Of Lions and Unicorns

by Michael Morpurgo

  “To this day, no one really knows what happened. But we do know that early in the evening, after the wedding was over, there was a rock-slide, a huge avalanche which swept down the mountainside into the fjord, and set up a great tidal wave. People from miles around heard it and saw it. No one saw the boat go down, but that’s what must have happened.

  “For a few years the two old sisters and I kept the village going. When they died, within days of one another, I buried them in the churchyard. Then I was alone. To start with, very often, I thought of leaving, but someone had to tend the graves, had to ring the church bell, so I stayed. I fished, I kept a few sheep in those days. I had my horse. I learnt how to be alone.

  “I discovered there is one thing you have to do when you are alone, and that is to keep busy. So every day I work on the houses, opening windows in the summers to air rooms, lighting fires in the winters to warm them through, painting windows and doors, fixing where I can, just keeping them ready for the day they return. There’s always something. I know it’s looking more and more untidy as the years go by, but I do my best. I have to. They’re all living here still, all my family and friends. I can feel them all about me. They’re waiting, and I’m waiting, for the others to come and join them.”

  “I don’t understand,” I told him.

  “No, young man,” he said, laughing a little. “I’m not off my head, not quite. I know the dead cannot come back. But I do know their spirits live on, and I do know that one day, if I do not leave, if I keep ringing the bell, if I keep the houses dry, then people will find this place, will come and live here. In the villages nearby, they are still frightened of the place. They think it is cursed somehow. But they are wrong about that. It was the boat that was cursed, I tell them, not the village. Anyway, they do not come. Most of them are so frightened, they won’t even come to visit me. They say it is a dying village and will soon be a dead village. But it is not, and it will not be, not so long as I stay. One day people will come and then the village will be alive once more. I know this for sure.”

  Ragnar Erikson offered me a bed in his house that night, but I said I was fine in the boat. I am ashamed to admit it, but after hearing his story I just didn’t want to stay there any longer. It was too easy to believe that the place – paradise that it looked – might be cursed. He did not try to persuade me. I am sure he knew instinctively what I was feeling. I told him that I had to be up early in the morning, thinking I might not see him again. But he said he would be sure to see me off. And he was as good as his word. He was down on the quay at first light. We shook hands warmly, friends for less than a day, but I felt, because he had told me his story, that in a way we were friends for life. He told me to come back one day and see him again if ever I was passing. Although I said I would, I knew how unlikely it would be. But, through all the things that have happened to me since, I never forgot the saga of Ragnar Erikson. It was a story that I liked to tell often to my family, to my friends.

  1 August 2010. Midnight

  Today I came back to Arnefjord. It has been over forty years and I’ve often dreamed about it, wondering what happened to Ragnar Erikson and his dying village. This time I have brought my family, my grandchildren too, because however often I tell them the story, they never quite seem to believe it.

  I had my binoculars out at the mouth of the little fjord and saw the village at once. It was just as it had been. Even the boat was there at the quay, with no one on it, so far as I could see. There was no smoke rising from the chimneys; when we tied up, no one came to see us. I walked up towards the village shop, the grandchildren running off into the village, happy to be ashore, skipping about like goats, finding their land legs again.

  Then, as I walked up towards the church, I saw a mother coming towards me with a pushchair.

  “Do you live here?” I asked her.

  “Yes,” she said, and pointed out her house, “over there.”

  My granddaughter came running up to me.

  “I knew it, Grandpa,” she cried, “I always knew it was just a story. Of course there are people living here. I’ve seen lots and lots of them.”

  And she was right. There was a toy tractor outside the back door of a newly painted house, and I could hear the sound of shrieking children coming from further away down by the seashore.

  “What story does she mean?” the mother asked me.

  So I told her how I’d come here over forty years before and had met Ragnar Erikson, and how he was the only one living here then.

  “Old Ragnar,” she said, smiling. “He’s up in the churchyard now.”

  She must have seen the look on my face. “No, no,” she said, “I don’t mean that. He’s not dead. He’s doing the flowers. We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him. Ragnar saved this village, Ragnar and the road.”

  “The road?” I asked.

  “Fifteen years ago they built a road to the village, and suddenly it was a place people could come to and live in. But there would have been no village if Ragnar hadn’t stayed, we all know that. There are sixteen of us living here – six families. He’s old now and does not hear so well, but he is strong enough to walk up the hill to ring the bell. It was the bell that brought us back, he says. And he still likes to go on ringing it every day. Habit, he says.”

  I went up the hill with my granddaughter, who ran on ahead of me up the steps and into the church. When she came out there was an old man with her, and he was holding her hand.

  “She has told me who you are,” he said. “But I would have recognised you anyway. I knew you would come back, you know. You must have heard me ringing. If I remember rightly, you liked ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ on the Wurlitzer. And you liked a beer. Do you remember?”

