was a shot. I felt it like a knife in my heart.

  This evening the farm is still, is silent. The fields are empty, and it’s raining.

  Foot-and-mouth disease

  Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) is a highly infectious disease that affects cattle, sheep, goats, pigs and deer. It is fatal in about 5 per cent of cases. Animals suffer high fever for two or three days, after which they develop blisters in the mouth and on the feet. These may break open, causing lameness. FMD is spread by predators, and through contact with contaminated farming equipment, vehicles, clothing and feed.

  On Monday 19 February 2001, FMD was detected in pigs in an abattoir in Essex. No one at that point realized that the outbreak stemmed from pigs eating infected animal feed in Northumbria. It was already incubating in more than fifty locations, in fifteen counties, from Devon to Dumfries and Galloway. The European Commission immediately banned all British milk, meat and livestock exports until the disease had been contained. Farming communities were thrown into turmoil and financial hardship. Tourism slumped. Rural Britain was in crisis.