Flamingo Boy

by Michael Morpurgo

  Afterwards, we walked to the lakeside and we sat together silently on his upturned rowing boat, watching a flock of flamingos out on the lake. We saw them in their hundreds, stepping out through the pink shallows, making their take-off runs on the water, then lifting into the sky, higher, higher, accompanied by a chorus of celebratory honking. They came back a few minutes later to land close to us, their feet seeming to tread the water, tiptoeing over it with hardly a splash as they touched down.

  “Two hundred fifteen,” Lorenzo cried, clapping his hands. “Flam flam! Flam flam!” He held up his fingers to show me, two fingers, then one, and then five. I knew he was not guessing.

  On the way back to the farmhouse, he showed me into his hospital shed, as I had been hoping he would. He had three flamingo fledglings in there now. He fed them, and let me feed them too. As he crouched down and breathed on them, they nibbled his lips. One was weaker than the others and I could see he was worried about it. He sat beside this one, held it on his lap, breathing over it, rocking back and forth, humming a quiet tune.

  It was the evening of that same day, the day I had seen the two hundred and fifteen flamingos with Lorenzo, that Kezia and I found ourselves alone together again by the fireside. I had been longing to ask her about the whereabouts of the carousel, to find out about the gun emplacement she had told me the Germans had built on the ruins of Lorenzo’s Camelot, and that was certainly not there now. But how could I ask her without implying that I thought she had been making this whole story up? I couldn’t ask her; I couldn’t do it. I just had to wait for her to tell me as and when the moment was right for her. It wasn’t a long wait, but it seemed like it at the time.

  CHAPTER 22

  An Accident, A Casualty

  Lorenzo had gone out for one of his late evening walks into the marshes as usual, just as he had the night he found me, and Ami had gone with him.

  “I hope he doesn’t find another English boy out there,” Kezia laughed as she sat down by the fire. “We have nowhere else for him to sleep. I think we shall be alone for a while, Vincent, enough time maybe to finish the story. Alors, if I remember, I think I had just brought home the Caporal’s plank of wood, is that right? And Maman had discovered I was lying about finding it in the canal. It was very silly of me to lie to Maman, because she could always read me like a book. Anyway, she kept her word and didn’t tell Papa, which was a great relief to me. I hated Papa to be angry with me. He only had to look at me disapprovingly, and it was like a knife in my heart.

  “Papa and Henri were of one mind about the German soldiers now garrisoned in the castle. I think it was one of the reasons they became such close friends so quickly. They were of one mind about so many things. There should be as little association with the Germans as possible, they said. We should all keep away from the place and have nothing to do with them. But Lorenzo had a mind of his own, and, regardless of what they said, and regardless of the endless taunting and mocking of the German soldiers, he would take me back there every day, down the farm track, to watch all the comings and goings.

  Great concrete bunkers were growing like warts all around his Camelot. I knew that witnessing this hideous transformation broke his heart, but that all the same he had to see it for himself. His beloved Camelot was being turned into a grim grey fortress, with barbed wire and ditches all around. They had captured his castle, taken it over, created a monstrosity of it, and made it their own. He hated it, but he had to be there.

  We were there the day the big guns were brought in. They came in a convoy of transporters, two enormous guns covered in canvas, the size and shape of the barrels quite obvious – they were so long there was no disguising them. We rushed home and told Maman, the first person we could find. But Papa was there too and he overheard.

  “Haven’t I told you and told you, Kezia?” he said, lifting my chin to make me look at him, to make me know he meant it. “Stay away. Don’t go near there, you hear me?”

  But I had no choice. Wherever Lorenzo went these days, he insisted I had to go with him. He never wandered off on his own any more. But every time we went there he was becoming more and more agitated. Often I had to hold him back when he went to shout at the soldiers on the bridge, or even throw stones at them. Their taunting only made him worse, more angry and upset. He was strong when he was angry like this, and it was all I could do to restrain him. I knew I could not hold him for long. Sooner or later, he would break free of me.

