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

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СКАЧАТЬ Magwitch’s every appearance I tried to see through his make-up (I just hoped it was make-up!) to discover how my father really looked. It was impossible. My polar bear father, my pixie father had become my convict father.

      Until the credits came up at the end my mother never said a word. Then all she said was, “Well, the potatoes won’t peel themselves, and I’ve got the Brussels sprouts to do as well.” Christmas was a very subdued affair that year, I can tell you.

      They say you can’t put a genie back in the bottle. Not true. No one in the family ever spoke of the incident afterwards – except Terry and me of course. Everyone behaved as if it had never happened. Enough was enough. Terry and I decided it was time to broach the whole forbidden subject with our mother, in private. We waited until the furore of Christmas was over, and caught her alone in the kitchen one evening. We asked her point blank to tell us about him, our ‘first’ father, our ‘missing’ father.

      “I don’t want to talk about him,” she said. She wouldn’t even look at us. “All I know is that he lives somewhere in Canada now. It was another life. I was another person then. It’s not important.” We tried to press her, but that was all she would tell us.

      Soon after this I became very busy with my own life, and for some years I thought very little about my convict father, my polar bear father. By the time I was thirty I was married with two sons, and was a teacher trying to become a writer, something I had never dreamt I could be.

      Terry had become an actor, something he had always been quite sure he would be. He rang me very late one night in a high state of excitement. “You’ll never guess,” he said. “He’s here! Peter! Our dad. He’s here, in England. He’s playing in Henry IV, Part II in Chichester. I’ve just read a rave review. He’s Falstaff. Why don’t we go down there and give him the surprise of his life?”

      So we did. The next weekend we went down to Chichester together. I took my family with me. I wanted them to be there for this. He was a wonderful Falstaff, big and boomy, rumbustious and raunchy, yet full of pathos. My two boys (ten and eight) kept whispering at me every time he came on. “Is that him? Is that him?” Afterwards we went round to see him in his dressing-room. Terry said I should go in first, and on my own. “I had my turn a long time ago, if you remember,” he said. “Best if he sees just one of us to start with, I reckon.”

      My heart was in my mouth. I had to take a very deep breath before I knocked on that door. “Enter.” He sounded still jovial, still Falstaffian. I went in.

      He was sitting at his dressing-table in his vest and braces, boots and britches, and humming to himself as he rubbed off his make-up. We looked at each other in the mirror. He stopped humming, and swivelled round to face me. For some moments I just stood there looking at him. Then I said, “Were you a polar bear once, a long time ago in London?”

      “Yes.”

      “And were you once the convict in Great Expectations on the television?”

      “Yes.”

      “Then I think I’m your son,” I told him.

      There was a lot of hugging in his dressing-room that night, not enough to make up for all those missing years, maybe. But it was a start.

      My mother’s dead now, bless her heart, but I still have two fathers. I get on well enough with Douglas, I always have done in a detached sort of way. He’s done his best by me, I know that; but in all the years I’ve known him he’s never once mentioned my other father. It doesn’t matter now. It’s history best left crusted over I think.

      We see my polar bear father – I still think of him as that – every year or so, whenever he’s over from Canada. He’s well past eighty now, still acting for six months of the year – a real trouper. My children and my grandchildren always call him Grandpa Bear because of his great bushy beard (the same one he grew for Falstaff!), and because they all know the story of their grandfather, I suppose.

      Recently I wrote a story about a polar bear. I can’t imagine why. He’s upstairs now reading it to my smallest granddaughter. I can hear him a-snarling and a-growling just as proper polar bears do. Takes him back, I should think. Takes me back, that’s for sure.

      

       don’t remember why my mother had to go into hospital. I’m not sure she ever told me. She did explain that after the operation she would be needing a month of complete rest. This is why she had had to arrange for me to go and stay with Aunt Mathilde, my mother’s older sister, in her house down in the south, in Provence.

      I’d never been to Provence, but I had met my Aunt Mathilde a few times when she’d come to see us in our little apartment in Paris. I remembered her being big and bustling, filling the place with her bulk and forever hugging and kissing me, which I never much cared for. She’d pinch my cheek and tell me I was a “beautiful little man”. But she’d always bring us lots of crystallised fruits, so I could forgive her everything else.

      I was ten years old and had never been parted from my mother. I’d only been out of Paris once for a holiday by the sea in Brittany. I told her I didn’t want to be sent away. I told her time and time again, but it was no use.

      “You’ll be fine, Yannick,” she insisted. “You like Aunt Mathilde, don’t you? And Uncle Bruno is very funny. He has a moustache that prickles like a hedgehog. And you’ve never even met your cousin Amandine. You’ll have a lovely time. Spring in Provence. It’ll be a paradise for you, I promise. Crystallised fruit every day!”

      She did all she could to convince me. More than once she read me Jean Giono’s story “The Man Who Planted Trees”, the story of an old shepherd set in the high hills of Provence. She showed me a book of paintings by Paul Cézanne, paintings, she told me, of the countryside outside Aix-en-Provence, very close to Aunt Mathilde’s home. “Isn’t it beautiful, Yannick?” she breathed as she turned the pages. “Cézanne loved it there, and he’s the greatest painter in the world. Remember that.”

      A city boy all my life, the paintings really did look like the paradise my mother had promised me. So by the time she put me on the train at the Gare de Lyon I was really looking forward to it. Blowing kisses to her for the last time out of the train window, I think the only reason I didn’t cry was because I was quite sure by now that I was indeed going to the most wonderful place in the world, the place where Cézanne, the greatest painter in the world, painted his pictures, where Jean Giono’s old shepherd walked the high hills planting his acorns to make a forest.

      Aunt Mathilde met me off the train and enveloped me in a great bear hug and pinched my cheek. It wasn’t a good start. She introduced me to my cousin Amandine, who barely acknowledged my existence, but who was very beautiful. On the way to the car, following behind Aunt Mathilde, Amandine told me at once that she was fourteen and much older than I was and that I had to do what she said. I loved her at once. She wore a blue and white gingham dress, and she had a ponytail of chestnut hair that shone in the sunshine. She had the greenest eyes I’d ever seen. She didn’t smile at me, though. I so hoped that one day she would.

      We drove out of town to Vauvenargues, Aunt Mathilde talking all the way. I was in the back seat of the Deux Chevaux and couldn’t hear everything, but I did pick up enough to understand that Uncle СКАЧАТЬ