Flamingo Boy

by Michael Morpurgo

  The long silence that followed was a stand-off. The Caporal and his soldiers were not going to move, and neither were we. I had the impression that Lorenzo had understood every word that had been spoken, for his hand gripped mine tighter and tighter, and I knew it was not in fear but in determination, defiance.

  In the end, it was Henri who broke the silence. He spoke very quietly and deliberately. “The Romans built this place a long time ago, Caporal, for the same reason as you, to make defences, to make a fort. Our ancestors were here when they came. Like you, they were occupiers. They came and they went. They were driven out, as you will be. We stay in the Camargue, just as the flamingos stay. We have always stayed. It is our place. Our time will come again, and you and your men will be gone. Meanwhile, we shall keep away, just so long as you and your men also stay away from the farm. You make your war here if you must, Caporal. We want only to be left in peace with our children on our farm. Let that be the agreement between us.”

  “It is agreed,” the Caporal replied.

  Papa was calling us down from the stone. The Caporal came and offered his hand to help us down. Lorenzo and I stood there, towering above him. Lorenzo was ignoring his proffered hand. Instead, he was pointing his stick at him, right at his throat.

  Speaking very quietly, he said, “Agon agon.” I knew what he meant, as did Papa and Henri, but the Caporal and all the soldiers simply looked bewildered.

  Then, still holding hands, we both jumped down, and walked away with Papa and Henri, leaving Camelot behind us. Lorenzo strode on ahead over the bridge and up the track, past the convoy of lorries, shoulders hunched, head bent, kicking out at the stones in his fury. He stopped suddenly, and let out a great cry of anger that became a wailing, then a roar of anguish that echoed over the marshes, sending the flamingos flying. Seeing them overhead calmed his rage, but brought on tears. I ran to him and we stood there on the farm track, forehead to forehead, hands on each other’s shoulders, the flamingos honking above us, as if they knew, as if they were singing to soothe his sadness, all our sadnesses.

  If we had not had the work on the carousel to do, to occupy our hearts and hands and minds, I think we might have been overwhelmed by this new invasion. Lorenzo felt it badly. There were times when he could not put it out of his mind. They had captured his castle, driven him out. Day after day, he grieved for his Camelot, finding consolation only in the privacy of his animal hospital, where he could be heard humming and singing to them.

  He did go missing from the animal hospital in the days that followed, but I always knew where I could find him. He would be down the farm track, standing by the barbed-wire perimeter the soldiers had put up. There was no way through now. The bridge, the whole castle, his beloved Camelot, had been wired off. There were sentries guarding the wire and the bridge, patrolling the walls.

  If ever we came too close, they would shout at us to go away, and some of them would laugh at Lorenzo, mocking him, how he talked, how he walked, calling him all sorts of names I did not understand, except one because they shouted it in French: “Garçon fou! Crazy boy! Hey there, you crazy boy!” I knew that Lorenzo understood, that it hurt him, but he stayed. He would not be driven away.

  I would stand with him and watch, as the lorries came and went, day in, day out, bringing in more and more building supplies, the soldiers fetching and carrying everything over the bridge into the castle. We were there, watching together, when the diggers arrived and began work inside and around the walls. Day after day, they were there, working almost constantly. Constant too was the sound of hammering and sawing.

  Sometimes we saw parties of workers come shuffling by under guard, bedraggled and thin, barefoot some of them. When I first saw them, I did not know who they were, nor where they were from. They were not local people. I recognised none of them. They scarcely looked at us as they passed by. It was as if we were not there, as if we and they lived in different worlds.

  Every day more concrete was being brought in and the scaffolding and the walls were going up ever higher. Before our eyes they were transforming the place into a huge concrete bunker. I hated to stand there, watching the desecration of Lorenzo’s Camelot, but once there I could not leave him on his own, not with the soldiers so close. It was never easy to persuade him to come home. The only way was to tempt him, to tell him that Cheval was missing him, or maybe that there were hundreds of flamingos waiting for him on the lake, turning their heads this way and that, looking for him. Any mention of the carousel might help to tempt him away too. Papa was busy carving the head of Bull, or the trunk of Elephant, I would tell him. Or I would remind him that Henri was mending the workings of the barrel organ, that he’d almost finished the repairs on the generator. I told him anything that I thought would take his mind off the occupation and ruination of his castle, anything that would cheer his spirit. Sooner or later, I would feel he was listening, that he was almost ready to come with me. Then I would take his hand gently, and he would turn away at last and leave.

  I was there doing just that one day, trying to talk him into coming home, when we saw the giant soldier, the Caporal, coming across the bridge, I had not seen him in a while. He was carrying a long plank of wood under his arm. He raised his hand in greeting as he came down the farm track towards us.

  “I have been told you have been looking for wood, for the carousel. Is this so?” Nervous of speaking to him, neither of us replied. “I hope you are rebuilding the carousel so it will be just as it was before. It was very beautiful. And I liked the music too, very much. Here.” He was holding out the plank of wood, offering it to us. “We do not need this for our building work. We have enough. It will not be missed.” He looked over his shoulder. “Quick, quick. I do not wish to be seen. You can carry it between you, I think. It might be useful.”