  I needed to distract him. I tried talking to him softly, using his language, talking his way, of “rousel”, and “Val”, of “flam flam”. It did not always work, but any mention of “flam flam” was effective, especially if we were touching foreheads as I was saying it. The sound of that word calmed him like no other, so I would repeat it again and again, and the more he echoed it back to me, the calmer he became. Then I could walk him away, back up the track to the farm and out of harm’s way.

  Once away from his Camelot, he seemed to be able to put out of his mind what was going on down there, for a while at least. He would often lead me by the hand straight to his animal hospital where he would sit down beside his rescued flamingo fledglings and rock himself back and forth, his eyes closed, humming to them. Within a few minutes, he was completely calm again. I saw then, for the first time, that Lorenzo’s love for his flamingos, for all his creatures, was as beneficial to him, to his state of mind, and to his happiness, as he was to theirs. They cared for him as much as he cared for them. This really was mutual love, mutual healing.

  I must have been so preoccupied with looking after Lorenzo, watching flamingos with him from the upturned boat, with all the restoration work on the carousel going on in the barn, that I scarcely gave any thought to those big guns again. I knew they were there now, of course, but I could not see them. So I forgot about them, I suppose. The German soldiers never came near us, and had tired of mocking him now, and after a while Lorenzo wanted less and less to go down the farm track to revisit his Camelot. I think in the end he must have realised it only made him sad, and so he kept away. I was glad of that. I hated being anywhere near the place.

  All this time, progress on the rebuilding of the carousel was slow. We only left the farm at all these days if we were going on trips to the coast to scour the beaches for more timber. We found very little, but just enough to keep the work going, enough to keep our spirits up.

  Papa had finished carving Bull and Elephant by now and Maman was busy painting them. The turning gear, and the generator, were repaired and working again, and you could walk on half the floor, which Lorenzo and I did often, jumping up and down on it, singing “Sur le Pont d’Avignon”, and imagining the carousel going round again. Best of all for Lorenzo was that Papa had been busy repairing and carving some of the flying pink flamingos from the frieze of the carousel. Six had been completed already. But we needed more wood badly, and it was becoming ever harder to find.

  The morning the guns fired, Lorenzo and I were out riding Cheval with Henri, Lorenzo up in front wearing Henri’s wide-brimmed hat as he loved to do, and me behind, clinging on. We had checked the horses and the bulls way out on the marshes and were coming home through the sheep pasture. It was summer. The skies were full of swallows, flying high, and everywhere out on the pink lakes there were egrets and flamingos.

  When the guns went off, it was as if the world exploded around us. The ground shook far and wide, birds everywhere out over the marshes lifted as one great flock into the air. Cheval reared, tipped me off backwards and galloped away, leaving me lying there, shaken and bruised, my ears ringing and deafened. I saw Henri struggling to regain control of the horse, an arm round Lorenzo, trying to hold on to him at the same time. Somehow he managed it. The sheep had scattered in panic.

  Henri came riding back to me, Lorenzo bewildered and crying. Henri gave me a hand up and we rode back to the farmyard. There was no one about. In the end, we found the others huddled together in the caravan. We sat there with them, unable to speak, with the rin
ging still in our ears, all of us hoping the guns would not fire again.

  Lorenzo, though, had only one thing on his mind. “Flam flam, flam flam,” he kept saying, pulling at Nancy’s sleeve, and then taking my face in his hands, and turning me to look at him, to listen to him. “Flam flam, flam flam.”

  To calm him, I echoed his words again and again, as I knew he liked me to. But nothing I said, or Nancy said, seemed to make any difference. She sat him on her lap, blew raspberries on the back of his neck and stroked his hair, which he usually loved, but there was no consoling him. He would not settle. He kept trying to get off her lap, to go outside. In the end, Nancy let him go. She thought he might perhaps be anxious about the fledglings in his shed, so she opened the door of the caravan for him and off he went.

  “Go with him, Kezia,” she told me.

  I jumped down the steps and was about to run after him when I saw him standing there in the farmyard, quite still, rooted to the spot.

