Alone on a Wide Wide Sea Read online

  So there we were the next day tootling along with a bit of a limp, but happy as Larry (I do sound like Dad sometimes I know, but I love the phrases he used. I inherited them. They’re mine now.) All the storms were behind us. The forecast was set fair all the way to Scilly. Sunshiney day, clear skies, and not a sign of a welcoming flotilla—amazing, Grandpa had kept quiet. I had just sighted land, not much land, but land all the same, and it was the land I wanted to see—the Scilly Islands. I toasted the occasion with a mug of hot chocolate. The Scillies looked like little grey dumplings lying there low in the sea, about ten miles off. We were going nicely, about five knots. It was early morning. I was so nearly there. I’d seen a whale, or perhaps a basking shark, in the distance the day before and was looking out for him again. What I saw instead was a school of porpoises playing off my starboard bow, giving me quite a show. This was the kind of unexpected, spontaneous welcome I really wanted.

  But I was enjoying it so much that I wasn’t keeping a good look-out all around. That was when a sickening shudder shook the boat. She reared up and rolled, and then crashed down into the sea, where she stopped dead, as if the life had suddenly gone out of her. The tiller was light in my hand, so I knew at once that we’d lost the rudder. Then I saw pieces of it floating away astern of us. I thought at first we must have hit the whale, but we hadn’t. The dark shape I saw lurking just beneath the surface rose then and showed itself. It was a dirty orange with flat sides and sharp edges. A container, a lousy stinking container. I cursed that container ship wherever she was, then I cursed all container ships wherever they were. Cursing over, I checked below. At least we weren’t holed. We hadn’t lost buoyancy. We were rudderless and helpless, but still afloat. I hoped we could drift in on the tide at first, but a quick look at my chart confirmed what I already knew, that there were rocks all around Scilly, thousands and thousands of them.

  I had no choice. I used the Satphone and called out the lifeboat. Within half an hour they were alongside and threw me a line. So with a busted rudder and a busted arm I arrived on the Scilly Isles, came into St Mary’s Harbour, towed in ignominiously by the lifeboat. Because of that, of course, there was a lot of interest, and very soon they found out who I was. No flotilla, thank goodness, but any hope I might have had of slipping in unnoticed was gone. They whisked me up to the hospital to have my arm looked at and told me I had to stay there the night, but I said I didn’t want to. I’d had a better offer. Matt Pender, the lifeboat coxswain, said he could put me up at home with his family. So after my arm was set and plastered he came to fetch me, and we went straight to a pub where they feted me as if I was Ellen McArthur. “Proper little hero” they called me. Everyone made a fuss of me and I loved it. I tried phoning home, but no one answered. They’d probably left already. I didn’t mind. I was so happy to have got to England, so happy the boat was in one piece, just about.

  I did some TV and radio interviews the next day, got them over with. Then I went down to the jetty to tidy Kitty Four before she went off for repairs. There were crowds all around her, dozens of people photographing her, and she was just bobbing up and down loving it all, taking her bows.

  I waited about till everyone had gone before I went on board. Then we had a quiet time together, just Kitty Four and me. I emailed Mum, emailed Dr Topolski, told everyone that repairs would take a couple of weeks at least, that I would catch the ferry the following day from Scilly to Penzance, and then the night train to London Paddington getting in at seven o’clock on the Wednesday morning. If they were there by then, they could meet me, and we could go off to Bermondsey and start looking for Kitty right away. I told them something else too, something I knew neither of them would want to hear. I’d decided that once Kitty Four was repaired, once my arm was better, I would be sailing Kitty Four home. I’d do the whole thing just as I’d planned, the whole circumnavigation, and nothing anyone could say would stop me. “I mean it, Grandpa,” I wrote. Before I left Kitty Four I got an email back.

  “Whatever you say, Allie. See you at Paddington seven a.m. Wednesday morning. There’s a big clock there on platform one. Meet you there. Love Mum and Grandpa.” They’d given in just like that. I couldn’t believe it.

  Matt and the whole lifeboat crew came to see me off on the ferry to Penzance. I’d never been hugged so much in all my life. I liked it, I liked it a lot. I had to wait around a while until I could get on the night train for London. So I was quite tired by the time I got into my seat. I was getting out my laptop. I wanted to send another email to Mum. When I looked up, there was this bloke sitting opposite smiling at me. We got talking as you do. His name was Michael McLuskie.

  The rest you know already, just about all of it, anyway. What you don’t know is what happened when I’d finished telling him my story, when we got into Paddington Station the next morning. The train came into platform one, and we got out together, Michael carrying my rucksack as well as his. (He wasn’t just good-looking, he was thoughtful too, still is—mostly.) I could see Mum and Grandpa under the clock waiting, looking around for me.

  “That them?” Michael asked.

