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

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СКАЧАТЬ I watched her walk away, a small yappy dog came bustling across the lawn, ran at her and sprang into her arms. She cradled him, put him over her shoulder and disappeared into the house.

      I finished mucking out the stable as quickly as I could, shook out some fresh straw, filled up the water buckets and led Peg back in. I gave her a goodbye kiss on the nose and rode my bike up to the house.

      I found her in the kitchen, cutting bread.

      “I’ve got peanut butter or honey,” she said. I didn’t like either, but I didn’t say so.

      “Honey,” I said. She carried the mugs of tea, and I carried the plate of sandwiches. I followed her out across a cobbled courtyard, accompanied by the yappy dog, down some steps and into a great glass building where there stood a gigantic white horse. The floor was covered in newspaper, and everywhere was crunchy underfoot with plaster. The shelves all around were full of sculpted heads and arms and legs and hands. A white sculpture of a dog stood guard over the plate of sandwiches and never even sniffed them. She sipped her tea between her hands and looked up at the giant horse. The horse looked just like Peg, only a lot bigger.

      “It’s no good,” she sighed. “She needs a rider.” She turned to me suddenly. “You wouldn’t be the rider, would you?” she asked.

      “I can’t ride.”

      “You wouldn’t have to, not really. You’d just sit there, that’s all, and I’d sketch you.”

      “What, now?”

      “Why not? After tea be all right?”

      And so I found myself sitting astride Peg that same afternoon in the stable yard. She was tied up by her rope, pulling contentedly at her hay net and paying no attention to us whatsoever. It felt strange up there, with Peg shifting warm underneath me. There was no saddle, and she asked me to hold the reins one-handed, loosely, to feel “I was part of the horse”. The worst of it was that I was hot, stifling hot, because she had dressed me up as an Arab. I had great swathes of cloth over and around my head and I was draped to my feet with a long heavy robe so that nothing could be seen of my jeans or sweater or wellies.

      “I never told you my name, did I?” said the lady, sketching furiously on a huge pad. “That was rude of me. I’m Liza. When you come tomorrow, you can give me a hand making you if you like. I’m not as strong as I was, and I’m in a hurry to get on with this. You can mix the plaster for me. Would you like that?” Peg snorted and pawed the ground. “I’ll take that as a yes, shall I?” She laughed, and walked round behind the horse, turning the page of her sketch pad. “I want to do one more from this side and one from the front, then you can go home.”

      Half an hour later when she let me down and unwrapped me, my bottom was stiff and sore.

      “Can I see?” I asked her.

      “I’ll show you tomorrow,” she said. “You will come, won’t you?” She knew I would, and I did.

      I came every day after that to muck out the stables and to walk Peg, but what I looked forward to most – even more than being with Peg – was mixing up Liza’s plaster for her in the bucket, climbing the stepladder with it, watching her lay the strips of cloth dunked in the wet plaster over the frame of the rider, building me up from the iron skeleton of wire, to what looked at first like an Egyptian mummy, then a riding Arab at one with his horse, his robes shrouding him with mystery. I knew all the while it was me in that skeleton, me inside that mummy. I was the Arab sitting astride his horse looking out over the desert. She worked ceaselessly, and with such a fierce determination that I didn’t like to interrupt. We were joined together by a common, comfortable silence.

      At the end of a month or so we stood back, the two of us, and looked up at the horse and rider, finished.

      “Well,” said Liza, her hands on her hips. “What do you think, Bonnie?”

      “I wish,” I whispered, touching the tail of the horse, “I just wish I could do it.”

      “But you did do it, Bonnie,” she said and I felt her hand on my shoulder. “We did it together. I couldn’t have done it without you.” She was a little breathless as she spoke. “Without you, that horse would never have had a rider. I’d never have thought of it. Without you mixing my plaster, holding the bucket, I couldn’t have done it.” Her hand gripped me tighter. “Do you want to do one of your own?”

      “I can’t.”

      “Of course you can. But you have to look around you first, not just glance, but really look. You have to breathe it in, become a part of it, feel that you’re a part of it. You draw what you see, what you feel. Then you make what you’ve drawn. Use clay if you like, or do what I do and build up plaster over a wire frame. Then set to work with your chisel, just like I do, until it’s how you want it. If I can do it, you can do it. I tell you what. You can have a corner of my studio if you like, just so long as you don’t talk when I’m working. How’s that?”

      So my joyous spring blossomed into a wonderful summer. After a while, I even dared to ride Peg bareback sometimes on the way back to the stable yard; and I never forgot what Liza told me. I looked about me. I listened. And the more I listened and the more I looked, the more I felt at home in this new world. I became a creature of the place. I belonged there as much as the wren that sang at me high on the vegetable garden wall, as much as the green dragonfly hovering over the pool by the water buffalo. I sketched Peg. I sketched Big Boy (I couldn’t sketch Chip – he just came out round). I bent my wire frames into shape and I began to build my first horse sculpture, layer on layer of strips of cloth dunked in plaster just like Liza did. I moulded them into shape on the frame, and when they dried I chipped away and sanded. But I was never happy with what I’d done.

      All this time, Liza worked on beside me in the studio, and harder, faster, more intensely than ever. I helped her whenever she asked me too, mixing, holding the bucket for her, just as I had done before.

      It was a Rising Christ, she said, Christ rising from the dead, his face strong, yet gentle too, immortal it seemed; but his body, vulnerable and mortal. From time to time she’d come over and look at my stumpy effort that looked as much like a dog as a horse to me, and she would walk round it nodding her approval. “Coming on, coming on,” she’d say. “Maybe just a little bit off here perhaps.” And she’d chisel away for a minute or two, and a neck or leg would come to sudden life.

      I told her once, “It’s like magic.”

      She thought for a moment, and said, “That’s exactly what it is, Bonnie. It’s a God-given thing, a God-given magic, and it’s not to be wasted. Don’t waste it, Bonnie. Don’t ever waste it.”

      The horse and rider came back from the foundry, bronze now and magnificent. I marvelled at it. It stood outside her studio, and when it caught the red of the evening sun, I could scarcely take my eyes off it. But these days Liza seemed to tire more easily, and she would sit longer over her tea, gazing out at her horse and rider.

      “I am so pleased with that, Bonnie,” she said, “so pleased we did it together.”

      The Christ figure was finished and went off to the foundry a few weeks before I had to go on my summer holiday. “By the time you come back again,” said Liza, “it should be back. It’s going to hang above the door of the village church. Isn’t that nice? It’ll be there for ever. Well, not for ever. Nothing is for ever.”

      The holiday was in Cornwall. СКАЧАТЬ