From Hereabout Hill

by Michael Morpurgo

  He came in. She heard the tap running into the basin. He was drinking. Then he spoke, ‘Forgive me,’ he whispered. ‘Dear God, forgive me. I begged the captain. I begged him, but he wouldn’t listen. Rats, he said, they breed like rats. You burn rats out. You destroy them. But they’re not rats, they’re flesh and blood. Oh God, oh God.’ He was sobbing and then he was kicking the wall. That was the moment Sofia shifted her weight on to her bad ankle and slipped. The sobbing stopped at once. Sofia shrank back as the footsteps came towards her. She could hear his breathing through the door.

  ‘Whoever you are,’ his voice was urgent but gentle, ‘whoever’s in there, just listen to me. Whatever happens, stay where you are. Believe me, where they’re going, you don’t want to go. Stay put. Don’t move. I’ll do what I can.’ And then he was gone.

  It was some time after he’d left before Sofia screwed up enough courage to look out of her window again. When she did, she saw the last of the men from the village climbing up into the lorry. There were two lorry loads of them. A fierce anger welled up inside her. They were going like lambs, all of them. What of the rousing, triumphal songs they had sung so often in the café? What of Mr Kovacs’ defiant exhortations that everyone must defend the homeland? How could they leave the women and the children without even a word of protest? How could they? The men were just sitting there with bowed heads, Mr Kovacs weeping openly. She hated him then even more than the cowboy soldier. She hated them all.

  ‘Good,’ said the cowboy soldier smiling. ‘Good boys. Now, women and children to the other lorries, and don’t worry yourselves, you’ll all meet up again soon enough. Hurry now.’ He waved his pistol, and the women and children drifted slowly, reluctantly, across to the other side of the square. The soldiers stood by and looked on as they struggled to clamber in. Only one of them stepped forward to pick up the smaller children and hand them up. Sofia wondered if it was her soldier. She hoped it was. He had long hair to his shoulders and a moustache like Father’s. He seemed very young to be a soldier.

  It took three of them to lift Mrs Marxova out of her wheelchair and up into the lorry. They were not gentle with her. One of them kicked away her chair so that it rolled down the road, hitting a curb and turning over in the gutter. They laughed at that. Mother helped Nan up into the lorry beside her and they sat down together, Nan’s head resting on her shoulder. The lorries started up. Mother was calling for her now, crying.

  Sofia made up her mind in that instant. She had to be with them. Why should she trust the soldier? She didn’t even know him. She had hardly seen him. She unlocked the door and ran past the basins, forgetting her ankle. She slipped and fell by the doorway. By the time she was up on her feet again, she could hear the lorries already moving off. It was too late. Maybe, she thought, maybe the soldier was right after all. Maybe she was safer here, undiscovered. She hobbled back into the toilet and shut the door. She climbed up just in time to see the last lorry leaving the square and her mother’s scarved head still turning, still looking. She was still crying.

  The cowboy soldier leapt down off his tank. ‘You know what to do. I don’t want a building left standing. Understand? Nothing. You’ll find all the petrol you need in the garage. Use hay, faggots, anything that’ll burn. If it won’t burn, then blow it up.’ The soldiers cheered at that. Whooping and yelling, they scattered in all directions, some diving directly into the houses on the square and others running off down the village streets. Soon the square was left to the cowboy soldier who sat down on a bench and lit up another cigarette. He blew smoke rings into the air and poked his finger through them. Martha’s dog was snuffling around her body, his tail between his legs.

  Sofia could not look any more. She sat down. The blood had congealed on her leg. She took off her sock. Her ankle was puffed up and grey.

  A window shattered somewhere in the village, then another, then another. Some way away, a gun began to chatter and did not stop.

  ‘Are you still in there?’ It was the soldier’s voice from below her window.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied at once, without thinking.

  ‘For God’s sake, don’t try to run. You’ll be seen. They’ll kill you if they see you. They mustn’t leave any witnesses.’

  ‘My mother, my nan. They were in the lorry. Where have you taken them? Where have they gone?’

