Our Jacko Read online

It surprised me how adamant my father was about it – but I was even more surprised when Otto piped up in my defence.

  “The photo and the notebook may be precious and unique and irreplaceable,” he said, “but they tell Our Jacko’s story. Everyone should know his story.”

  And he came up with a solution. We would photocopy the photo and all the pages of the notebook.

  The tin hat was already khaki again, hardly a fleck of red paint to be seen thanks to the paint-stripping job Otto had done. Now he took on the cleaning of the shell case. Within an hour or so, the tarnish of a century was rubbed and polished away. It shone now; it gleamed. The engraving turned out to be of flowers all around – poppies, they looked like – and above them was a name: YPRES. The place where Our Jacko had been killed, the place where I was going on my school trip to the battlefields.

  At the bottom of the shell case, the writing, now quite legible, told us more about when and where it was made: 1915. PATRONEFABRIK. KARLSRUHE. My father thought Karlsruhe must be the name of a German town. We googled it to be sure. He was right.

  “Same year, isn’t it?” said Otto. “The year Our Jacko was killed. This was a German shell, fired in Ypres.”

  No one said anything. My mother was turning the pages of the notebook.

  “He’s written this poem out more than once,” she said. “Hardly surprising. I mean, being out there, in that war, in those trenches, never knowing if this was your last day. From Cymbeline, I think.” Then she read it.

  Later that evening I was alone with my mother in the kitchen. There was a song playing on a CD, one of her favourites. It was one I was fed up with hearing – I knew it too well. She was singing along.

  “All around my hat I will wear the green willow, and all around my hat…”

  As she was jigging about to the rhythm, I happened to look out of the window at the window box where she grew her tulips, always white – she loved white tulips. Somehow the words of that song and the white of the tulips wove themselves into an idea that fast became a plan, and one I was very soon determined to carry out. But it wasn’t just the tulips and the song that made up my mind; it was the thought of Our Jacko dying so young, only twenty-three; Our Jacko, who had walked the banks of the river where I walked, acted in the theatre I had been to; who never came home, who had no known grave, who never walked the riverbank again with Ellie or Tom.

  There was one poem in particular that I read over and over again. It wasn’t about the countryside along the river, like so many of the others, but rather about the night before a battle. So he had written about the war, despite his resolve not to. I imagined him reading it to himself by candlelight in his dugout the night before he died. He had written in the margin, Henry V. I was a soldier in this play. And now I play a soldier.

  From camp to camp through the foul womb of night

  The hum of either army stilly sounds,

  That the fixed sentinels almost receive

  The secret whispers of each other’s watch.

  Fire answers fire, and through their paly flames

  Each battle sees the other’s umbered face.

  Steed threatens steed, in high and boastful neighs

  Piercing the night’s dull ear, and from the tents

  The armourers, accomplishing the knights,

  With busy hammers closing rivets up,

  Give dreadful note of preparation.

  The country cocks do crow, the clocks do toll

  And the third hour of drowsy morning name.

  I took the notebook up to bed with me that night and read it from cover to cover, following in my mind’s eye where he had walked, seeing his face in my head with every word. Every walk he wrote about, every poem he wrote down, made me more certain I was doing the right thing.

  I was up early before the others. After quite a search, I found the ribbon I was looking for in a drawer in the kitchen and I took the tulips I needed from the window box. By the time I got to school, the trestle tables for the exhibition were up in the library, covered in Union Jacks from end to end. Mr Macleod was busying himself making a comprehensive list of all the exhibits. There were medals – lots of those; buttons and badges; one or two sepia photographs; something that looked like a garden hoe but that he said was a trenching tool; and a large photo Mr Macleod had discovered himself, he told me, of children from our school photographed in front of the old block. Some of the boys were in sailor’s uniform and the girls were in smock dresses; all hollow-cheeked and unsmiling, all wearing great hobnail boots.

  “That was taken in 1914,” he told me. “Twenty-three of them went. Eight never came back. Him … him … him. And her, too … she was killed in a Zeppelin raid on London, where she had gone to live with her auntie. What’ve you brought in, then?”

  But before I could tell him, he was distracted by the headteacher.

  It didn’t take me long to put out our family exhibits. I found some water for the shell case and arranged the tulips. I tied the white ribbon around the tin hat, leaned the photo of Our Jacko up against the shell case and placed the notebook beside it. Then I wrote on the labels Mr Macleod had provided:

  Lt Jack Morris. Sherwood Foresters. Son, husband,

  father, actor at Stratford, soldier. Killed 1915, Ypres.

  Beside the tin hat I propped up the card on which I had written out the poem the evening before, in bed:

  All around his hat

  I will wear the white ribbon,

  All around his hat

  For a twelve month and a day.

  And if anyone should ask me

  The reason why I’m wearing it,

  It’s all for Our Jacko

  Who’s far, far away.