  “That’s them,” I said.

  “So it’s true, all if it, everything you told me. None of it made up?”

  “None of it.”

  “Then,” he said, looking straight at me, and meaning every word he said, “then you are the most incredible person I’ve ever met, and I’d like to see you again, if that’s alright.”

  I don’t know to this day what made me say it. “Look,” I said. “I’m hungry. Why don’t you come and have breakfast with us, with Mum and Grandpa and me?” He didn’t say no, which was why, after Mum and Grandpa had each hugged me again and again, and after we’d all cried and laughed Cretan style under the clock at Paddington, we all piled into a taxi, and went off to their hotel for breakfast.

  They seemed, I thought, a little nervous. Grandpa kept looking away whenever I caught his eye. I thought he was cross with me because I’d insisted on doing the whole circumnavigation. He’d always been so much against it. Mum couldn’t seem to find her voice at all, just sat there patting my hand fondly. I exchanged glances with Michael who shrugged with his eyes, as only he can do.

  It was one of those huge modern hotels, made entirely of glass, and was right on the river. We walked into the breakfast room which was full of laid up tables, all of them empty except for a large round table near the window. Sitting around it were what looked like a family with a couple of kids and all of them were looking at me very intently, which was odd, I thought. And Mum and Grandpa weren’t leading us to one of the empty tables, as I expected they would. Instead they were leading us directly towards the round one by the window. “And this,” Mum said to them, not trying to disguise the pride in her voice, “this is Allie, my daughter Allie. Arthur’s daughter, Allie.”

  Still they stared, and then, one by one the stares turned to smiles. “I think you had better introduce yourselves,” Mum went on.

  “Shall I start?” I knew who he was before he opened his mouth. I recognised him from his photograph. “I’m Marc, Marc Topolski. From up there, remember? And this is my family, Marianne, Molly and Martha, known in the neighbourhood back home in Vermont as the M&Ms.” I couldn’t speak, partly because I was so choked up. But there was another reason too.

  Even as he was talking, I was looking at the old lady sitting next to him. Her smile was Dad’s smile, from the eyes, from the heart.

  “And I’m Kitty,” she said. “Your dad’s sister.”

  She could hardly speak either, but smiled through her tears. “You got Arthur’s key, dear?” she said. “The one I gave him?” I took it off from around my neck and gave it to her. There was a small wooden box on the table in front of her, carved and painted with red and white flowers. She turned the key in the lock. It fitted. She smiled up at me again. She turned it, then she went on turning it, again and again, which seemed strange. Then she opened the lid, and I understood everything. The box played music. It w
as a musical box. And the tune it played was London Bridge is Falling Down. We listened until it slowed right down, and then finished mid-tune.

  “And that,” said the old lady pointing out at the river, and I noticed now that she too had a kind of American accent, “that is London Bridge, and it isn’t falling down. I was born just down the road in Bermondsey. It’s where your dad was born too. My mother and father were killed in a bombing raid in the war. This musical box was all that was left of our home. We were in the same orphanage together, Arthur and me. We loved listening to this, over and over. We’d listen to it for hours. Then they took your dad away. I gave him the key, and I told him I wouldn’t play our tune again until he brought the key back. Then I would wind it up for him and we would listen to it together—I was the eldest you see, I always did the winding up. I never heard it again until today. It’s yours now, Allie. And if you have children one day, then maybe you’ll pass it on to them, and you’ll tell them the story of how in the end the key found the musical box and the musical box found the key.”

  I was still unable to make sense of it all. “But how did they find you?” I asked. “I don’t understand.”

  “That was your astronaut friend here,” said my Aunty Kitty. “He went on television in the US when he came down from his space travels and told the whole world about you, this amazing eighteen-year-old girl from Australia called Allie Hobhouse, sailing single-handedly around the world on a little boat called Kitty Four, sailing all the way to England to find her father’s long lost sister to fulfil a promise she’d made to her father on his death bed. The father, he said, was called Arthur Hobhouse, his sister, Kitty Hobhouse. Anyone who can help, phone in. So I did. You see, when they sent your dad off to Australia all those years ago, a lifetime ago, they sent me to Canada. I got lucky. I landed up with a lovely family in Niagara-On-the-Lake. I live there still right by the shore in the same house I was brought up in. You must come and see it sometime.”

  I noticed then a copy of Dad’s story in front of her, right by her bowl of cornflakes.

  “Have you read it yet?” I asked.

  “I only just got it,” she said. “Trouble is, my eyes aren’t very good at reading any more. Maybe you could read it to me after breakfast.”

  So that’s what I did, an hour or so later. I read it to them, sitting there overlooking London Bridge and the Thames.