  A German soldier was walking slowly towards him, limping. It was the giant Caporal. He was carrying a flamingo in his arms that was struggling to get away. There was blood on the feathers, on the wings, on the neck too. He was holding on to it only with the greatest difficulty. Maman was beside me now, Papa too, his arm on my shoulder.

  Henri spoke up for us all. “We had an agreement,” he told the Caporal. “No soldiers on the farm, you remember?”

  “I remember, monsieur,” replied the Caporal. “I am here only because I had to come. This morning, we tested our guns for the first time.”

  “We heard,” Nancy told him.

  “I am sorry to say there has been an accident, a casualty. We do not know how it happened, but all the flamingos, they took off and somehow this one was injured. So I came here to see you, to see your son.”

  The flamingo was struggling wildly in his arms.

  “I hear it everywhere in the town, that Lorenzo has the gift of healing, and I know that he loves flamingos. So I thought I must come here and bring him this wounded bird. They call him Flamingo Boy. Is this right?”

  “Flam flam,” murmured Lorenzo, walking up to the Caporal, “Flam flam.” He reached out his hand, and with the tips of his fingers, stroked the flamingo on the neck, and then, leaning forward, breathed gently on her. The struggling stopped almost at once. He took the flamingo in his arms, gathering her close, then walked away towards his shed.

  “The wing is broken, I think,” said the Caporal. “I hope she will live, but she will not fly again, I am afraid.”

  Then I spoke up. “She will,” I told him. “Lorenzo will mend the wing. Lorenzo will make her better.”

  “I hope you are right,” said the Caporal. “And talking of mending things,” he went on, “may I ask how work on your carousel is progressing? May I see it?” He did not wait for a reply, but walked past us, over to the barn, opened the doors and went in. I wanted to go after him, but Papa’s hand was holding me back.

  We stood there in silence until he emerged a short time later.

  “You have done much good work,” the Caporal said. “But I think you will need a lot more wood if you are to make the carousel what it was.” He was looking straight at me now. “The floor of the carousel is coming on well. I see that you have found some good planks from somewhere.”

  “We found one in the canal,” I said, but I knew I had said it too quickly. I did not sound convincing even to myself. I could feel Maman’s eyes burning into me, but she said nothing.

  “I have noticed that there is much that floats in these canals,” the Caporal said. “Maybe you will find more if you go to look.”

  We could hear Lorenzo humming softly from inside his hospital shed, and moments later the sound of gentle honking.

  “I brought the flamingo to the right place, I think,” said the Caporal, smiling. “Guten Tag. I shall not bother you again.”

  He was about to turn and walk away when he thought again. “I just wanted to say something.” He was talking now directly to Papa and Maman. “Monsieur and Madame Charbonneau, if you will take my advice, you and your little girl will not leave the farm. Do not come into the town. It may be dangerous for you. The Milice, the police, they are guarding the roadblocks. They have been rounding up some of your people, Roma people, and taking them away. They have taken many Jews already. You may know this, but I thought I should tell you. So it is better not to be seen perhaps, not to be noticed. You are safer to stay here. Here you are hidden. You understand me?”

  “What did he mean?” I asked Maman when he had gone. “Taking Roma people away? What did he mean? Where to? Is it like Madame Salomon?” She did not answer me. No one did. They simply looked at one another.

  “It’s just talk, nothing to worry about, Kezia,” said Maman after a while. “We told you, he told you, the Caporal. Here we are safe, so you must not worry.”

  And she said the same again that night when I asked her the same question. She kissed me goodnight, and held me tighter than she had ever done before. I could hear the flamingo honking from time to time from Lorenzo’s hospital shed, and I could hear him humming in there. I longed to get out of bed and go to see him, but I knew I must not. But at least I could hear him, and his wounded flamingo. The humming and the honking lulled my fears, and in time lulled me to sleep.”

