Flamingo Boy

by Michael Morpurgo

  I had been coming out to the farm for my lessons with Nancy for a while by now, and with every visit I was made to feel more and more at home, as if I was one of the family. Lorenzo was already treating me like a sister. There was trust and friendship between us. So when in the middle of lunch one day he grasped me by the hand, made me get up from the table and follow him outside, I went along willingly. I could feel it was important to him that I did. He held my hand all the way across the yard, and led me towards a long shed behind the barn. Outside the door he turned to me and put his finger to his lips.

  Coming out of the sunlight into the darkness, I found it difficult to see at first. I could make out pens in the corner, a couple of sheep in one, a black cow and calf in another, and there was a white horse, an old Camargue horse, lying down on his own in another corner. As we approached, the horse got up, shook himself, snorted, then bowed his neck to be stroked. And, all the while, Lorenzo was talking to him, not in words, or even bits of words, but as a horse talks – “horse murmuring” you might call it. He did much the same then with the cow that was lying down in the corner, the calf beside her. He crouched down, and put his forehead on hers. When he murmured now, it was the murmur of a contented cow. He climbed over into the sheep pen and lay down amongst them, humming to them. He wanted me to join him. So I did. They gathered around us, nuzzling us, bleating softly, talking to us.

  I looked up some time later to see both Nancy and Henri standing there, watching us.

  “Lorenzo cures animals. He has a gift,” Nancy told me. “These animals are not always ours. These sheep are, but that horse isn’t. Sometimes neighbouring farmers bring their animals to us, because they know Lorenzo can cure them. Don’t ask me how. He just can. He talks to them – and not just farm animals either, wild animals too – frogs, birds, beetles, terrapins, flamingos. He puts his hands on them, breathes on them, and they get better. Not always, of course, but often.”

  Lorenzo was climbing now into another pen in the darkest corner of the shed. Something stirred as he went down on his knees in the straw and crawled towards it. Then it rose up on trembling legs, stood there unsteadily and cheeped – a fledgling flamingo.

  Coming out of the shed that day, Lorenzo spread his wings and ran around the farmyard in the sunshine, honking happily. Then he came to me, lifted my arms, held them out wide, and beat them up and down. He was making wings of my arms. I knew at once what he wanted me to do. I became a flamingo too, wings wide outstretched as his were, honking as he was, flying as he was. No play-making this, no make-believe. I was a flamingo. I ran like a flamingo. I lifted off and flew away after Lorenzo.

  “Fly, flamingo, fly!” Nancy cried. “Bravo, Renzo! Bravo, Zia!””

  CHAPTER 10

  We Live For That

  “Nancy told me one day as I was leaving that I could come to the farm not just one day a week, but whenever I felt like it.

  “More lessons would be good for you anyway – especially writing lessons. You certainly need them! And, which is more important, Lorenzo loves to be with you,” she said. “You make him happy. Henri and me, we love to see him happy. We live for that.”

  So that’s what I did. I went out to the farm whenever I could. Maman didn’t mind because she thought it would be good for my schooling, and it was too. I loved it, because Nancy read to me after my lessons, especially if my writing had been good – King Arthur stories mostly, because, she said, Lorenzo always liked them best, so she thought I might too. And, soon enough, I found I was confident enough to try to read one of the Arthur stories aloud to her. I stumbled over some of the difficult words, but I did it. She was as proud of me as I was of myself.

  But most of the time, though, I was outside with Lorenzo, either in his hospital shed, helping to look after the animals, or riding out with him and Henri across the farm. And Lorenzo would take me to sit with him on the upturned rowing boat by the pink lake. He loved that place. We would sit side by side and talk, or not talk. Mostly we would not talk, but watch the flamingos out on the island where they gathered and nested. And sometimes Henri would row us out there in the boat. Lorenzo was always counting them – it was to be sure they were all there, Henri said.