  ‘You don’t want to know,’ said the soldier. ‘Just worry about yourself. And don’t look out of the window. They’ll see you. I could see the shape of your head from across the square. Keep down. I can’t stay.’ Sofia heard him walk away. She wanted to ask him so much more but could not risk calling out. She sat down on the toilet and tried to gather her thoughts, but nothing would come but tears. Racked with sobbing, Sofia put her head between her knees and hugged herself into a tight ball and closed her eyes. So she sat for hour after hour as they burnt the village around her. Trying not to listen, not to smell.

  The first explosion was from far away, but all the same, it rocked the building, blasted her ears and left a ringing inside her head that would not stop. The next was closer, in the square itself, maybe the post office she thought, and the next shortly afterwards was even closer still. Perhaps the café. She bit her lip till it bled, determined not to scream, not to give herself away. When plaster crashed down from the ceiling on to her shoulders, she could stand it no longer. She lifted her head and screamed and screamed. Through her own screaming, through the whistle in her ears, she heard the whoosh and crackle of the flames outside, the roar of the roofs collapsing, and always the soldiers whooping.

  Then she saw smoke drifting in under her door, thick smoke that would stifle the life out of her. She had to get away. She climbed up on to the seat and put her nose to the window to breathe in the last of the cleaner air. That was when the tanks began to fire from under the trees, pounding, pounding, pounding. She fell backwards on to the floor, back down into the smoke. She rolled into a corner, covering her face, her mouth, her ears, clenching herself into herself as tight as she would fit. Then she prayed. The picture she had seen on television of the child without any legs flashed into her head. ‘Please God, I want my legs. I need my legs. Let me die if you want, but I want my legs. I want my legs.’

  The smoke was thinning. Suddenly she could breathe without coughing, then there were voices outside.

  ‘The toilets. Don’t forget the toilets.’ It was the cowboy soldier. ‘A grenade will do it.’

  ‘Hardly worth the trouble, Captain,’ said another. Her soldier, her soldier’s voice. ‘It’s not as if there’s anyone left to piss in it, is there? And anyway, why don’t we leave it there as a monument. All that’s left of them, their toilet.’

  The cowboy soldier laughed. ‘Good. Very good. I like it. Some bonfire, eh?’ They were walking away now. The cowboy soldier went on, ‘D’you see the mosque come down? Obstinate beggar, he was. Took twenty rounds to topple him. This heat gives a man a thirst, eh? Let’s get at the beer.’

  ‘Why not,’ said Sofia’s soldier.

  There were no more shootings after that, no more explosions, but Sofia stayed where she was, curled up on the floor of the toilet. She could hear the soldiers carousing in the square and the sound of smashing beer bottles. One crashed against the window above her head, shattering the glass. Shortly after, their laughter was drowned out by the noise of the tank engines starting up. They were calling each other. They were going. She waited a few minutes more until she was quite sure the tanks were on the move, their engines revving. Then she climbed up and looked out. The two tanks were rumbling away out of sight, belching black smoke out behind them. They were gone.

  Everywhere she looked was utter destruction. The village was a flaming, smoking ruin. Like all the other buildings, the café had no roof. Flames licked out of the windows, leaping across the road into the trees. The parked cars were blackened shells now, the tyres still burning furiously. The front of the shop had entirely caved in. Sofia got down, opened the door and hobbled out into the square
. The minaret had fallen right across School Lane, obliterating the houses beneath. Martha still lay outside her café, but now her dog was beside her. He was not moving. Sofia sat down on the bench in the middle of the square where she was farthest from the heat of the fires. She had no tears left to cry.

  She was still sitting there late that evening when the reporters came in their Land Rover. She was rocking back and forth and there was a cow beside her, grazing the grass. She was humming ‘Raining in My Heart’. She looked up at them as they approached.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘That’s Myrtle. She’s come to find me. She wants milking.’

  ‘Is this your village?’ asked a reporter, pushing a microphone at her. Sofia looked at him blankly. ‘What does it feel like to see it like this?’ he went on. ‘And what do you think of the people who’ve done it? Where the hell is everyone, anyway?’

