To Alice and Lucie –
welcome to the world
As she says herself, there are many spellings of Grania O’Malley’s name. The spelling used in this book is an English Translation of her name from the Irish Language.
First published in Great Britain in 1996 by Macmillan Education Ltd
This edition published 2007 by Egmont UK Limited
239 Kensington High Street, London W8 6SA
Text Copyright © 1996 Michael Morpurgo
Cover illustration copyright © 2007 Lee Gibbons
The moral rights of the author and cover illustrator have been asserted
ISBN 978 1 4052 3340 8
eBook ISBN 978 1 7803 1185 2
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
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
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher and copyright owner.
CONTENTS
1 Smiley
2 The Big Hill
3 The face in the mirror
4 Jaws
5 The ghost of Grania O’Malley
6 Gone fishing
7 Rockfleet
8 Mister Barney
9 The diggers are coming
10 The last stand
11 The Battle of the Earthbusters
Postscript
1 SMILEY
JESSIE WAS ALWAYS FINDING BONES IN THE great bog-oak field where they dug the peat for the winter fires. It was here too that her father found most of the wood he needed for his wood sculptures, his ‘creatures’ as she called them. She was forever going off there alone, mooching around, bottom in the air looking for her bones. She had a whole collection of them, but she never tired of looking for more. Mostly they were just sheep bones – skulls, jawbones, legbones, vertebrae. She had shrews’ skulls too, birds’ skulls, all sorts of skulls. But there was one skull she found that was unlike any other, because it was a human skull. She was quite sure of it.
She never said a word to anyone. She kept it with the rest of her collection in the ruined cottage at the bottom of the bog-oak field. No one but herself ever went near the place. She called him Smiley because he would keep grinning at her. She put Smiley in pride of place in a niche in the cottage wall; and from time to time she’d go and talk to him and tell him her troubles – which were many. Smiley would listen, stare back at her and say nothing, which was what she wanted.
But as time passed, Jessie began to feel more and more uneasy about Smiley. So one day, in confession, she told Father Gerald about her skull, partly because she’d been worrying herself about it, and partly because at the time she could think of no other sins to confess. If she told him she had done nothing wrong, nothing bad enough to confess, he just wouldn’t believe her. She’d tried that before. So she blurted it out about Smiley, told him everything; but she could tell from the tone of his voice that he just thought this was another of Jessie Parsons’ little white lies.
‘Bones should be buried in hallowed ground and left undisturbed, Jessie,’ he said sonorously. ‘Then the souls of the departed can rest in peace.’
So, one dark night with the owl hooting at her from high up in the ruined abbey, she dug a small hole under the abbey walls, said goodbye to Smiley in a whisper, laid him carefully in the wet earth and covered him up. She felt a lot better afterwards; and although she did miss him for a while, she felt pleased with herself that she’d done the right thing.
Some time later Father Gerald had asked after the skull and she’d shown him one of her many sheep’s skulls. He’d laughed. ‘It’s as I thought, Jessie Parsons, that’s never a human being. Do you not know a sheep’s skull when you see one?’ He’d counted the teeth carefully. ‘I’d say that’s a six-year-old ewe, by the teeth in her.’
Jessie went and put flowers on the unmarked grave just once. ‘I hope you’re feeling better now, Smiley,’ she said. ‘I’ll leave you be, so’s you can rest in peace, like Father Gerald says.’ So she did, and as the weeks and months passed, she thought of Smiley less and less.
All this happened a year or more before the rest of it began.
2 THE BIG HILL
THERE HAD TO BE MIST OR JESSIE WOULD NOT even try it. If she failed, and so far she had always failed, she wanted no one else to know of it, especially her mother and father. She’d lost count of how many times she’d lied to them about the Big Hill, about how she had made it all the way to the top. They mustn’t see her. No one must see her. If she was going to fail again, then she would fail alone and unseen.
Old Mister Barney might see her, and probably often did, as she passed his shack at the bottom of the Big Hill, but he’d be the only one; and besides, he wouldn’t tell anyone. Mister Barney kept himself to himself and minded his own business. He hardly ever spoke to a soul. Jessie was ten and he had spoken to her maybe half a dozen times in her entire life. He would wave at her through the window sometimes, but she was as sure as she could be that he would never spy on her. He just wasn’t like that. There was smoke coming from his chimney and one of the chickens stood one-legged in the porch; but today, as Jessie walked across the clearing outside his shack, there was no sign of Mister Barney.
The mist cut the hill off halfway up and dwarfed it, but Jessie knew what was waiting for her up there, how high it really was, how hard it was going to be, and was daunted by it all over again. Mole, her mother’s black donkey, nudged her from behind. Mole would go with her. He went everywhere with her. More than once it had been Mole who had spoilt it, nudging her off balance at just the wrong moment.
There was a lot that annoyed her about her ‘lousy palsy’, as she often called it. But it was balance that was the real problem. Once she’d fallen over, it took so much of her energy to get up again that there was little left for the Big Hill itself. If she could just keep her rhythm going – one and two, one and two, one and two – if she could just keep on lurching, and not fall over, she knew that one day, some day, she’d have strength enough to reach the top of the Big Hill, and then she’d never have to lie about it again.