  I took it from him. Lorenzo stood there, stony-faced, and would not help. He did not seem to want to touch the plank. I took it because I knew we needed it, and because I felt that this was a kind and thoughtful thing the Caporal had done. My thank-you was muted, but he heard it.

  He smiled and said, “Bitte schön – you’re welcome.” Then he saluted us and walked away.

  When we got back to the farmhouse, they were all delighted with our “find”. I told them we had found the plank floating in the canal in amongst the rushes. Lorenzo was frowning as I told my tale. He was trying to work it out, to understand why I was not telling the truth, and becoming quite agitated. It may have taken a few moments, but I think he soon realised that if I had told them the plank was a gift from the giant Caporal, from the Germans, that Henri or Papa would have insisted on taking it back, or burning it.

  That evening, we were all there in the barn, looking on, as Papa sawed the Caporal’s plank to just the right length, cut and planed the ends so they fitted the restored circular iron frame perfectly, then laid it down alongside the other planks from the beach. Our carousel had nearly half a floor now.

  I was in bed that night when Maman came and sat beside me. Papa was still at work on the carousel in the barn, so we were alone in the caravan.

  “Kezia,” she whispered, as she bent over to kiss me goodnight, “the wood you say you found in the canal, it was not wet.”

  I cried then and told her the truth. “Don’t tell Papa, please,” I begged her.

  “I never lie to your papa,” she said. “But not telling is not lying, not quite. I shall say nothing. But never again, Kezia, you hear me? Never again. These people are enemies. Think what they did to Madame Salomon and her family. We must not forget this.”

  She stayed and talked for a while, and that was when I asked her about the strange work parties we had seen being marched into the castle day after day, why they were so badly clothed and thin, and why they spoke another language.

  “They are slaves, Kezia,” she told me. “Prisoners. Russians maybe, or Poles. They use them for slave labour. This, and Madame Salomon, is why I tell you it is wrong to take gifts from the Nazi occupiers. They m
ay not all be wicked, but they do wicked things, cruel things. So never again, Kezia, you hear me? No matter how kind they seem, how much they smile.”

  “So Lorenzo is right,” I said. “They are dragons – agons, he calls them.”

  “Lorenzo is right about most things,” Maman told me, giving me another kiss. “You should remember that, Kezia.””

  CHAPTER 21

  Patience is a Virtue

  Infuriatingly, frustratingly, it was at this moment in the story that Ami decided to rise up from the fireside, shake himself, scratch his ear, and then make his way across the room to the front door, where he stood, hanging his head, nose touching the door, looking miserable and needy, at which he was an expert. I had seen this performance often enough by now to know what he was asking for, and that the story was going to have to wait.

  Kezia got up, and pulled on her coat. “That dog is a tyrant to me,” she sighed. “He will not take no for an answer. He does not like the dark on his own. He is frightened of the foxes out there, and the badgers, and the wild boar, I think. I will have to go with him.”

  She stopped and turned to me as she reached the door. “I was thinking again as I was telling you the story that it is so strange you being here, coming here as you have – out of the blue, I think you say. He came out of the blue also, and he was English too. He is the only other person I have ever told the story to. But he was always more interested in the flamingos. Like Lorenzo, il adorait les flamands roses. Flamingos were his passion.”

  “Who was he? Who do you mean?” I asked her.

  She smiled. “He is an important part of the story,” she said, “a very important part. But he comes at the end, so you will have to wait. I do not want to put the end before its time comes, the cart before the horse – I love your English expressions. I will tell you about him later. Now, as you can see, Ami needs to go outside – to do his business, I think you say. You see? Another of your delightful English expressions.” Chuckling, she was gone then with Ami out into the night.

  After a while, I got up to have another look at all the photographs on the walls. There were more flamingos than people, but it was the people who really interested me. I knew who many of the faces were by now. Lorenzo loved to show them to me again and again, often touching them tenderly, stroking them with his fingertips, then reminding me of their names too: Henri, Nancy, Renzo, Kezia. There was one in particular, of himself, he always liked to show me – and I could never look at it without smiling. He must have been my age when the photograph was taken – about eighteen or so, I guessed. He was walking somewhere out on the marshes, being followed in stately procession by a dozen flamingos. It wasn’t comical so much as balletic, beautiful, touching. It said everything about Lorenzo, about his love for flamingos, and their love for him.

  From these photographs, I knew what so many of the people in Kezia’s story had looked like. Nancy was usually smiling, and often holding hands with the two children, with Lorenzo and Kezia, Lorenzo towering above Kezia even as a child. There was only one photo of Henri, riding up on Cheval in his broad-rimmed hat, a long pole in his hand. He was staring sternly back at the camera, a herd of white horses in the background. I had never thought of him with a moustache, and it was a magnificent one too, until I saw him in that photo.

  There was one of the caravan, with little Kezia and her maman and papa standing proudly outside, and Honey, their bad-tempered piebald horse, grazing behind them. And beyond the caravan I could make out a walled town – Aigues-Mortes, I presumed – where so much of Kezia’s story had happened.