  We went to Ypres a few weeks later and saw the museum there – In Flanders Fields, it’s called. I’d never cried in a museum before. We stood in windswept war cemeteries, walked along the lines of gravestones, read the names, saw how young they were, how many there were. Thousand upon thousand. Mr Macleod took us to the place where the Christmas truce of 1914 had taken place, where both sides had met in the middle and exchanged gifts, played a game of football and sung carols. He showed us where the trenches must have once been, the wire, the shell holes. We were standing in no-man’s-land, he said.

  He read us a poem by Carol Ann Duffy about the Christmas truce, and we listened in silence because it was so powerful, and because every one of us knew from the break in his voice that Mr Macleod loved the poem.

  When he finished, he said, “They said this was to be the war to end all wars. I’m thinking that all the fellows lying here, on both sides, hoped and believed it was true. But it wasn’t. We don’t learn.”

  I think it was listening to that poem about the Christmas truce out there in that field that changed my mind, maybe; that and knowing – as I did now – all about my great-great grandfather, about Our Jacko. I decided there and then that I wanted to be in the play after all.

  On our last evening we went to hear the bugles played under the Menin Gate, where they play them every evening. We stood there with hundreds of others, the bugles echoing under the great arch, and as they played I looked upwards to where the sound was rising. And as I looked, I read the names, each one – like Our Jacko – a son, a husband maybe, a father maybe. I saw his name without even looking for it, as if he was showing me. JACK MORRIS, LT. He was there in among all the other thousands of those who had no known grave.

  As the last echoes of the bugles died away, I knew what I had to do, what I felt Our Jacko was telling me to do.

  I got home. I talked to Otto about it, asked what he thought – and I’m glad I did, because he came with me the next day, the tin hat in his rucksack, as we followed in Our Jacko’s footsteps all the way from Hampton Lucy to Stratford along the river, so far as we could. We stopped from time to time as he had done, maybe where he had, and read to one another from his notebook. And we ended our journey in a rowing boat, as we knew he and Ellie had done so often together, and then wal
ked through the gaggle of ducks and geese, up the steps into the theatre.

  Otto said I should do the talking because it had been my idea. The problem was finding the right person to talk to. I think we must have looked rather bewildered and lost, because in the end, as luck would have it, the right person found us. She was, she told us, the “front-of-house manager”. I had no idea what that meant but it sounded important, so I told her why we had come.

  “Well, you see,” I began, “our great-great-grandfather, Our Jacko – Jack Morris, really – was an actor here in 1914 and he was killed in the war, and our great-great-grandmother worked here too, in the theatre. She did the costumes, and that’s how they met. And we saw Henry V here once, like Our Jacko did, and the soldiers wore hats in it, tin hats like this one.”

  I took the tin hat out of the rucksack and showed it to her. “This is Our Jacko’s helmet from the First World War, and I thought – we thought, Otto and me – that it belonged here, so maybe one day it can be used in a play. Because Our Jacko loved acting, loved Shakespeare, loved the theatre.”

  I held it out to her and she took it, and for many moments she stood there, looking down at it and saying nothing.

  Then she said, “I wonder, could you wait a moment?”

  So we did. We waited for quite some time before she came back and asked us to follow her. She led us through the doors into the theatre itself. The stage was empty of scenery but it was lit up, and on the stage were dozens of actors, all looking at us as we walked towards them. A couple of them helped us up onto the stage.

  “Tell them what you told me,” said the front-of-house manager. “The whole story.”

  So, with a little encouragement from Otto, I did.

  I finished by reading the last poem in Our Jacko’s notebook, from Love’s Labour’s Lost. The last one he ever wrote down. There were a few scribbled words above it. I read those, too.

  “It is cold this morning, and bright, snow carpeting the mud. No guns. The world is almost beautiful again.

  When icicles hang by the wall,

  And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,

  And Tom bears logs into the hall,

  And milk comes frozen home in pail;

  When blood is nipped, and ways be foul,

  Then nightly sings the staring owl:

  Tu-whit, tu-woo! – a merry note,

  While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

  When all aloud the wind doth blow,

  And coughing drowns the parson’s saw,

  And birds sit brooding in the snow,

  And Marian’s nose looks red and raw;

  When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,

  Then nightly sings the staring owl:

  Tu-whit, tu-woo! – a merry note,

  While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.”

  When I had finished, one of the actors started to clap, then another, then all of them. And we knew they were clapping for Our Jacko and for Ellie, so Otto and I clapped too.

  We went home on the bus, silent in our thoughts, with two free tickets to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Otto looked over and smiled at me. I smiled back. We were happy.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.

  First published 2014 in The Great War: Stories Inspired by Objects from the First World War by Walker Books Ltd, 87 Vauxhall Walk, London SE11 5HJ

  This illustrated edition published 2018

  Text © 2014, 2018 Michael Morpurgo

  Illustrations © 2018 David Gentleman

  The right of Michael Morpurgo and David Gentleman to be identified as author and illustrator respectively of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, taping and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data:

  a catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-1-4063-8527-4 (ePub)

  www.walker.co.uk