Muck and Magic Page 2

  She knew the way – up the track through the woods, past more running men and another wild boar, then forking off past a pond where a huge bronze water buffalo stood in the water, drinking without ever moving his lips. White fish glided in a ghostly fashion through the dark of the water under the shadow of his nose. The path led upwards from there and took us past a hen house where some speckled black and white hens scuttled about, and a solitary goose stretched his neck, flapped his wings and honked at us. Merry stopped for a moment, lifted her nose and wrinkled it at the goose who began preening himself busily. After a while I found myself coming back to the stable-yard gate, Merry leading me in. I tied her up in the yard and set about mucking out the stables.

  So it went on, every Saturday morning for a month or more. The lady was never there, so I had the place to myself. She always left me a note of instructions in my wellies. Then, one Saturday I was emptying the wheelbarrow onto the muckheap when I felt someone behind me. I turned round. Without her coat she looked a lot thinner than I had imagined, and more frail. She was dressed in jeans and a rough sweater, and her face and hands seemed to be covered in white powder, as if someone had thrown flour at her.

  “Where there’s muck there’s money, that’s what they say,” she laughed. “Not true, I’m afraid, Bonny. Where there’s muck, there’s magic. Now that is true.” I wasn’t sure what she meant by that. “Horse muck,” she went on, by way of explanation. “Best magic in the world for vegetables. I’ve got leeks in my garden longer than, longer than …” She looked around her. “… twice as long as your bicycle pump over there. All the soil asks is that we feed it with that stuff, and it’ll do whatever we want it to. It’s like anything, Bonny, you have to put more in than you take out. You want some tea when you’ve finished?”

  “Yes please.”

  “Come up along into the house when you’re done then. You can have your money. Haven’t paid you yet at all, have I? And you’ve done a lot of Saturdays.” She laughed at that. “Maybe there is money in muck after all.”

  As I watched her walk away, Percy came bustling across the lawn towards her and sprang up into her arms. She lifted him on to her shoulder where he balanced easily and rode her 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 Merry back in. I gave her a goodbye pat on the neck, another carrot and left her to her hay. “Bye, Peg,” I said. When I talked to her I still thought of her as Peg.

  I found the lady in the kitchen, cutting bread. Percy yapped at me from his basket, until she told him to be quiet.

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

  “Honey, please,” I replied. She carried the mugs of tea and I carried the plate of sandwiches. I followed her out across a cobbled courtyard, accompanied by Percy, down some steps and into a great glass building where there stood a life-sized sculpture of a great white horse. “You recognize her?” she asked me. “You couldn’t mistake her.”

  “It’s Peg, isn’t it?” I said in amazement. “She was always Peg to me before I knew she was Merry,” I explained.

  “Peg, Merry, she won’t mind,” she laughed. I don’t think I told you my name, did I, Bonny? That was rude of me. I’m Liz Maloney. You can call me Lizzie, I prefer it.”

  The floor was covered in newspaper, and everywhere was crunchy underfoot with plaster. The shelves all around were full of heads, arms, legs and hands. A white sculpture of a dog stood guard over the plate of sandwiches and never even sniffed them. Lizzie sipped her tea between her hands and looked up at the giant horse. The horse looked just like Merry, only a lot bigger.

  “It’s no good,” she said, standing back and walking around the horse, scrutinizing her from all sides. “She needs a good rider.” She turned to me suddenly. “You wouldn’t be the rider for me, would you, Bonny? You could be just who I need. Could you ride Merry for me?”

  “I can’t ride.”

  “You can ride a bike, can’t you? It’s not that different. And anyway, you wouldn’t have to, not really. You’d just sit there on Merry and I’d sketch you, sculpt you.”

  “What, now?” I asked.

  “Next week. Next Saturday. That be all right?” she said.

  So it was that the next Saturday I found myself sitting astride Merry-Peg in the stable yard – we decided between us to call her both names from now on. She was pulling contentedly at her hay net and paying no attention to us whatsoever. It felt strange up there – so much higher off the ground than on a bike, with Merry-Peg shifting, warm underneath me. There was no saddle. Lizzie told me to hold the reins one-handed, loosely, to “sit easy”, and “feel part of the horse”. The worst of it was that I was hot, stifling hot, because I was in desert dress. I had great swathes of cloth over and around my head and draped down to my feet with a long heavy robe so that nothing could be seen of my jeans or sweater or wellies.

