Of Lions and Unicorns: A Lifetime of Tales from the Master Storyteller. Michael Morpurgo

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СКАЧАТЬ paper bag after she had poured your quarter pound from the big glass jar on the counter. I had once thought of stealing that jar, of snatching it and running off out of the shop, making my getaway like a bank robber in the films. But I knew the police would come after me in their shiny black cars with their bells ringing, and then I’d have to go to prison and Mother would be cross. So I never did steal Mrs Parsons’s lemon sherbet jar.

      Then there was Mad Jack, as we called him, who clipped hedges and dug ditches and swept the village street. We’d often see him sitting on the churchyard wall by the mounting block eating his lunch. He’d be humming and swinging his legs. Mother said he’d been fine before he went off to the war, but he’d come back with some shrapnel from a shell in his head and never been right since, and we shouldn’t call him Mad Jack, but we did. I’m ashamed to say we baited him sometimes too, perching alongside him on the wall, mimicking his humming and swinging our legs in time with his.

      But Mrs Pettigrew remained a mystery to everyone. This was partly because she lived some distance from the village and was inclined to keep herself to herself. She only came into the village to go to church on Sundays, and then she’d sit at the back, always on her own. I used to sing in the church choir, mostly because Mother made me, but I did like dressing up in the black cassock and white surplice and we did have a choir outing once a year to the cinema in Southminster – that’s where I first saw Snow White and Bambi and Reach for the Sky. I liked swinging the incense too, and sometimes I got to carry the cross, which made me feel very holy and very important. I’d caught Mrs Pettigrew’s eye once or twice as we processed by, but I’d always looked away. I’d never spoken to her. She smiled at people, but she rarely spoke to anyone; so no one spoke to her – not that I ever saw anyway. But there were reasons for this.

      Mrs Pettigrew was different. For a start she didn’t live in a house at all. She lived in a railway carriage, down by the sea wall with the great wide marsh all around her. Everyone called it Mrs Pettigrew’s Marsh. I could see it best when I rode my bicycle along the sea wall. The railway carriage was painted brown and cream and the word PULLMAN was printed in big letters all along both sides above the windows. There were wooden steps up to the front door at one end, and a chimney at the other. The carriage was surrounded by trees and gardens, so I could only catch occasional glimpses of her and her dogs and her donkey, bees and hens. Tiny under her wide hat, she could often be seen planting out in her vegetable garden, or digging the dyke that ran around the garden like a moat, collecting honey from her beehives perhaps or feeding her hens. She was always outside somewhere, always busy. She walked or stood or sat very upright, I noticed, very neatly, and there was a serenity about her that made her unlike anyone else, and ageless too.

      But she was different in another way. Mrs Pettigrew was not like the rest of us to look at, because Mrs Pettigrew was “foreign”, from somewhere near China, I had been told. She did not dress like anyone else either. Apart from the wide-brimmed hat, she always wore a long black dress buttoned to the neck. And everything about her, her face and her hands, her feet, everything was tidy and tiny and trim, even her voice. She spoke softly to me as she helped me to my feet that day, every word precisely articulated. She had no noticeable accent at all, but spoke English far too well, too meticulously, to have come from England.

      So we walked side by side, her arm round me, a soothing silence between us, until we turned off the road on to the track that led across the marsh towards the sea wall in the distance. I could see smoke rising straight into the sky from the chimney of the railway carriage.

      “There we are: Dusit,” she said. “And look who is coming out to greet us.”

      Three greyhounds were bounding towards us followed by a donkey trotting purposefully but slowly behind them, wheezing at us rather than braying. Then they were gambolling all about us, and nudging us for attention. They were big and bustling, but I wasn’t afraid because they had nothing in their eyes but welcome.

      “I call the dogs Fast, Faster and Fastest,” she told me. “But the donkey doesn’t like names. She thinks names are for silly creatures like people and dogs who can’t recognise one another without them. So I call her simply Donkey.” Mrs Pettigrew lowered her voice to a whisper. “She can’t bray properly – tries all the time but she can’t. She’s very sensitive too; takes offence very easily.” Mrs Pettigrew took me up the steps into her railway carriage home. “Sit down there by the window, in the light, so I can make your face better.”

      I was so distracted and absorbed by all I saw about me that I felt no pain as she cleaned my face, not even when she pulled out the thorn. She held it out to show me. It was truly a monster of a thorn. “The biggest and nastiest I have ever seen,” she said, smiling at me. Without her hat on she was scarcely taller than I was. She made me wash out my mouth and bathed the hole in my cheek with antiseptic. Then she gave me some tea which tasted very strange but warmed me to the roots of my hair. “Jasmine tea,” she said. “It is very healing, I find, very comforting. My sister sends it to me from Thailand.”

      The carriage was as neat and tidy as she was: a simple sitting room at the far end with just a couple of wicker chairs and a small table by the stove. And behind a half-drawn curtain I glimpsed a bed very low on the ground. There was no clutter, no pictures, no hangings, only a shelf of books that ran all the way round the carriage from end to end. From where I was sitting I could see out over the garden, then through the trees to the open marsh beyond.

      “Do you like my house, Michael?” She did not give me time to reply. “I read many books, as you see,” she said. I was wondering how it was that she knew my name, when she told me. “I see you in the village sometimes, don’t I? You’re in the choir, aren’t you?” She leant forward. “And I expect you’re wondering why Mrs Pettigrew lives in a railway carriage.”

      “Yes,” I said.

      The dogs had come in by now and were settling down at our feet, their eyes never leaving her, not for a moment, as if they were waiting for an old story they knew and loved.

      “Then I’ll tell you, shall I?” she began. “It was because we met on a train, Arthur and I – not this one, you understand, but one very much like it. We were in Thailand. I was returning from my grandmother’s house to the city where I lived. Arthur was a botanist. He was travelling through Thailand collecting plants and studying them. He painted them and wrote books about them. He wrote three books; I have them all up there on my shelf. I will show you one day – would you like that? I never knew about plants until I met him, nor insects, nor all the wild creatures and birds around us, nor the stars in the sky. Arthur showed me all these things. He opened my eyes. For me it was all so exciting and new. He had such a knowledge of this wonderful world we live in, such a love for it too. He gave me that, and he gave me much more: he gave me his love too.

      “Soon after we were married he brought me here to England on a great ship – this ship had three big funnels and a dance band – and he made me so happy. He said to me one day on board that ship, ‘Mrs Pettigrew –’ he always liked to call me this – ‘Mrs Pettigrew, I want to live with you down on the marsh where I grew up as a boy.’ The marsh was part of his father’s farm, you see. ‘It is a wild and wonderful place,’ he told me, ‘where on calm days you can hear the sea breathing gently beyond the sea wall, or on stormy days roaring like a dragon, where larks rise and sing on warm summer afternoons, where stars cascade on August nights.’

      “‘But where shall we live?’ I asked him.

      “‘I have already thought of that, Mrs Pettigrew,’ he said. ‘Because we first met on a train, I shall buy a fine railway carriage for us to live in, a carriage fit for a princess. And all around it we shall make a perfect paradise and we shall live as we were meant to live, amongst our fellow creatures, as close to them as we can be. And we shall be happy there.’

      “‘So СКАЧАТЬ