  “I remember,” I said. “I remember everything.”

  illiam Tregerthen had the look of a child who carried all the pain of the world on his hunched shoulders. But he had not always been like this. He is remembered by his mother as the happy, chortling child of his infancy, content to bask in his mother’s warmth and secure in the knowledge that the world was made just for him. But with the ability to walk came the slow understanding that he walked differently from others and that this was to set him apart from everyone he loved. He found he could not run with his brothers through the high hay fields, chasing after rabbits; that he could not clamber with them down the rocks to the sea, but had to wait at the top of the cliffs and watch them hop-scotching over the boulders and leaping in and out of the rock pools below.

  He was the youngest of four brothers born on to a farm that hung precariously along the rugged cliffs below the Eagle’s Nest. The few small square fields that made up the farm were spread, like a green patchwork between the granite farmhouse and the grey-grim sea, merging into gorse and bracken as they neared the cliff top. For a whole child it was a paradise of adventure and mystery, for the land was riddled with deserted tin miners’ cottages and empty, ivy-clad chapels that had once been filled with boisterous hymns and sonorous prayer. There were deserted wheel houses that loomed out of the mist, and dark, dank caves that must surely have been used by wreckers and smugglers. Perhaps they still were.

  But William was not a whole child; his left foot was turned inwards and twisted. He shuffled along behind his older brothers in a desperate attempt to stay with them and to be part of their world. His brothers were not hard-souled children, but were merely wrapped in their own fantasies. They were pirates and smugglers and revenue men, and the shadowing presence of William was beginning already to encroach on their freedom of movement. As he grew older he was left further and further behind and they began to ignore him, and then to treat him as if he were not there. Finally, when William was just about school age, they rejected him outright for the first time. “Go home to Mother,” they said. “She’ll look after you.”

  William did not cry, for by now it came as no shock to him. He had already been accustomed to the snide remarks, the accusing fingers in the village and the assiduously averte
d eyes. Even his own father, with whom he had romped and gambolled as an infant, was becoming estranged and would leave him behind more and more when he went out on the farm. There were fewer rides on the tractor these days, fewer invitations to ride up in front of him on his great shining horse. William knew that he had become a nuisance. What he could not know was that an inevitable guilt had soured his father who found he could no longer even look on his son’s stumbling gait without a shudder of shame. He was not a cruel man by nature, but he did not want to have to be reminded continually of his own inadequacy as a father and as a man.

  Only his mother stood by him and William loved her for it. With her he could forget his hideous foot that would never straighten and that caused him to lurch whenever he moved. They talked of the countries over the sea’s end, beyond where the sky fell like a curtain on the horizon. From her he learnt about the wild birds and the flowers. Together they would lie hidden in the bracken watching the foxes at play and counting the seals as they bobbed up and down at sea. It was rare enough for his mother to leave her kitchen, but whenever she could she would take William out through the fields and clamber up on to a granite rock that rose from the soil below like an iceberg. From here they could look up to Zennor Quoit above them and across the fields towards the sea. Here she would tell him all the stories of Zennor. Sitting beside her, his knees drawn up under his chin, he would bury himself in the mysteries of this wild place. He heard of mermaids, of witches, of legends as old as the rock itself and just as enduring. The bond between mother and son grew strong during these years; she would be there by his side wherever he went. She became the sole prop of William’s life, his last link with happiness; and for his mother her last little son kept her soul singing in the midst of an endless drudgery.

  For William Tregerthen, school was a nightmare of misery. Within his first week he was dubbed “Limping Billy”. His brothers, who might have afforded some protection, avoided him and left him to the mercy of the mob. William did not hate his tormentors any more than he hated wasps in September; he just wished they would go away. But they did not. “Limping Billy” was a source of infinite amusement that few could resist. Even the children William felt might have been friends to him were seduced into collaboration. Whenever they were tired of football or of tag or skipping, there was always “Limping Billy” sitting by himself on the playground wall under the fuchsia hedge. William could see them coming and screw up his courage, turning on his thin smile of resignation that he hoped might soften their hearts. He continued to smile through the taunting and the teasing, through the limping competitions that they forced him to judge. He would nod appreciatively at their attempts to mimic the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and conceal his dread and his humiliation when they invited him to do better. He trained himself to laugh with them back at himself; it was his way of riding the punches.

  His teachers were worse, cloaking their revulsion under a veneer of pity. To begin with they overburdened him with a false sweetness and paid him far too much loving attention; and then because he found the words difficult to spell and his handwriting was uneven and awkward, they began to assume, as many do, that one unnatural limb somehow infects the whole and turns a cripple into an idiot. Very soon he was dismissed by his teachers as unteachable and ignored thereafter.

  It did not help either that William was singularly unchildlike in his appearance. He had none of the cherubic innocence of a child; there was no charm about him, no redeeming feature. He was small for his age; but his face carried already the mark of years. His eyes were dark and deep-set, his features pinched and sallow. He walked with a stoop, dragging his foot behind him like a leaden weight. The world had taken him and shrivelled him up already. He looked permanently gaunt and hungry as he sat staring out of the classroom window at the heaving sea beyond the fields. A recluse was being born.

