Such Stuff: A Story-Maker's Inspiration

  “That dog, what’s his name?” he asked me.

  “Bercelet,” I replied.

  “Bercelet! Funny name!” he laughed. “What sort of dog is that, then?”

  “A lurcher,” I told him.

  “Lurcher!” He laughed again, then said, “I got a bigger one than that back home, an Alsatian.”

  “What’s he called?” I asked.

  “Stella Artois,” he said. Now I was doing the laughing. I had my dog’s name, Stella Artois. The next day I sat down to write my story onto the paper, in my scrawly tiny writing. I called it Kensuke’s Kingdom.

  KENSUKE’S KINGDOM

  The terrors came fast, one upon another. The lights of the Peggy Sue went away into the dark of the night, leaving me alone in the ocean, alone with the certainty that they were already too far away, that my cries for help could not possibly be heard. I thought then of the sharks cruising the black water beneath me – scenting me, already searching me out, homing in on me – and I knew there could be no hope. I would be eaten alive. Either that or I would drown slowly. Nothing could save me.

  I trod water, frantically searching the impenetrable darkness about me for something, anything to swim towards. There was nothing.

  Then a sudden glimpse of white in the sea. The breaking of a wave perhaps. But there were no waves. Stella! It had to be. I was so thankful, so relieved not to be all alone. I called out and swam towards her. She would keep bobbing away from me, vanishing, reappearing, then vanishing again. She had seemed so near, but it took several minutes of hard swimming before I came close enough to reach out and touch her. Only then did I realize my mistake. Stella’s head was mostly black. This was white. It was my football. I grabbed it and clung on, feeling the unexpected and wonderful buoyancy of it. I held on, treading water and calling Stella. There was no answer. I called and I called. But every time I opened my mouth now, the seawater washed in. I had to give her up. I had to save myself if I could.

  There was little point in wasting energy by trying to swim. After all, I had nowhere to swim to. Instead, I would simply float. I would cling to my football, tread water gently and wait for the Peggy Sue to come back. Sooner or later they would come looking for me. I mustn’t kick too much, just enough to keep my chin above the water, no more. Too much movement would attract the sharks. Morning must come soon. I had to hang on till then. I had to. The water wasn’t that cold. I had my football. I had a chance.

  I kept telling myself that over and over again. But the world stayed stubbornly black about me, and I could feel the water slowly chilling me to death. I tried singing to stop myself from shivering, to take my mind off the sharks. I sang every song I could remember, but after a while I’d forget the words. Always I came back to the only song I was sure I could finish: “Ten Green Bottles”. I sang it out loud again and again. It reassured me to hear the sound of my own voice. It made me feel less alone in the sea. And always I looked for the grey glint of dawn, but it would not come and it would not come.

  Eventually I fell silent and my legs just would not kick any more. I clung to my football, my head drifting into sleep. I knew I mustn’t, but I couldn’t help myself. My hands kept slipping off the ball. I was fast losing the last of my strength. I would go down, down to the bottom of the sea and lie in my grave amongst the seaweed and the sailors’ bones and the shipwrecks.

  The strange thing was that I didn’t really mind. I didn’t care, not any more. I floated away into sleep, into my dreams. And in my dream I saw a boat gliding towards me, silent over the sea. The Peggy Sue! Dear, dear Peggy Sue. They had come back for me. I knew they would. Strong arms grabbed me. I was hauled upwards and out of the water. I lay there on the deck, gasping for air like a landed fish.

  Someone was bending over me, shaking me, talking to me. I could not understand a word that was being said. But it didn’t matter. I felt Stella’s hot breath on my face, her tongue licking my ear. She was safe. I was safe. All was well.

  I was woken by a howling, like the howling of a gale through the masts. I looked about me. There were no masts above me, there were no sails. No movement under me either, no breath of wind. Stella Artois was barking, but some way off. I was not on a boat at all, but lying stretched out on sand. The howling became a screaming, a fearful crescendo of screeching that died away in its own echoes.