  Lorenzo loved to count; he still does. In the blink of an eye, he would know how many flamingos were out on the island, if any were missing. He would check them, rescue any fledgling that seemed lost or weak or abandoned, and bring it to the shed to look after it, then, once it was strong again, he would take it back to the island.

  I did notice, on my now frequent visits to the farm, that Henri and Nancy were always anxious to know where Lorenzo was. They told me to keep him in sight if possible, which was not at all easy because he did like to wander off sometimes on his own. Nancy told me once that one of the reasons they liked it so much when I came out to the farm was that they knew that if he did wander off any time he would as like as not be with me, so they need not worry so much. It wasn’t that he would get lost, Nancy said. He knew the farm as well as they did. But he did have moods sometimes, when something had upset him, and then he could become confused and agitated, so it was always better for someone to be with him, and keep him in sight at least.

  They were worried too that he could not swim. The trouble was, they told me, that he did not seem to know it. If he saw a fledgling flamingo in the water that needed rescuing, he would just jump into the lake and do it – however deep the water was. Mostly the lakes were shallow, but in places they were deep enough to drown in, and so were the canals. So long as I was there to keep an eye on him – and Maman had told them how well I could swim – then they were happy.

  Time and again, Lorenzo would try to find a way of postponing my leaving at the end of the day, if he could. One evening, as I was about to go home, he grabbed my hand and insisted on coming with me. “Lot, Zia,” he was saying. “Lot Lot Lot.”

  Nancy laughed at this. “Well, you are honoured, Kezia,” she said. “Lot is Lorenzo’s place, his special place. I am not allowed there without him, nor is his papa either.”

  Lorenzo held my hand tight – I could not have broken away even if I had wanted to. And I most certainly did not want to. His excitement was infectious. I wanted to know where this “Lot Lot” place was, and what it was; and when I found out I was amazed.

  We were walking hand in hand down the farm track – the way I cycled home – when, without any warning, he suddenly dragged me off the track. We were walking through head-high reeds and rushes, then climbing a rutty hill, and on to a rickety wooden bridge. There below us now was a ditch, with a stream running through, and beyond the bridge I could see a ruin – it looked like the remains of an old castle or fort maybe, its stone walls rising from the reeds.

  “Lot Lot!” Lorenzo cried, rushing me over the bridge and in under a great stone archway.

  I found myself standing in a grassy courtyard, surrounded by the ruins of old castle walls, a huge stone rising in the middle. He let my hand go then, and, clapping his hands, he began telling me all about the castle – that was what I supposed he was talking about. He was waving his hands about, swishing and slashing and stabbing with a stick he had picked up, strutting about like some king, and tapping the side of his head.

  “Art Art! Lot Lot!” He was shouting at me, face close to mine, hands on my shoulders, willing me to understand. I didn’t.

  There was more play-acting to come. He clambered up on to the stone, and I could see he was pretending to pull something out of it, tugging, straining, heaving. Then it came to me: Excalibur! The sword in the stone! Nancy had read me the story. I had read it to her myself only the day before. Lorenzo was pulling the sword out of the stone! He was King Arthur – Art Art – and I was standing in his castle, his Camelot – Lot Lot. At last I understood, and I could see he was so pleased I did.

  He was calm now, but still breathless with excitement, as he stood there, smiling down at me. “Guin,” he said, bowing low to me. “Guin Guin.”

  Guinevere. I
had been made queen of his Camelot. Now I knew what Nancy had meant. He had brought me to his special place, and made me his queen. I felt so honoured, so truly honoured.

  Nancy told me often how Lorenzo looked forward more than anything else now to his trips to town on market days. He loved his ride on Horse on the carousel, and the music of our barrel organ as well, especially “Sur le Pont d’Avignon”, which he would sing and hum again and again, in a monotone as always. Lorenzo did not hum tunefully, but he had perfect rhythm. Above all, he loved to see me, Nancy told me. Whenever he arrived in the town square, he would always spread his wings and fly towards me.