  On his way back from school that last summer, William tried to avoid the road as much as possible. Meetings always became confrontations, and there was never anyone who wanted to walk home with him. He himself wanted less and less to be with people. Once into the fields and out of sight of the road he would break into a staggering, ugly run, swinging out his twisted foot, straining to throw it forward as far as it would go. He would time himself across the field that ran down from the road to the hay barn, and then throw himself at last face down and exhausted into the sweet warmth of new hay. He had done this for a few days already and, according to his counting, his time was improving with each run. But as he lay there now panting in the hay he heard someone clapping high up in the haystack behind him. He sat up quickly and looked around. It was a face he knew, as familiar to him as the rocks in the fields around the farm, an old face full of deeply etched crevasses and raised veins, unshaven and red with drink. Everyone around the village knew Sam, or “Sam the Soak” as he was called, but no one knew much about him. He lived alone in a cottage in the churchtown up behind the Tinners’ Arms, cycling every day into St Ives where he kept a small fishing boat and a few lobster pots. He was a fair-weather fisherman, with a ramshackle boat that only went to sea when the weather was set fair. Whenever there were no fish and no lobsters to be found, or when the weather was blowing up, he would stay on shore and drink. It was rumoured there had been some great tragedy in his life before he came to live at Zennor, but he never spoke of it so no one knew for certain.

  “A fine run, Billy,” said Sam; his drooping eyes smiled gently. There was no sarcasm in his voice but rather a kind sincerity that William warmed to instantly.

  “Better’n yesterday anyway,” William said.

  “You should swim, dear lad.” Sam sat up and shook the hay out of his hair. He clambered down the haystack towards William, talking as he came. “If I had a foot like that, dear lad, I’d swim. You’d be fine in the water, swim like the seals I shouldn’t wonder.” He smiled awkwardly and ruffled William’s hair. “Got a lot to do. Hope you didn’t mind my sleeping awhile in your hay. Your father makes good hay, I’ve always said that. Well, I can’t stand here chatting with you, got a lot to do. And, by the by, dear lad, I shouldn’t like you to think I was drunk.” He looked hard down at William and tweaked his ear. “You’re too young to know but there’s worse things can happen to a man than a twisted foot, Billy, dear lad. I drink enough, but it’s just enough and no more. Now you do as I say, go swimming. Once in the water you’ll be the equal of anyone.”

  “But I can’t swim,” said William. “My brothers can but I never learnt to. It’s difficult for me to get down on the rocks.”

  “Dear lad,” said Sam, brushing off his coat. “If you can run with a foot like that, then you can most certainly swim. Mark my words, dear lad; I may look like an old soak – I know what they call me – but drink in moderation inspires great wisdom. Do as I say, get down to the sea and swim.”

  William went down to the sea in secret that afternoon because he knew his mother would worry. Worse than that, she might try to stop him from going if she thought it was dangerous. She was busy in the kitchen so he said simply that he would make his own way across the fields to their rock and watch the kestrel they had seen the day before floating on the warm air high above the bracken. He had been to the seashore before of course, but always accompanied by his mother who had helped him down the cliff path to the beach below.

  Swimming in the sea was forbidden. It was a family edict, and one observed by all the farming families around, whose respect and fear of the sea had been inculcated into them for generations. “The sea is for fish,” his father had warned them often enough. “Swim in the rock pools all you want, but don’t go swimming in the sea.”

  With his brothers and his father making hay in the high field by the chapel William knew there was little enough chance of his being discovered. He did indeed pause for a rest on the rock to look skywards for the kestrel, and this somehow eased his conscience. Certainly there was a great deal he had not told his mother, but he had never deliberately deceived her before this. He felt
however such a strong compulsion to follow Sam’s advice that he soon left the rock behind him and made for the cliff path. He was now further from home than he had ever been on his own before.

  The cliff path was tortuous, difficult enough for anyone to negotiate with two good feet, but William managed well enough using a stick as a crutch to help him over the streams that tumbled down fern-green gorges to the sea below. At times he had to go down on all fours to be sure he would not slip. As he clambered up along the path to the first headland, he turned and looked back along the coast towards Zennor Head, breathing in the wind from the sea. A sudden wild feeling of exuberance and elation came over him so that he felt somehow liberated and at one with the world. He cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted to a tanker that was cruising motionless far out to sea:

  “I’m Limping Billy Tregerthen,” he bellowed, “and I’m going to swim. I’m going to swim in the sea. I can see you but you can’t see me. Look out, fish, here I come. Look out, seals, here I come. I’m Limping Billy Tregerthen and I’m going to swim.”

  So William came at last to Trevail Cliffs where the rocks step out into the sea, but even at low tide never so far as to join the island. The island where the seals come lies some way off the shore, a black bastion against the sea, warning it that it must not come any further. Cormorants and shags perched on the island like sinister sentries and below them William saw the seals basking in the sun on the rocks. The path down to the beach was treacherous and William knew it. For the first time he had to manage on his own, so he sat down and bumped his way down the track to the beach.

  He went first to the place his brothers had learnt to swim, a great green bowl of sea water left behind in the rocks by the tide. As he clambered laboriously over the limpet-covered rocks towards the pool, he remembered how he had sat alone high on the cliff top above and watched his brothers and his father diving and splashing in the pool below, and how his heart had filled with envy and longing. “You sit there, with your mother,” his father had said. “It’s too dangerous for you out there on those rocks. Too dangerous.”