  ‘I’ve got my legs,’ said Sofia, and she smiled. ‘I’ve got my legs. God is great.’

  The Owl and the Pussycat

  I’m a lucky fellow. I live in the wilds of North Devon, in the same valley where Williamson set his wonderful Tarka the Otter. I have walked to work for over twenty years across fields, down country lanes. One morning, on the way to milking, I discovered a tawny owlet, grounded, helpless.

  It was a summer morning in mist with sleep still in my head. As I walked the long way down the lane to the dairy I saw something strangely alive against the rigid cold stones of the wall, but I was too detached to bother about it. It was only as I was milking Herma, the cow with the kick, that my mind finally emerged from the shades of the night’s rest. She stood eating her cake while I washed her and dried her off, and I slipped the cluster on easily. Like a statue she stood, her feet planted in the concrete, while the milk gushed down warm and white into the jar below. She milked out her regular four gallons and I bent to remove the cluster. It was her karate kick that woke me. As I touched the cluster, her leg flashed forward and sent it sprawling on the ground underneath her. I reached out to retrieve it. She shuffled like a heavyweight boxer and kicked out viciously, catching me across my wrist. Only then, as I cursed her, did I come to realise that the soft grey patch against the stone wall of the lane had been an owl. I would have a look later, I thought.

  But as I finished the milking and drove the cows back out on to their silver-cobwebbed field, I remembered the great ginger tomcat that lived in and around the calf pens, not twenty yards from the spot where I had seen the owl. The yard could wait. I would wash down later. Still in the slippery rubber armour of the dairy I ran back up the lane, my waders squeaking against each other. I reached the place, or what I thought might have been the place, but there was no owl. I looked higher up the lane, shielding my eyes against the shafts of sunlight that filtered through the elms above. The great ginger tom looked down on me from the sun at the top of the garden wall, his tail whipping from side to side menacingly.

  It was the cat that convinced me I had not been dreaming, and I looked now for the mangled, contorted mess of a murdered tawny owlet. I searched for fifty yards in both directions, on both sides of the lane. All the way along, the banks were six feet high above stone walls, too high to climb. And he was too small to fly. No sign anywhere – no feathers, no blood. The cat must have taken him off elsewhere for the kill. I glanced up to the top of the garden wall. The cat was still there, still swishing his tail at me.

  On an impulse, perhaps it was resentment that he had got there first, I reached down, picked up a stone and threw it up towards the cat. The stone cracked and shattered against the wall, and the cat was gone, leaving me staring into the glare of the sun.

  I undid my milking-apron and pulled it up over my head. As I threw it over my shoulder my hand must have slipped because the apron fell to the ground. That was the moment I saw him, a black eye blink against the stone, like the shutter of a camera. I bent to look more closely and there, exactly where I had first seen him, was the small tawny owlet with wisps for feathers. With both eyes now closed he had become part of the stone wall, part of a patchwork of wet, grey-brown stone and dank weeds. If his camouflage was imperfect, it was only that he was perhaps a more mottled stone than the other stones around him.

  He came into my hands quietly submissive. There was no panicky flapping of wings, no raucous shrieking as I gathered him up in both hands and cradled him against my chest. Thin and wet and weak, he could muster the energy only to blink his boot-black eyes. I ran my fingers under his claws in an effort to make him grasp me; but the claws lay limp and cold, curled up underneath him. His hook beak remained tight shut, locked down into his feathers. I thought briefly of leaving him where he was, of climbing the high elms above the lane to find his home. I thought too of bashing his head against a stone – weak as he was, he would have died more quickly than a trout. But then I thought of the ginger tom. If it was right to kill the bird, then why not let the cat kill him and have some profit from the kill? I confess now that I took the bird in, took him under my wing, so to speak, so that the cat should not have him.

