Such Stuff: A Story-Maker's Inspiration

  THE BUTTERFLY LION

  I was still deciding which direction to take when I heard a voice from behind me.

  “Who are you? What do you want?”

  I turned.

  “Who are you?” she asked again. The old lady who stood before me was no bigger than I was. She scrutinized me from under the shadow of her dripping straw hat. She had piercing dark eyes that I did not want to look into.

  “I didn’t think it would rain,” she said, her voice gentler. “Lost, are you?”

  I said nothing. She had a dog on a leash at her side, a big dog. There was an ominous growl in his throat, and his hackles were up all along his back.

  She smiled. “The dog says you’re on private property,” she went on, pointing her stick at me accusingly. She edged aside my raincoat with the end of her stick. “Run away from that school, did you? Well, if it’s anything like it used to be, I can’t say I blame you. But we can’t just stand here in the rain, can we? You’d better come inside. We’ll give him some tea, shall we, Jack? Don’t you worry about Jack. He’s all bark and no bite.” Looking at Jack, I found that hard to believe.

  I don’t know why, but I never for one moment thought of running off. I often wondered later why I went with her so readily. I think it was because she expected me to, willed me to somehow. I followed the old lady and her dog up to the house, which was huge, as huge as my school. It looked as if it had grown out of the ground. There was hardly a brick or a stone or a tile to be seen. The entire building was smothered in red creeper, and there were a dozen ivy-clad chimneys sprouting skywards from the roof.

  We sat down close to the stove in a vast vaulted kitchen. “The kitchen’s always the warmest place,” she said, opening the oven door. “We’ll have you dry in no time. Scones?” she went on, bending down with some difficulty and reaching inside. “I always have scones on a Sunday. And tea to wash it down. All right for you?” She went on chatting away as she busied herself with the kettle and the teapot. The dog eyed me all the while from his basket, unblinking. “I was just thinking,” she said. “You’ll be the first young man I’ve had inside this house since Bertie.” She was silent for a while.

  The smell of the scones wafted through the kitchen. I ate three before I even touched my tea. They were sweet and crumbly, and succulent with melting butter. She talked on merrily again, to me, to the dog – I wasn’t sure which. I wasn’t really listening. I was looking out of the window behind her. The sun was bursting through the clouds and lighting the hillside. A perfect rainbow arched through the sky. But miraculous though it was, it wasn’t the rainbow that fascinated me. Somehow, the clouds were casting a strange shadow over the hillside, a shadow the shape of a lion, roaring like the one over the archway.

  “Sun’s come out,” said the old lady, offering me another scone. I took it eagerly. “Always does, you know. It may be difficult to remember sometimes, but there’s always sun behind the clouds, and the clouds do go in the end. Honestly.”

  She watched me eat, a smile on her face that warmed me to the bone.

  “Don’t think I want you to go, because I don’t. Nice to see a boy eat so well, nice to have the company; but all the same, I’d better get you back to school after you’ve had your tea, hadn’t I? You’ll only be in trouble otherwise. Mustn’t run off, you know. You’ve got to stick it out, see things through, do what’s got to be done, no matter what.” She was looking out of the window as she spoke. “My Bertie taught me that, bless him, or maybe I taught him. I can’t remember now.” And she went on talking and talking, but my mind was elsewhere again.

  The lion on the hillside was still there, but now he was blue and shimmering in the sunlight. It was as if he were breathing, as if he were alive. It wasn’t a shadow any more. No shadow is blue. “No, you’re not seeing things,” the old lady whispered. “It’s not magic. He’s real enough. He’s our lion, Bertie’s and mine. He’s our butterfly lion.”

  “What d’you mean?” I asked.

  She looked at me long and hard. “I’ll tell you if you like,” she said. “Would you like to know? Would you really like to know?”

  I nodded.

  “Have another scone first and another cup of tea. Then I’ll take you to Africa where our lion came from, where my Bertie came from too. Bit of a story, I can tell you. You ever been to Africa?”