  I sat up. I was on a beach, a broad white sweep of sand, with trees growing thick and lush behind me right down to the beach. Then I saw Stella prancing about in the shallows. I called her and she came bounding up out of the sea to greet me, her tail circling wildly. When all the leaping and licking and hugging were done, I struggled to my feet.

  I was weak all over. I looked all about me. The wide blue sea was empty as the cloudless sky above. No Peggy Sue. No boat. Nothing. No one. I called again and again for my mother and my father. I called until the tears came and I could call no more, until I knew there was no point. I stood there for some time trying to work out how I had got here, how it was that I’d survived. I had such confused memories, of being picked up, of being on board the Peggy Sue. But I knew now I couldn’t have been. I must have dreamed it, dreamed the whole thing. I must have clung to my football and kept myself afloat until I was washed up. I thought of my football then, but it was nowhere to be seen.

  Stella, of course, was unconcerned about all the whys and wherefores. She kept bringing me sticks to throw, and would go galloping after them into the sea without a care in the world.

  Then came the howling again from the trees, and the hackles went up on Stella’s neck. She charged up the beach barking and barking, until she was sure she had silenced the last of the echoes. It was a musical, plaintive howling this time, not at all menacing. I thought I recognized it. I had heard howling like it once before on a visit to London Zoo. Gibbons, “funky gibbons”, my father had called them. I still don’t know why to this day. But I loved the sound of the word “funky”. Perhaps that was why I remembered what they were. “It’s only gibbons,” I told Stella, “just funky gibbons. They won’t hurt us.” But I couldn’t be at all sure I was right.

  From where I now stood I could see that the forest grew more sparsely up the side of a great hill some way inland, and it occurred to me then that if I could reach the bare rocky outcrop at the summit, I would be able to see further out to sea. Or perhaps there’d be some house or farm further inland, or maybe a road, and I could find someone to help. But if I left the beach and they came back looking for me, what then? I decided I would have to take that chance.

  The real Kensuke

  Second World War Japanese soldiers, especially officers, fiercely adhered to a rigid code of “No surrender”. Japan had the oldest continuous hereditary monarchy in the world, and had never been invaded or lost a war. Japanese soldiers were fervently loyal to their Emperor, and believed in a variant of the Bushido code (literally, “the way of the warrior”). The most honourable fate for a warrior was to die taking enemies with him. Ordinary death in battle was the next most honourable fate; surrender unthinkable. Japanese troops who found themselves in a hopeless situation often adopted a suicide (or banzai) charge. They would die rather than surrender. Very few Japanese officers were captured alive until the final months of the war, and even then not many.

  Towards the end of 1944, American forces were sweeping through the Pacific Islands to drive back the Japanese. The island of Guam was of strategic importance. Its airfields could handle large bombers, it had a deep harbour and its capture would assist the push towards the Philippines and Taiwan. When the attack began, the Japanese Guam garrison numbered 22,000. Over 18,000 were killed in the subsequent fierce fighting. As only 485 were taken prisoner, some just melted into the jungle.

  On 24 January 1972, two fishermen from Talofofo village on Guam were checking their shrimp traps when they heard a sound in the tall reeds. Out came an old and wild-looking Japanese man, who tried to grab one of the hunter’s rifles.

  Eventually, the story of Shoichi Yokoi??
?s twenty-eight years of survival became known. Yokoi, an apprentice tailor, was born in 1915, and conscripted in 1941. When US forces invaded, soldiers such as Yokoi became cut off from their commanders during the fierce fighting, and had to fend for themselves.

  Yokoi’s long separation from the world began. He and a handful of other soldiers hid in the jungle. They took enormous care not to be detected, erasing their footprints as they moved through the undergrowth. They killed local cattle to eat. Later, fearing American patrols and local hunters, they withdrew deeper into the jungle, supplementing their diet of nuts and berries with venomous toads, river eels and rats.