  I knew little enough about owls. I was aware they were meat eaters, and that they hunted at night. I had seen them often enough making low-flying sorties over the hedges at dusk. And at night, coming back across the moonlit fields from milking, I had heard them calling out across their dark kingdom, filling the night air with their stuttering cries that always seemed to end on the long falling note they first intended. But the closest I had been to an owl was in Winnie the Pooh, or with a pussycat riding the seas in a beautiful peagreen boat. Of course I could have asked. But then I would have had to have taken the advice offered, and that was difficult. Mother would have had it in the airing cupboard, feeding it on steak; and Father would have killed it there and then. A compromise would not have been easy, so I decided to do it my way.

  The old shippen was the best place. All the stock were out to grass and no one ever came near the place in summer. I had cleaned it out only the week before. There were rats of course, but I hadn’t seen any in there for months. I laid him down gently on a bed of hay in an empty water trough. He lay like a patient on his back, the only sign of life in his cold, tired body were those hypnotic, slow-winking eyes.

  Worms seemed to me to be the right way to start, so I left him in the dark where he lay and went hunting. It is remarkable that worms seem to know when you are after them. Any afternoon digging the vegetable garden I would turn them up by the hundreds, but now when I needed them all I could manage in half an hour were half a dozen miserable, emaciated specimens. But I was anxious to get some food inside him.

  At first he just blinked while I dangled one in front of him. I rubbed it gently against the point of his black beak, but it would not open. I tried setting him on his feet, thinking he might not like to feed lying on his back; but there was no strength in his legs and he would not grip with his claws. He toppled over and flapped his wings to right himself. I held him upright against me and pressed the worm against his beak. He blinked slowly, the shutters over his eyes coming down like those of a ventriloquist’s dummy. Then with no warning the head turned sideways, the beak opened, reached out and took the worm. It proved to be an awkward worm, wrapping itself around his beak. But a shake or two of the head and it was gone. They eyes winked black again. He dealt with the remaining five worms with extreme efficiency but with an air of supercilious detachment that almost irritated me. I was pleased he was strong enough to eat, but my pleasure was overshadowed by the feeling that he was not in the slightest bit grateful for my mining efforts in the vegetable patch.

  I fed him four times more that day, and by the evening he was standing huddled into the side of the trough, with his grey feathers turned tawny brown, fluffed out and dry. He would live now if I could keep him going.

  After milking the next morning I went into the shippen with a tinful of lusciously wriggling worms – one as long as a small snake. The water trough in the corner was empty. I shut the door quickly behind me, and turned on
the light, but there was no sign of the owl at first. Had he not snapped his beak I doubt I would have found him at all. From the darkest corner of the shippen came the sound of irregular tapping, like wood against wood in short sharp bursts. He was wedged into the corner, his swivel-head turned around aiming at me; and all the while as I approached slowly he snapped his beak in agitation. I picked him up but his wings were stronger now, and he fought me for a moment or two in an effort to break free. I held him tight and set him back in his trough for his breakfast. This time there was no hesitation. Within a minute the tin was empty and he was clapping his beak at me for more.

  All that day I fed him on worms, all day he ate everything I put in front of him. Father was beginning to wonder why I insisted on digging the vegetable patch every spare minute I had. It took too long and I knew I could no longer maintain the worm supply. It was the dog eating his dinner that night that gave me the idea of an alternative food source. Mother fed the dog on chunks of ox cheek every evening. No one would notice if a few ounces went missing every day.

  I cut it up quite small to start with and the owl took it from me with ever increasing enthusiasm. He clapped at me when I went in to feed him, he clapped at me in between mouthfuls, and he clapped at me when I went out. I could never make out whether this last clapping meant ‘Goodbye’, or ‘Get out and find me some more.’

  I looked up owls in the only book I could find. I read what I knew already but had not thought about: that an owl eats his prey whole, he doesn’t fillet it, that his digestion needs the bone, the hair, the feathers. Accordingly, I wrapped the chunks of meat in duck feathers before I fed them to him. Any mice the cats brought in I pounced on and took out to him. I even cornered a little fieldmouse myself, but held my hand at the last moment. He ate everything; he left nothing behind. Within a few days I picked up an owl pellet from the floor under the trough.