  * * *

  “‘The story of Arthur Hobhouse’,” I began. “‘Arthur Hobhouse is a happening. I should begin at the beginning, I know that. But the trouble is, I don’t know the beginning. I wish I did…’“

  Now you’ve read the book

  Now you’ve read the book, I want you to know something. The two stories we wrote were never intended to be published. We each of us wrote our story simply as a record of what had happened, first to my father, Arthur Hobhouse, and then to me. I thought long and hard about whether to publish. This is after all a family story. How much you tell the world about your family is a delicate matter for everyone concerned. But the family is happy about it, as I am, because our stories, Dad’s and mine, had already been acted out in public, to some extent at least. And certainly, had this not happened, our story could not possibly have ended as well as it did. In other words our private family story was never totally private in the first place. It was in the newspapers, on the radio, on television. But the whole of our story has never been fully told. And that’s why we all thought that it should be. Dad would have wanted it, I know, because he believed that we live on only as long as our story is told. I believe that too.

  Afterword

  It is estimated that between 1947 and 1967 somewhere between 7000 and 11,000 British children were sent to Australia alone.

  It was at one time thought convenient to pack up your troublesome people, whether they were convicts or simply unwanted or orphaned children, and ship them off to what were then the colonies – mostly Canada, New Zealand and Australia.

  The first white Australians were convicts settled there forcibly in 1788. It was a form of banishment.

  The banishment of children, which went on for centuries and reached its modern peak in the years after the Second World War, was in many ways just as cruel, but it was sometimes well meant. Children who had nothing could be provided with a new land, a new family, some prospects of living a happy life, away from the seething slums of Britain’s cities. And many of them did get lucky, landed up in the right place with genuinely kind people who looked after them and cared for them. However just as many did not. One former child migrant said, “Most of us have been left with broken hearts and broken lives.”* Cruelty, abuse and exploitation were tragically all too common.

  Another wrote this:

  “For the vast majority of former child migrants the most often asked question is ‘Who am I?’ Most of us were born in the British Isles of British parents. Our culture, heritage and traditions are British. Our nationality, our rights and our privileges were our inheritance. Unable to make a reasoned decision we were transported 20,000 kilometres to the other side of the world. Our crime for the most part was that we were the children of broken relationships. Our average age was eight years and nine months. In this one act, we were stripped of our parents and our brothers and sisters. We were stripped of our grandparents and extended families. We were stripped of nationality, culture and birthright. Many of us were stripped of our family name and even our birth date. We were stripped of our personhood, human rights and our dignity. We were referred to as migrant boy number ‘so and so’ or migrant girl number ‘so and so’. And so we arrived, strangers in a lost land, lost and with no way back.”*

  It was because of harrowing accounts like this that

  I wrote my story.

  Michael Morpurgo

  If you or your family are interested in locating a former child migrant, or you are a former migrant seeking your family, you can obtain a document describing the available resources (including a contact database and financial support) from the UK Department of Health.

  As a clickable file:

  www.dh.gov.uk/assetRoot/04/09/00/30/04090030.pdf

  As a text-only file:

  www.dh.gov.uk/assetRoot/04/09/00/31/04090031.pdf

  * Source: The House of Commons Health Select Committee’s report On the Welfare of Former British Child Migrants, 1998

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks to Alex Whitworth and Peter Crozier, mariners extraordinaire and quite ancient too, whose emails while circumnavigating the world in their yacht Berrimilla in 2004 informed and inspired this story. Thanks also to Graham Barrett and Isabella Whitworth for all their wonderful help and encouragement. And of course I mustn’t forget Samuel Taylor Coleridge…

  About the Author

  MICHAEL MORPURGO is one of Britain’s best-loved writers for children, and was recently awarded an OBE in the Queen’s 80th Birthday Honours List for his services to literature. He has written over 100 books and won many prizes, including the Smarties Prize, the Whitbread Award and the Writers’ Guild Award. In 2005 he won the Blue Peter Book Award for his novel Private Peaceful, which was also adapted into a stage play by the Bristol Old Vic and has been toured to great acclaim.

  From 2003 to 2005 Michael was the Children’s Laureate, a role which took him all over the UK to promote literacy and reading, and in 2005 he was named the Booksellers Association Author of the Year.

  Michael lives in Devon with his wife Clare. Both have been awarded MBEs for their work in founding the charity Farms for City Children.

  ‘Michael Morpurgo’s name on a book is a guarantee of quality.’ Daily Telegraphmichael morpurgo

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  Copyright

  First published in hardback in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books 2006

  First published in paperback in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books 2007

  HarperCollins Children’s Bo
oks is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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  The HarperCollins Children’s Books website address is

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  Copyright © Michael Morpurgo 2006

  Michael Morpurgo asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  EPub Edition © 2006 ISBN: 978-0-00-736998-0

  Some Photographs were unavailable for the electronic edition.

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