  Yokoi knew, from leaflets dropped by plane in 1952, that the war was over. But neither he nor the others would give up, because they thought the news might be false Allied propaganda. “We Japanese soldiers were told to prefer death to the disgrace of getting captured alive.” Over time their numbers dwindled to three, who shared a cave. Eight years before Yokoi was captured, the two other men died, but he continued to survive completely alone.

  One of Michael’s inspiration triggers for Kensuke was a press article about another Japanese soldier found years after the war was over. After Yokoi’s return, there were searches for soldiers hiding out on islands and in the jungle. Another straggler turned up two years later in the Philippines. Unlike Yokoi, whose rifle had rusted and become useless, Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda had kept a working firearm and was accused of killing several villagers before he was discovered in the jungle. Onoda survived on coconut milk, bananas and stolen cattle.

  Neither Yokoi nor Onoda found adjusting to life in modern Japan easy. Yokoi became a popular television personality, and advocate of simple living, but he disliked the country’s rapid post-war economic and industrial development. Japan had become a powerhouse of capitalism and technology. Yokoi became increasingly nostalgic about the past, and returned to Guam on several occasions before his death in 1997. There is a small museum on the island displaying Yokoi’s prize possessions from those years in the jungle.

  Onoda, like Yokoi, returned triumphantly to his homeland as a symbol of the irrepressible soldier, and, like Yokoi, did not like what he found there. “Japan’s philosophy and ideas had changed dramatically. That philosophy clashed with mine, so I went to live in Brazil.” In South America he set up a cattle ranch. Eventually, he returned to Japan, teaching survival skills to youngsters.

  Onoda had only surrendered when his ageing former commander visited him and read the thirty-year-old orders stating that combat activity had ceased. Onoda remembers the time with a mixture of emotions: “I became an officer and I received an order. If I could not carry it out, I would feel shame. Every Japanese soldier was prepared for death, but as an intelligence officer I was ordered to conduct guerrilla warfare and not to die… We really lost the war! How could they have been so sloppy? Suddenly everything went black. A storm raged inside me. What had I been doing for all these years? Gradually the storm subsided, and for the first time I really understood. My thirty years as a guerrilla fighter for the Japanese army were finished. This was the end. I pulled back the bolt on my rifle and unloaded the bullets.”

  Billy the Kid

  THE DREAM

  I’m not sure I ever wrote a story more inspired by the lives of others. For me now, when I read Billy the Kid, every page is a reminder of family and friends, who they are and were and the stories they have told me.

  As with many of my books, I would never have come up with the idea in the first place without Michael Foreman. He rang me one day, nearly twenty years ago now, I suppose. “Hello, Michael, it’s the other one,” he began. “I want you to come with me to Stamford Bridge to see Chelsea play.” Now, I had never been to a proper football match, and Michael knew I wasn’t that interested in football. He knew my game was rugby. He, however, is a Chelsea fan through and through, a season ticket holder. He’s mad about it. I thought that was why he was asking me really, to convert me from rugby to football. But then he explained, “I’ve got something I want to show you – an idea for a story.” He wouldn’t tell me on the phone. I had to come to the match if I wanted to find out more. So I did. With him, I joined the blue tide flooding the streets around Chelsea, heard the thunder of clapping and chanting in the stadium, and there I was in my seat waiting for the game to begin.

  If I’m honest, and don’t tell Michael, the game was quite dull – very few goals were scored, and when there was one, everyone all around me was on their feet instantly, so that I could not even see what was going on. The half-time whistle went. “All right,” I said, “What am I here for? What’s the story?” Michael was pointing up to the director’s box. “See those half-dozen old men in scarlet uniforms?” he said. “They’re Chelsea pensioners – old soldiers, all of them. They live in a sort of old people’s home for veterans, just down the road. Very famous.” “I know who they are,” I told him. “I’ve seen them about in their uniforms.” “Well,” he went on, “the club gives the old fellows free seats in the director’s box at all the home games…” “But what’s your story idea?” I asked. “Look down that end of the grounds.” He was pointing. “The Shed End there, they call it. What do you see?” There was a solitary Chelsea pensioner sitting there in his scarlet uniform.