  “No,” I replied.

  “Well, you’re going,” she said. “We’re both going.”

  Suddenly I wasn’t hungry any more. All I wanted now was to hear her story. She sat back in her chair, gazing out of the window. She told it slowly, thinking before each sentence; and all the while she never took her eyes off the butterfly lion. And neither did I.

  White lions

  Thirty years ago, there were 200,000 lions living in the wild; today there are only 15,000. In thirty-five African countries, where once they roamed free, the lion is now extinct or has virtually disappeared. And although it may be unthinkable that lions ever become completely extinct, they are now listed as “vulnerable” in the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species.

  A wild lion has a “home range” of about 240 kilometres, the area regularly travelled by a single lion in its food gathering, mating and caring for young. This brings lions into conflict with farmers and with the increasing need, driven by population growth, for land building and agriculture. “Anyone who is trying to farm livestock in Africa finds it very difficult to co-exist with lions,” comments Luke Hunter of Panthera, one of the groups trying to save the lion from extinction. He also notes a “very widespread killing of lions, mostly in a conflict situation”. Poachers and big-game hunters also add to the risks for these big cats.

  The lion most likely to die out unless we take more positive action is the white lion. White lions are not albinos. Albino animals – and people – have an inherited disorder characterized by the complete or partial absence of pigment in the skin, whereas white lions owe their remarkable colouring to a genetic twist. A pigment gene gives them blue or green-grey eyes instead of brown, and a pelt that remains white all their lives. It is their very prettiness and apparent cuddliness that have been their downfall since their first contact with Europeans in 1938.

  White lions probably evolved many millennia ago. Despite this, there was an unsupported belief among some conservationists that white lions could not survive in the wild, on the grounds that their colouring would make it difficult to remain camouflaged when they were hunting. Most white lions were rounded up and sold to zoos – if they were not killed by big-game hunters first.

  A few wild white lions can be found on the edge of a South African National Park. To the local tribe, the Shangaan, the area is special. They name it Timbavati, meaning “the place where something sacred came down to earth”.

  For centuries, white lions have been part of the African oral tradition. The medicine men traditionally believed the lions to be animal angels. One legend says they were the first creatures to be created by the gods – and when life becomes extinct the roar of the white lions will be the last sound on Earth. Tribal elders believe that the white lions are here to deliver a message for humanity. In spiritual terms their white colouring represents purity and enlightenment. White represents sunlight and contains all the colours of the spectrum in one; white is beyond colour, creed, race, or gender.

  Sadly, rich hunters pay huge sums of money to slaughter lions – even though it is illegal to hunt them in the wild almost everywhere in Africa – and white lions are especially prized by hunters. A stuffed lion can sell for £40,000.

  Many lions are captured in the wild as cubs, or bred in captivity, brought up as tourist attractions in lion ranches. They are bottle-fed, taught not to fear humans, and spend their days being petted and photographed by unwitting visitors. The animals involved are very vulnerable. No longer fearful of humans, they will approach them expecting to get fed, but instead receive a bullet, or an arrow from a hunting bow. One rancher r
evealed: “We keep them up until six months for attractions for the people so they can play with them and then we sell them to other lion parks. What they do with the lions is up to them.”

  The Global White Lion Protection Trust has spent the last twelve years buying two thousand acres of land in Timbavati and preparing to release white lions, hoping that they might re-establish themselves. Reintroduction into the wild of animals born or reared in captivity is always difficult. Their dependence on human contact can mean the loss of both their hunting instincts and their fear of people – both essential qualities for survival.

  Nevertheless, the initial success of the programme was capped in 2014, when the first ever photographs of white lion cubs born in their natural habitat were published. Conservationist Linda Tucker, who founded the Trust, said: “The birth of these second-generation white cubs to a wild white lioness is fantastic news. It brings huge hope for the future of white lions. They recognize me, but I keep my distance and allow them their independence. I look at them like any mother with a brood of growing youngsters. And, in the end, the most loving gift you can give is freedom.”