Mole rubbed his nose up against her back. ‘All right, Mole,’ said Jessie, clutching the donkey’s neck to steady herself. ‘I’m going. I’m going. It’s all very well for you. You’ve got four good legs. I’ve only got two, and they won’t exactly do what I tell them, will they?’ She looked up at the Big Hill and took a deep breath. ‘I’m telling you, Mole, today’s the day. I can feel it inside me.’ The donkey glanced at her and snorted. Jessie laughed. ‘Race you to the top, big ears.’
She started well enough, leaning forward into the hill, willing her fumbling feet forward. She knew every rut and tussock of the track ahead – she’d sat down hard enough on most of them. Mole walked alongside her, browsing in the bracken. After a while he trotted on ahead, all tippy-toed, and disappeared into the mist. ‘Clever clogs!’ Jessie called after him, but then she tried all she could to put him out of her mind. She knew she had to concentrate. The path was wet from the mist, and slippery. One false step and she’d be on her bottom and that would be that – again.
She could hear Mole snorting somewhere up ahead. As like as not, he’d be at the waterfall by now. Jessie had reached the waterfall just once, the week before – it was as high as she’d ever gone on her own. That time, too, her legs had let her down. They wouldn’t manage the stones and she’d tripped and fallen. She’d tried crawling,
but she wasn’t any better at crawling than she was at walking. She’d crawled on through the water, become too cold and had had to give up. Today would be different. Today she would not let herself give up. Today she would reach the top, no matter what. Today she would prove to Mrs Burke, to Marion Murphy, and to everyone else at school that she could climb the Big Hill just like they could.
She could see Mole up ahead of her now, drinking in the pool below the waterfall. Jessie’s legs ached. She wanted so much to stop, but she knew that she mustn’t, that rhythm was everything. She passed Mole and laughed out loud at him. ‘Haven’t you read the one about the hare and the tortoise?’ she cried. ‘See you at the top.’ This was the spot where she’d come to grief the week before, the part of the track she most dreaded. The track rose steeply beside the waterfall, curling away out of sight and around the back of the hill. Every stone was loose here and until she reached the waterfall, if she reached the waterfall, the track would be more like a stream, the stones under her feet more like stepping stones. From now on she would have to be careful, very careful.
She was standing now on the very rock where she’d tripped last time. She punched the air with triumph and staggered on, on and up. She was in unknown territory now. Only on her father’s back had she ever gone beyond this point and that was a long time ago when she was small. She felt her legs weakening all the while. She fought them, forcing them on. She breathed in deep, drawing what strength she could from the air, and that was when the mist filled her lungs. She coughed and had to go on coughing. Still she tried to go on.
She felt herself falling and knew she could do nothing about it. She threw her arm out to save herself and was relieved to see she was falling into the water. She would be wet, but at least she wasn’t going to hurt herself. But she hadn’t accounted for the stone just beneath the surface of the water. She never even felt the cold of the stream as it covered her face. There was an explosion of pain inside her head and a ringing in her ears that seemed as if it would never end. Then the world darkened suddenly around her. She tried to see through it, but she couldn’t. She tried to breathe, but she couldn’t.
She was dreaming of her father’s ‘creature’ sculptures. They were all in the cottage and Smiley was telling them a story and they were laughing, cackling like witches. She woke suddenly. She was sitting propped up, her back against a boulder. Mole was grazing some way off, his tail whisking. Jessie’s head throbbed and she put her hand to it. There was a lump under her fingers, and it was sticky with blood. There was more blood in her ear and on her cheek too. She was soaked to the skin. She wondered for some moments where she was and how she had got there. She remembered the climb up the Big Hill, and how she had fallen; and she realised then that she had failed yet again. Tears filled her eyes and she cried out loud, her fists clenched, her eyes closed to stop the tears.
She tasted the salt of her tears and brushed them away angrily. ‘I’ll get there, Mrs Burke,’ she shouted. ‘I’ll get there, you’ll see.’
From nowhere came a voice, a woman’s voice, but almost low enough to be a man’s. ‘Course you will, Jessie,’ it said. ‘But not if you sit there feeling all sorry for yourself.’ Jessie looked around her. There was no one there. Mole glanced at her quizzically. He had stopped chomping. For one silly moment, Jessie imagined it might have been Mole talking, but then the voice went on. ‘So you’ve a bit of a knock on your head. Are you going to let that stop you?’ Mole was browsing again, tearing at the grass. So it couldn’t be him talking. ‘I’m not the donkey, Jessie. And I’ll tell you something else for nothing, there’s no point at all in your looking for me. You’ll not find me. I’m just a voice, that’s all. Don’t go worrying about it.’
‘Who are you?’ Jessie whispered, sitting up and wiping her nose with the back of her hand.
‘Is that what they teach children these days? Can you not use a handkerchief like a proper person? Have you not got a handkerchief?’
‘Yes,’ said Jessie, still looking all around her, but frantically now.