  “When you come next week, you can give me a hand making you – if you see what I’m saying! I’m not as strong as I was, and I’m in a hurry to get on with this and to make the rider, make you. You can mix the plaster for me. Would you like that?” Merry-Peg snorted and pawed the ground. “I’ll take that as a yes, shall I?” she laughed, and walked around behind the horse, turning over 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 legs had pins and needles, and my bottom felt stiff as a board.

  “Can I see the sketch?” I asked her.

  “I’ll show you next week,” she said. “You will come, won’t you?”

  She knew I would, and I did. Because it was half-term, I came every day after that to muck out the stables and to walk Merry-Peg as usual, but what I looked forward to most – even more than being with Merry-Peg – was mixing up Lizzie’s plaster for her in the bucket, climbing the stepladder with it, holding it for her and watching her lay the strips of cloth dunked in the wet plaster over the frame of the rider – who she always referred to as Bonny. I liked that. She was building me up slowly, strip by strip, from the skeleton of the wire frame, into what looked at first like an Egyptian mummy.

  After only a few days’ work, I had become a rider looking out over the desert, at one with my horse, my robes shrouding me with mystery. It was me inside that skeleton, me inside that mummy-looking creature. Lizzie worked ceaselessly, and with such a fierce determination that I didn’t like to interrupt. We were joined in a common but comfortable silence.

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

  “Well,” said Lizzie, her hands on her hips. “What do you think, Bonny?”

  “I wish,” I whispered, reaching up and touching the neck of the horse, “I just wish I could do it, make such a thing, make a sculpture.”

  “But you did, Bonny,” 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 when she spoke. “Without you, that horse would never have had a rider. If you weren’t here, I don’t think I would ever have even thought of giving her a rider. And she needed one. Without you mixing my plaster, holding the bucket, I couldn’t have done it.” Her fingers gripped my shoulder tighter. “Do you want to make a sculpture of your own, Bonny?”

  “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 the world in deep, and all its creatures too, become a part of it. You draw what you see, what you feel, what you know, what you care about. After that, you make what you’ve drawn. Use clay if you like, or do what I do and build 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?”

  As spring blossomed into summer, I was away on my bike as often as possible. I couldn’t avoid Mum riding out with me sometimes, or Dad being there occasionally with his stopwatch for time-trials. He said he thought I’d reached a plateau of performance, that it happens and I wasn’t to worry about it, but that my times weren’t improving as much as he hoped, which surprised him, he said, with all the training I had been doing. I was leading a kind of double life, and I was loving every moment of it.

  I could even ride now. After a while, I dared to ride Merry-Peg bareback on the way back to her stable, and I never forgot what Lizzie had told me. I looked about me. I listened. I breathed the world in deep. And the more I listened and 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 from up high on the vegetable garden wall; as much as the green dragonfly hovering over the pool by the water buffalo. I sketched Merry-Peg. I sketched Big Ben. I couldn’t sketch Tiny Tim, because he wouldn’t ever stand still, and he just came out round. I bent my first wire frame into shape and I began to build a small horse sculpture, layer on layer of strips of cloth dunked in plaster. I moulded them into shape around the frame, and when they dried I chipped away and sanded. But I was never happy with what I’d done.

  All this time, Lizzie was working away beside me in the studio, harder, faster, more intensely than ever. I helped her whenever she asked me to, mixing and holding the bucket for her, just as I had done before.

  The silences between us were always comfortable. We were in a world of our own. I didn’t ask questions about her new sculpture, though I was aching to. I’d learned to wait for her to tell me. “It’s going to be a figure of a walking wom
an,” she said. “They want me to make a sculpture for the church. They told me I can do what I like. So I am. I like doing what I like. ‘Striding Woman’, I am calling her.” 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 around 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 suddenly come to life.

  “When you do it, it’s like magic,” I told her. She thought for a moment, and said, “No, Bonny. Not magic. It’s a given thing, a gift from who knows where, who knows who, but once you discover you have it, whatever the gift is, it’s not to be wasted. You have to learn to believe in it, work on it. Don’t waste it, Bonny. Don’t ever waste it. Life’s too short to 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, I noticed, Lizzie seemed to be tiring more easily, and she would sit longer over her tea, gazing out at her sculpture and lapsing into long silences.

  “I am so pleased with our horse and rider,” she told me, “so pleased we did it together.”

  The Striding Woman figure was finished by now, and went off to the foundry a few weeks before I was going on my summer holiday. “By the time you come back,” said Lizzie, “it should be all done and back from the foundry. It’s going to stand outside the church door in the village, so that everyone can take her by the hand if they like – that’s why she’s holding it out. We all need a helping hand from time to time, don’t we, Bonny?”