  Most people in town loved to see Flamingo Boy, as people called him, and they were mostly kind to him. But after school, or on school holidays, when there were children about, there were those who were mean, the same ones who had been mean to me when I went to school – Bernadette was the worst. I noticed them, heard their nasty jibes, but Lorenzo never did, or, if he did, he ignored them. He only noticed if they picked on me. And one afternoon they did.

  I had taken Lorenzo down to our caravan where he often liked to come after he had been on the carousel. We were sitting, side by side, on the bank of the canal, fishing, with Honey grazing nearby, when a group of boys came along, Joseph amongst them, on their way home from school. They spotted us there and began to taunt us.

  “Gyppo girl, gyppo! Gyppo girl and Flamingo Boy! Loony boy! Loony boy! Gyppo! Gyppo!”

  They were coming closer. We both tried to ignore them and went on fishing. But then they began throwing stones at us, at Honey too. One of the stones hit me on my ear. I could feel the blood trickling. Lorenzo reached out, and touched my neck. He looked down at the blood on his fingers, and then at me, his eyes full of bewilderment and hurt.

  He did not hesitate. He was up on his feet, and walking towards the boys, just like one of the black bulls on the farm about to charge, his shoulders hunched, his head lowered. Then he did charge, bellowing like a bull. The boys stopped in their tracks, silenced and suddenly terrified. They took to their heels and ran for it. Lorenzo came back, sat down and went on fishing as if nothing had happened. But I had seen another side to Lorenzo I had not known was there, a side I never saw again until some two years later when German soldiers marched into the town, and our whole world changed.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Occupation

  “The afternoon the German soldiers came was market day, the town square bustling with people, the carousel turning, the music playing. The stallholders were busy selling, Nancy and Henri amongst them, and Lorenzo was riding Horse as usual, loving every moment of it.

  It will seem strange to you now perhaps, Vincent, that we were not expecting it. After all, our country had been attacked and invaded three years before. Even we children knew that. We had heard endless talk of the Occupation and the war – I remember seeing people crying in the streets when we heard about it – but I suppose it was of little interest to me at the time, because I could not see it. So I could not really understand it. It seemed to be something that had happened to other people and a long way away. My life had been little changed by it, if at all.

  This was because, up to now, the Germans had occupied mostly the north of France. Here, down in the south, in the Camargue, we were in what was then called the Vichy Zone, the unoccupied part of France. Only the north of the country had seen German soldiers in the streets – the black-and-red swastika flags flying. So far as we were concerned in the Camargue, everything had gone on much the same as before. There was less food to go around, and many men had been taken away as prisoners of war, or rounded up to be sent to work in Germany. But we had seen no German uniforms in the streets, no tanks, no planes, no bombing, no shooting. There were rumours that a railway line and some trucks had been blown up not far away, I remember, but there was little talk of resistance.

  So far as I could understand it, the war was over for us. We had lost, and everyone was upset. I understood that. And no one likes losing. But our French tricolour flag still flew on the mairie – the town hall you call it in English, I think – in the town square, the gendarmes walked the streets as usual. We celebrated the fourteenth of July, as we always had, sang the “Marseillaise”, the town band playing, and there were fireworks in the evening over the town.

  We were living in the Free Zone, we thought, the unoccupied zone. France was still France here, and French; the Camargue was still the Camargue, and French; Aigues-Mortes was still Aigues-Mortes and French. The mosquitoes and the heat were here in the summer; the mistral wind roared and rattled the rest of the time. And I suppose, looking back now, our carousel was just part of the same normality, the same reality, the reality we all knew and accepted. The carousel went on turning day after day, and the seasons came and went. Life went on much as before.