‘Then use it, why don’t you?’ Jessie searched out her handkerchief and blew her nose. ‘That’s better now,’ the voice went on. ‘I’ve always thought that you can tell a lot about folk from the way they treat their noses. There’s pickers, there’s wipers – like you – there’s snifflers and, worst of all, there’s trumpeters. You’ll not believe this, but I once knew a queen, a real queen, I’m telling you – and she was a trumpeter. Worse still, she’d blow her nose on a handkerchief and she wouldn’t throw it away like you or me. She’d use it again, honest she would. She’d use the same handkerchief twice. Can you believe such a thing? And herself a queen! I told her straight out. I said: “There’s no surer way to catch a cold and die than to use the same handkerchief twice.” She was no one’s fool, that queen. Oh no, she listened to me. She must have, because she lived on and into a ripe old age, just like me. She died sitting up. Did you know that?’
Chuckling now, the voice seemed to be coming closer all the time. ‘That queen, she wouldn’t lie down for anyone, not even death. A lady after my own heart she was. English, mind, but she couldn’t help that now, could she? Listen, Jessie, are you just going to sit there or are you going to get up on your feet and climb the Big Hill, like you said you would?’
‘Who are you?’ Jessie asked again. She was hoping against hope that maybe she was still asleep and dreaming it all. But she was bleeding and there was real blood on her fingers, on her head. So the voice had to be real too – unless she was going mad. That thought, that she might be going mad, frightened Jessie above everything else.
‘It doesn’t matter who I am,’ said the voice, and it came from right beside her now, ‘except that this is my hill you’re walking on. I’ve been watching you these last weeks, we all have, the boys and me. They didn’t think you’d make it, but I did. I was sure of it, so sure of it that I’ve a wager on it – five gold doubloons. And, Jessie, if there’s one thing I hate losing, it’s money. And here you are, sitting there like a pudding, crying your eyes out and wiping your nose with the back of your hand. I’m ashamed of you, Jessie.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Jessie. ‘I didn’t mean to . . .’
‘So you should be. I tell you what.’ The voice was whispering in her ear. ‘I’ll make it worth your while. I’ll leave a little something for you at the top of the hill. But if you want my little something, then you’ll have to go up there and fetch it for yourself. How about it?’
Jessie was still thinking about what she should do when she felt strong arms under her shoulders, lifting her on to her feet and then holding her for a moment until she had steadied herself on her legs. Then someone tapped her bottom. ‘On your way, girl.’ And Jessie found herself walking on, almost without meaning to, as if her legs were being worked by someone else. She looked behind her again and again to see if anyone was there. There was no one, only Mole ambling along, head lowered, ears back.
‘Did you hear her?’ Jessie whispered, as Mole came alongside. ‘She’s watching us, I know she is. Come on Mole, we’ve got to get to the top, we’ve got to.’ And she lurched on up the Big Hill, rejoining the track beyond the waterfall.
The grass under her feet was spongy here; easier walking, easier falling too, she thought. She remembered how her father had galloped her on his back along this same grassy path, and how they’d fallen over and rolled down the hill together and into the bracken. She remembered too the rockstrewn gully ahead, and wondered how she was ever going to get past it. She went down on her hands and knees. It would be painful and slow, but it was the only way. There were brambles across the path that had to be pulled away, endless lacerating rocks to be negotiated. Jessie kept crawling until her wrists couldn’t take it any more and she had to crawl on her elbows. That was when her knee slipped and her fingers wouldn’t grasp and she slid backwards. She ended up in an ungainly heap, wedged against the rocks, knees and elbows barked and bleeding, and a vicious thorn stuck in the palm of her h
and. She drew it out with her teeth and spat it on to the ground.
Mole was braying at her from somewhere further up the hill. Jessie looked up, shielding her eyes against the white of the sun that was breaking now through the mist. Mole was standing right on top of the Big Hill. He wasn’t just calling her, he was taunting her. Jessie levered herself laboriously to her feet and swayed there for a moment, her head spinning. She closed her eyes, and then it all came flooding back.
April, the start of the summer term at school and they’d all of them gone, even the infants, up the Big Hill on a nature walk with Mrs Burke, her head teacher and the other bane of her life besides Marion Murphy. And Jessie had been the only one to be left behind with Miss Jefferson, the infant teacher. Miss Jefferson had insisted on holding her hand all the way to the beach, just in case, she said. They were going to find lots of interesting shells, she said, to make a shell picture. It was always shells or wild flowers with Miss Jefferson – she had her own wild flower meadow behind the school. But today it was shells.
Miss Jefferson foraged through the bladderwrack and the sea lettuce, whooping with joy every few seconds and talking nineteen to the dozen like she always did. It wasn’t that Jessie didn’t like her; she did. But she was forever fussing her, endlessly anxious that Jessie might fall, might be too cold, might be too tired. Jessie was used to that, used to her. It was being left behind that she really resented.
Despite all Miss Jefferson’s enthusiastic encouragement she could not bring herself to care a fig about the shell picture. She wanted to be up there with them, with the others. All the while she kept her eye on the Big Hill. She could see them, a trail of children up near the summit now, Mrs Burke striding on ahead. She heard the distant cheer when they reached the top and she had to look away. Miss Jefferson understood and put her arm round her, but it was no comfort.