  Kensuke’s Kingdom

  THE DREAM

  Some books that you read when you are young make such an impression that they never leave you. Some are life-changing, both literally and imaginatively. The first book I ever really loved was Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island – I must have discovered it when I was nine or ten.

  Until then I had been addicted to comics. I liked being read to, but I had a horror of words packed tight on a page. I preferred pictures to tell the story rather than words. For a while, I managed to read nothing but Enid Blyton adventures – great page-turners. But Treasure Island, I could tell, even then, made all the pictures I wanted and needed in my head, and was much more engaging and compelling than Blyton books, because the characters were so well drawn that I cared about them, identified with them. I was Jim Hawkins in the Hispaniola hiding in that barrel of apples on deck, overhearing Long John Silver and his mutinous, villainous cronies hatching their murderous plans. And the island itself – I knew Treasure Island like the back of my hand. I lived on that island, knew its beaches and caves and the stockade. That island was a world of its own, and I loved that.

  Then there was Lord of the Flies by William Golding. I read this as a teenager, as many of us do, and was struck at once not only by the dark power of the story, but also the landscape. Golding’s island is not simply scenery against which the story is played out. It is the wilderness and wildness of the island, the isolation from the world and the imprisoning sea itself that determine the behaviour of the boys.

  Islands fast became a fascination. I read all the books I could about them. Then later, when I was grown-up, about thirty, I was lucky enough to visit some islands that were isolated and wild, where the sea rules. Every summer we would go to the Isles of Scilly for our holidays, to stay on Bryher, the smallest of the five inhabited islands, rearing cliffs at Hell Bay at one end, and beaches of the finest sand at the other at Rushy Bay. I got to know that island and its people in all weathers, when the fog rolled in and the lighthouse hooted its warning, when storms raged and threatened to flood and overwhelm, when the sun shone over a sparkling green sea. And we caught crabs and shrimps in the rock pools, went fishing for mackerel. Bliss it can be on such days. But the sea always rules. Tides, the wind, the weather dictate the lives of islanders and visitors. There are times when you cannot leave the island for days on end.

  The more I got to know the Scillies, the more I became aware of the effect of isolation on how islanders feel, how they see the world, their sense of independence, their toughness. I listened to their stories, stories of wrecks and treasure, of great tragedy and supreme courage. There were ancient burial chambers, field systems now swallowed up by the sea, but visible. The Romans had been here, King Arthur too, maybe, and pirates and monks. Scilly for me was a treasure house of stories, both true and legendary. I immersed myself in the place. So it was hardly surprising that in the end, I sat down and wrote my own stories about Scilly, on Bryher mostly. I wrote Why the Whales Came, then The Wreck of the Zanzibar; The Sleeping Sword; Arthur, High King of Britain; Half a Man; and recently, Listen to the Moon. But there was one island story I could not set on Scilly.

  Like many writers, I receive letters from readers from time to time. I like them, because mostly, people write because they have loved the stories. So, I confess it, I love getting fan mail – makes a fellow feel good, especially if he is having difficulty with his new story. About a year after The Wreck of the Zanzibar came out, I got a letter from a boy which went something like this.

  Dear Mr Morpurgo,

  I read your book The Wreck of the Zanzibar. It is the best book I ever read, better than all the Harry Potter books put together. BUT, it is about a girl. I am a boy. Will you please write me a story about a boy who gets stuck on a desert island?

  Yours sincerely…

  What a great idea! I thought. Until I discussed it with Clare, my wife. She said it wasn’t an original idea. Didn’t I realize there was Treasure Island, Lord of the Flies – both about boys on desert islands, classics, known and loved all over the world, both by literary giants. That, of course, was precisely why I liked the idea. All right, so Stevenson and Golding were great writers, but I could have a go, couldn’t I?