  So the shock of seeing a German scout car come driving into the town square that afternoon, officers in grey uniforms and peaked caps in the back, and German soldiers coming in behind them – trucks full of them, with their shining black helmets, and their rifles – silenced the town instantly. The carousel stopped turning. The music stopped playing. The town looked on in disbelief. No one moved. No one spoke. The leaves on the plane trees in the square rustled in the wind, but that was the only sound you could hear. Even the pigeons on the church roof seemed to have stopped their cooing.

  Outside the mairie, the soldiers jumped down from their trucks and lined up. An officer got out of the scout car, and stood there for long moments, straightening his jacket, surveying the silent square imperiously, before turning to climb the steps to the mairie, accompanied by several soldiers. The mayor, Monsieur Dubarry, came out to meet him and escorted him into the building. It felt to me as if the whole town was holding its breath. The soldiers stood now in ranks in the square, facing the sullen hostility of the townspeople.

  I was so intent on the drama unfolding in front of me that I did not realise that Lorenzo was no longer up on Horse, no longer on the carousel, until I saw him barging his way through the crowd towards the soldiers. He walked straight up to the first soldier he came to and began to push at him, pushing him so hard that the soldier was sent staggering back, dropping his rifle.

  There was a murmur of astonishment first and then some muted vocal support amongst the crowd. And I knew why that was too. Lorenzo, Flamingo Boy, was doing what everyone else there wanted to do, would have done, if any of us had had the courage. He was walking along the line now, pushing soldier after soldier, each one harder. People were laughing openly, and there was even some nervous giggling and clapping.

  The soldier in charge seemed at first unsure of what to do, but now he went after Lorenzo, grabbed him by the arm and held him. Lorenzo pulled away, then turned and did just the same to him, pushing him, then pounding him with his fists. One of the soldiers raised his rifle then. He was pointing it straight at Lorenzo.

  No one was clapping now. No one was laughing. Until that moment, I had stood there, watching, too stunned to move or to think. But now I was running across the square through the crowd.

  “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” I was yelling. “He does not mean it. I’ll look after him. Don’t shoot!”

  I had reached Lorenzo by now. I put my hand on his shoulder, and spoke to him as softly and as calmly as I could, which I knew by now was the only way to be with him when he was upset.

  “Renzo,” I said, “come away now. We’ll go fishing, shall we? Fish, fish.”

  I felt his whole body relax under my hands. He was still breathing hard, though, still as agitated as I had ever seen him.

  The soldier in charge was barking an order and the rifle was lowered. Then he turned his attention to us. As he came closer, I saw he was much taller than the other soldiers, his face weather-beaten, his skin wrinkled like the bark of a tree. He walked with a limp, using a stick. The closer he came the taller he seemed to be. He was towering over us.

  Frightened though I was, I remember thinking his helm
et looked ridiculous on him, comical almost, far too big for such a thin man. It sat on his head like a huge upturned saucepan. Thin he may have been, but he was a giant of a man and the anger in his eyes was not comical at all. There was a long silence.

  “He did not mean it,” I told him.

  “Yes, he did,” the soldier replied. He spoke to me severely, but not as angrily as I thought he would. “This boy, you must tell him that it is not allowed to attack German soldiers. He could be shot. You have to make him understand.”

  “I will,” I said. “I will.”

  “You are this boy’s sister, are you not?” He spoke French easily and quite well.

  I was about to explain that Lorenzo was not my brother, that he was better than a brother, that he was my friend. I was still searching for the words to answer him when he answered his own question, assuming he was right.

  “If you are his sister, then you should look after him. He must not do this, you understand? If there is a next time, it will be very serious …”

  Then Nancy was at our side. With scarcely a glance at the soldier, she led us both away from him, back through the crowd towards the carousel. Maman was running towards us, Papa close behind, both frantic with anxiety.

  We were standing there in the town square, arms still around one another, when we all became aware that the people in the crowd were looking not at us any more, but up at the balcony of the mairie. The French tricolour that always hung there had gone. Instead, two German soldiers were unfurling another flag, a huge red Nazi banner, a black swastika in the centre.