  CHAPTER 23

  Like a Miracle

  “For days on end, Lorenzo hardly came out of his hospital shed. I knew he would invite me in when he was ready, and not before. He was silent and withdrawn whenever he came out. I would ask him about the flamingo, whether she was well enough yet for me to come and see her, but he would not reply. He would not even look at me. Even at meal times, he wanted to stay in the shed with his flamingo, but Nancy put her foot down.

  “You have to eat, Lorenzo,” she told him. “You must. You must eat for the flamingo. You need to be strong to do your healing.” Nancy always had a way of saying the right thing to him. Even so, he was never happy about coming away and leaving his patient. He would walk up and down, nibbling unenthusiastically on his sausage. He had to finish every bit of it before Nancy would let him go back to his shed. It was as if the rest of us hardly existed. For days, he was like this. He lived only for the flamingo. His absence affected not just me, but all of us. It became like a cloud hanging over us that would not lift. Then one day it did, miraculously.

  With Lorenzo shut away in his shed, I had taken to riding out with Henri on the farm whenever I could. Henri was the only one of us who seemed still to be much as he always had been, never morose or gloomy as the rest of us had become. He would just get on with the next job to be done, because it had to be done. I loved being out with him around the black bulls, driving them to new pastures, or riding in amongst the white horses and their foals, making sure none were walking lame, that the foals were fit and growing on well.

  We were riding back one morning into the farmyard, Cheval trotting out as he always did when he was on his way back home, when we saw the most wonderful sight. Lorenzo was walking across the yard towards the caravan, the flamingo at his side. The flamingo was stepping out strongly, wounded no longer, healed. Maman and Papa were standing there, watching them, and Nancy had come running out of the house. Lorenzo walked the flamingo round and round, clapping his hands with delight. The flamingo stayed close to him all the time, honking happily, both her wings outstretched. One moment Lorenzo and the flamingo were walking side by side, together, honking in harmony, moving in unison, then the next moment there seemed to be two flamingos.

  “It is like a miracle,” Nancy breathed. “A miracle.” And so it seemed to all of us who were there to witness it. But that wasn’t the only miracle that was to happen that day.

  I was so happy to have Lorenzo back with me. He too made no secret either of his joy at our reunion, skipping along beside me, clapping his hands. We were never alone after that. The flamingo came with us, following us wherever we went. If she ever looked hesitant, or nervous, Lorenzo only had to honk gent
ly and she would come running. I could see now that one of her wings would not stretch out quite as far as the other, that she was struggling to beat the air strongly, evenly, with both wings. I wondered then if the Caporal had been right, that the wing had been too seriously damaged, that she might never fly again.

  I did not want to go back down the farm track towards Camelot, towards the concrete bunker and the guns and the soldiers. I did not want to be reminded of it. But one day Lorenzo insisted we went, dragging me along, and calling all the while to the flamingo to follow. We were coming ever closer to the bridge. We could see the hideous shape of the bunker, and hear the laughter of the soldiers. There was music playing, the soldiers singing. I saw them waiting by the wire, but they could not see us yet.

  “No, Renzo,” I said, taking both his hands and trying to persuade him to come away. “No, please, I want to go home. Come, Renzo, come.” Then I had a lucky moment. I spotted an egret moving through the reeds beside the canal. “Grette!” I whispered, pointing it out to him. He had seen it. When I took his hand, he did not resist.

  We followed the egret as it picked its way through the reeds along the shore of the canal, back towards home. We were almost there when Lorenzo stopped and crouched down to watch more closely. I did the same. The egret was busy feeding. The flamingo beside us was as still as we were.

  That was when we noticed the water in the canal seemed to have changed colour. It was no longer murky and grey, but brown, dark brown, the colour of wood. I realised then that it wasn’t just the colour of wood. It was wood! The canal was full of planks, all jammed against each other, so tightly in places that it was more like a wooden floor that stretched across the canal, from one bank to the other. I could hardly believe what I was seeing.

  “Twenty-nine,” Lorenzo said. I counted. He was right, of course. Twenty-nine planks of wood were floating in the canal, some half submerged, some half hidden in the reeds.