  Our holiday that summer was in Cornwall as usual. We stayed where we always did, in St Ives, and I drew every day. I drew boats and gulls, lobster pots and fishermen. I made sculptures with wet sand – sleeping giants, turtles, whales – and I swam a lot too. Mum and Dad seemed surprised and puzzled at my new passion for drawing, but were delighted, I could tell, when my sand sculptures attracted enthusiastic crowds each day. The sun shone for fourteen days. I never had such a perfect holiday. But I missed the horses, and Lizzie, and was looking forward to showing her my sketches.

  The first day home, I cycled out to see her with a few of my best drawings in a stiff envelope in my rucksack. As I came up the farm track, the place looked strangely still. The stable yard was deserted. There were no horses in the fields. Merry-Peg wasn’t in her stable, no wellies by the door. I knocked on the door, rang the bell, called for her. Everything was quiet around the house, no Lizzie, no yapping Percy. I cycled to the nearest village and tried to find someone to ask. It was like a ghost village. Then I heard the church bell ringing. I leant my bike up against the churchyard wall and went up the path. Just as she had said it would be, Lizzie’s Striding Woman stood there glowing in the sun beside the church porch. Inside they were singing hymns.

  I crept in, lifting the latch carefully so that I wouldn’t be noticed. The hymn was just finishing. Everyone was sitting down and coughing. I found a place to sit right at the back behind the font. The church was packed. A choir in red robes and white surplices sat on either side of the altar. The vicar was up in the pulpit now, taking off her glasses. I looked everywhere for Lizzie’s wild white curls, but couldn’t find her. A few of the ladies were wearing hats, so I presumed she was too and stopped looking for her. She’d be there somewhere.

  The vicar was speaking: “Last Saturday, a week ago now, Lizzie came here to unveil her beautiful Striding Woman sculpture. We were all here celebrating her gift to the church, to the parish, to all of us who live here. Sadly, so sadly, she died at home that same evening. Some will think of this powerful statue as a Madonna, some as a figure of womankind, but to me she will always be Lizzie. I think many of you will think the same.”

  It was at that moment that I caught sight of the coffin resting on trestles between the choir stalls, a single wreath of white flowers laid on it. Only then did I begin to take in the awful truth.

  I didn’t cry when they carried the coffin out of the church, coming right by me. I suppose I was still trying to believe it. I stood and listened to the last prayers over the grave, numb inside, grieving as I had never grieved before or since, but still not crying. I waited until almost everyone had gone and went over to the grave. I didn’t want to look down at the coffin. A man was taking off his jacket and hanging it on the branch of the tree. He spat on his hands, rubbed them and picked up his spade. He saw me standing there.

  “You family?” he said.

  “Sort of,” I replied. I reached inside my rucksack and pulled out my best boat drawing from St Ives. “Can you put it with her?” I asked. “It’s a drawing. It’s for Lizzie.”

  “’Course,” he said, and he took the drawing from me and looked down at it. “Nice, she’d like that. Fine lady, she was. The things she made. She saw everything beautiful, made everything beautiful. Magic, pure magic.”

  It was just before Christmas that same year that a cardboard tube arrived in the post, addressed to me. I opened it in the secrecy of my room. A rolled letter fell out, typed and very short.

  I unrolled it and spread it out. It was of me sitting on Merry-Peg, swathed in desert clothes. Underneath was written:

  So here I am, well over thirty now, twenty years on. And as I look out at the settling snow from my studio window, I see Lizzie’s Horse and Rider under the oak tree in my back garden; and all around my own sculptures are gathered. There are several hares, a prowling panther, a standing bear; and some sculptures of people too, one of Mum and Dad sitting together – they did get used to not having the next Laura Trott for a daughter in time – and one of the great Laura herself, standing proudly, beside her bike. You try sculpting a racing bike. Not easy. I sent the drawing of it to her. She wrote a kind letter back, saying she wished she could draw like that. Horses for courses, I thought. Horses for courses.

  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.

  This edition published 2019 by Walker Books Ltd

  87 Vauxhall Walk, London SE11 5HJ

  Text © 1995, 2019 Michael Morpurgo • Illustrations © 2019 Olivia Lomenech Gill

  The right of Michael Morpurgo and Olivia Lomenech Gill 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 978-1-4063-8997-5 (ePub)

  www.walker.co.uk

 

 

  Michael Morpurgo, Muck and Magic

 

 

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