  There was only one rather faded photograph of the carousel, with Lorenzo as a boy, sitting on Horse, Kezia beside him, holding his elbow, steadying him, both having the happiest of times. And there was Papa, turning his cranking handle, and Maman beside her barrel organ. It may have been a still, silent photo in black and white, but it was not difficult to imagine the colour, the sound, the music, the sheer fun and joy of it. And I could see the great plane tree in full leaf towering over it, in the town square.

  There were a few photos too of white horses and black bulls and sheep out on the marshes, and then there were all those thirty or forty photos of flamingos. In some, the flamingos were in flight; in others, wading in their hundreds through the shallows, or taking off, or landing, or they were dancing, sitting on eggs, sleeping. Maybe my favourite one was of a flamingo at rest, her head nestling in among her feathers. All these flamingo photographs were in colour, as well as the one of Lorenzo as a younger man, nose to beak with a flamingo. They were not just domestic snapshots as the black-and-white photos were. Each one was more like a photographic study of flamingo life on the marshes, flamingos of all ages, in all seasons, and each one perfectly developed.

  By the time Kezia came back in with Ami a while later, I was back on my couch, ready for her to finish her story. She read my thoughts. “It is horrible out there,” she said. “Your English rain has followed you here.” She was shaking herself, and enjoying it hugely. “The story can wait, Vincent. I have to be in the right mood to finish it. It is not such an easy story to tell, especially towards the end.”

  My heart sank. Ami lay down near the fire, head on his paws, eyeing me. He was not my favourite dog at the moment.

  “It is good to see you looking so much better, Vincent,” Kezia said, as she made her way to the stairs to go up to bed.

  “When will you tell me the rest?” I asked her.

  “Bientôt. Soon,” she replied. “Soon I will tell you, I promise. But now is not the time. It is right you should know the whole story. I want you to know just how it was, how it happened. Lorenzo would want the same. He is very fond of you, Vincent. He trusts you. Trust for him is the most important thing, and loyalty. Loyalty, as you know, is simply repeated trust. And repetition, for him, is reassurance, and reassurance is everything. He would like me to trust you with our story, all of our story, but it is for another time. Sleep well.” She put her head on one side and studied me. “It is extraordinary, vraiment extraordinaire. You are so like him, like Alan, the other Englishman. You are much younger, of course, but you have the same deep-set eyes.”

  “Alan who?” I asked her.

  “Patience is a virtue, Vincent. Or didn’t your mother tell you that? Goodnight. Bonne nuit.” And that was all she would say.

  She left me with my head so full of questions that I hardly slept that night. As it turned out, in the days that followed, as I recovered – and I was regaining my strength quickly now – some questions were beginning to answer themselves anyway, in part at least.

  The very next day was fine and bright, and Lorenzo wanted yet again to take me out. This time Kezia said that she thought I was well enough, but I had to take it easy and come back soon. So, at long last, I got to know for myself where I had been all this time.

  I had seen so much of it, of course, in my mind, as Kezia told her story, and from the photos too: the farmhouse, the barn, the black bulls, the white horses, the marshes, the pink lakes, the flamingos. I had stood there, looking out of the windows, so I had some idea of what to expect. But now I was outside in the fresh air, in the wind, and seeing it all properly for the first time. Lorenzo was taking me by the hand, and leading me on a guided tour, talking all the while, Ami sometimes following us, sometimes not. Ami did what he pleased.

  Most of Lorenzo’s talk was about “flam flam”, so I knew the tour was likely to be mainly a flamingo tour, and so it proved. And, wherever he led me, the story Kezia had been telling me took on a landscape, a new life, new meaning, and sometimes also a new perplexity.

  When Lorenzo showed me into the barn, for instance, there was no sign of a carousel anywhere. Where had it gone? And when he took me, as I hoped he would, down the farm track along the canal, and walked me over the bridge to see the castle, his Camelot, it was not at all as I had imagined. Yes, there were the bare, ruined walls of an old castle, and a grassy courtyard with a great stone in the middle. But what of the concret
e bunker and the gun emplacement that Kezia had told me the giant Caporal and his German soldiers had built there? There was no sign of any of it.

  I so wanted to ask Lorenzo about it all, but I knew that I mustn’t, that Kezia would not have wanted me to, that it might be too intrusive, too upsetting for him. She had always been so careful never to tell me the story in his hearing. And anyway I would have probably been unable to understand most of what he might try to tell me. So I said nothing, asked nothing. Kezia would soon explain everything, I thought, I hoped.

  That walk down the farm track to Camelot, with Lorenzo holding my hand all the way, delighting in showing me his kingdom, was the first of many walks. Every time I went out with him, my step felt stronger, my breathing came more easily. I was tiring less quickly, going further and further afield every day. Once he took me back to the very place he had found me, on the long, straight road across the marshes. He explained all this by dramatising it, lying down and being me. Then he was picking me up and carrying me a few steps, Ami cavorting around us, as if he remembered too. Maybe he did.