  But try as I did to dream up my story of my boy on the desert island, I couldn’t find a way to make it work. Everything I thought up seemed to have been done before. It was beginning to look as if Clare had been right – she usually is. I couldn’t even find a way of getting my boy onto the island. Then I struck lucky. At a very dull party I got talking to a stranger, a young man, and asked him, as you do, what he did. He told me that he had just returned from five years’ sailing around the world on a yacht, stopping off on uninhabited islands in the Pacific. I remember, as he was telling me, that I felt the hair on the back of my neck standing up.

  “Just you, on your own?” I asked him.

  “No, with my wife too!”

  “The two of you, then?”

  “No, three. Our son came along.”

  “A boy?” I said.

  “Sons usually are,” he replied. “Oh, yes, and the dog – the dog came too. The dog fell overboard once or twice.”

  “Really?” I said.

  Suddenly the dull party was dull no more. I quizzed the poor stranger for an hour or more and came away knowing I could do this now. Unseen, in the dark of night, the boy would somehow fall off the yacht, dog too, and there he was in the sea, watching the boat sail away into the darkness, his mum and dad on board, his screams unheard. Swim, swim, swim … sharks, sharks, sharks. Island, island, island! I had my boy on the island, and with a dog too. I added a football, because I felt like it. That was a bonus!

  Once I got home and thought about it, I realized this wasn’t enough in itself to make a story. You can’t make bread with just flour, you need yeast, salt, water, oil. All I had was a boy and a dog on an island. Then what? Again, I simply could not go any further. I very nearly abandoned the idea altogether. But it obsessed me, would not leave me alone.

  From time to time, I cut out stories that interest me from newspapers, true stories. I kept asking myself who else could be on this island? Maybe it wasn’t deserted but already inhabited? That was when I remembered the story I had cut out of a newspaper, about a Japanese soldier who, after the end of the Second World War, refused to believe the war was lost, and remained at his post on an island in the Pacific. Over twenty years later he had been discovered and brought back to Japan. I had my yeast, my salt, my water, my oil! My boy thinks himself alone with his dog on this island, but it turns out that there is also a Japanese sailor there, who has stayed on the island after the war, hidden himself away from the world and made the place his own, his kingdom. He does not want this intruder on his island. He feeds him, but ostracizes him. So, a young boy of today from one culture, one time, has to get along
with an ancient Japanese warrior from another time, another culture, who does not want the boy there, nor his dog. Conflict! I had conflict. In my story, in almost any story, conflict is important, essential.

  Before I can begin a story, I have to have names. I have already said that I am not good at choosing names for my characters. With Kensuke’s Kingdom I struggled for weeks, searching for names that might work. Without them, I couldn’t write even my first sentence. In the end, in desperation, I called the boy Michael, as I do! It was a start. Then I happened to be listening one day to a song on our Buddy Holly CD, Peggy Sue. Great name for a boat, I thought. It was difficult, though, to find a name for my marooned Japanese sailor. Then I got lucky again – luck, happenstance, always plays its part in the making of my stories, a large part. I went one day to a school to do a talk, and afterwards was signing books for the children. I looked up and there was this tall Japanese boy.

  “What name shall I write in your book?” I asked him.

  “Kensuke,” he said. He spelt it for me. I liked the sound of it, the look of it.

  “Can I borrow your name?” I asked him.

  “What for?”

  “To use in my next book,” I told him.

  “Can I have a copy of the book when it comes out?” he asked me. I agreed.

  Only the dog’s name left to find. All I could think of was Rover or Sally or Scoobydoo, until one dark evening in winter when I was walking down the lane to the milking parlour on the farm, with some of the city children who had just come down for their week on the farm. Our dog, Bercelet, came along with us, as she often did. The children huddled together close to me as we walked – the darkness clearly made them nervous – there are no streetlamps in the countryside. One boy, the biggest of the group, was particularly nervous and talked a lot.