  “All right,” I said, knowing he wanted me to ask the obvious question. “What’s he doing there, all on his own?” “That’s why I’ve dragged you all the way from Devon,” he replied. “To see him. That old bloke is always sitting there on his own. And here’s why. When he first came to be a Chelsea pensioner, ten or so years ago now, they knew he was a bit of a Chelsea fan, so they told him that he could have a free seat with the others in the director’s box at Chelsea. And he said something like, “Well, you can stuff that. Full of posh people. I wouldn’t sit up there, not if you paid me. I want to go where my dad took me when I was a little kid, to the Shed End behind the goal.” So they told the club, and the club agreed, and now he sits there every home game. And he’s happy.”

  Michael turned to me. “I want you to tell that man’s story – I mean his whole life story, from the old days when he was a little boy coming here with his dad, right up to now. I think he’s about eighty now, maybe older. Fill in the years for me, Michael, and we’ll make a book of his life.”

  Well, I knew at once I wanted to do it, that was for sure. I was very moved by the idea, and honoured that Michael had entrusted me with it. But I had no clue where to start. On the train back to Devon the next day, I remember jotting down the names of four people: my Uncle Francis, my Uncle Pieter, Les Farley – an old man from my village in Devon – and Uncle Mac, who was not my uncle, but had been like a father to me when I was young. All of them had fought in the Second World War, and might, had they all survived, now have been the Chelsea pensioner I had seen sitting there on his own, at the Shed End. Their lives, their stories, might play a part, in some way or other, in my Chelsea pensioner story, I thought. Somehow, I wanted to weave their lives together, a way of remembering them maybe. Their life stories had been part of my life for so long. I’ll tell you something about each of them.

  The first two life stories belong together because they were brothers, my two uncles, Francis and Pieter. At the outbreak of the Second World War, my Uncle Francis was a teacher, and my Uncle Pieter was an actor. Francis was a committed socialist and pacifist, and decided that he could not join up. Pieter, on the other hand, was quick to join the RAF. I can only imagine the difficulties and arguments there must have been within the family as these two brothers went their separate ways. Pieter was killed in 1940 when his plane crashed in St Ives in Cornwall. He was twenty-one. He lived on only in my mind – because, of course, I never met him – and in his photo which was always kept on the mantelpiece as I was growing up, a poppy beside it. My mother, his sister, grieved for her dead brother for the rest of her life.

  On learning of the death of his younger brother, Francis decided he could no longer stay out of the conflict, that he had to p
lay his part. He spent most of the rest of the war as a secret agent in France, living and fighting with the French Resistance. He was captured by the Germans and condemned to death. But, at the last moment, he was rescued, saved by a friend, a Polish secret agent called Christine. After the war he went back to teaching again.

  I grew up with the stories of these two lives, and wrestled with the dilemma they faced. To fight or not to fight? For how long do we give peace a chance? In my own life, in an attempt to answer these questions, I have tried both the soldier’s way and the teacher’s way. Billy, my Chelsea pensioner, I decided, might have to face the same dilemma, so I gave him a younger brother who joins up at the beginning of the Second World War, but is then killed at Dunkirk. So Billy joins up, and his life changes for ever.

  In my mind he now becomes Les Farley, the old farm labourer from my village, who I came to know, who was working on a farm at the start of the war. He joined up and after training was shipped off to North Africa, to Tobruk. He and his pals landed with rifles, but no ammunition, and the next morning found themselves facing the Panzers of Rommel’s army. They were all taken prisoner. Within a week or so, they were prisoners of war of the Italians, all taken to a prison camp in the north of Italy. After two years of a poor diet and living in wretched conditions, they woke up one morning to discover the Italian guards had gone. Italy, they were told, was now out of the war. The gates of the prison camp were open. So thousands of British prisoners of war simply walked out, Les among them. They walked in twos and threes all across northern Italy, avoiding the German soldiers who were now invading. An Italian farming family hid Les and his pals for the winter months, at great risk to themselves of course.