Times of War Collection

by Michael Morpurgo

  That was when another officer came wandering over and spoke to me, in a low and overly confiding tone. “Temperamental, you see,” he said. “That’s the trouble with them. And I’m warning you, that one can be a bit surly too.”

  I felt like getting up and shaking him. I should have given him a piece of my mind. I should have said, “And how would you feel being caged up in here like this? He’s just a kid, with no home, no hope, nothing to look forward to, except deportation.”

  Instead, and for the second time that day, I said nothing. In keeping silent as I had, I felt I had betrayed Aman yet again. Whatever way I looked at it, the whole thing had all been my fault. I should never have shown Aman the photo.

  He was just beginning to trust me, and I’d blown it. I didn’t understand why, but that didn’t make me feel any better about it. People were looking at me from all around the room. I was sure they thought I had upset Aman intentionally somehow. I waited for a while, hoping he might come back, but longing at the same time to get out of there. When he didn’t reappear, I decided to pack up the Monopoly game as quickly as I could, and go.

  I had just collected up the last of the Monopoly money and was closing the lid, when I saw Aman coming back across the room towards me. He sat down opposite me again, without speaking a word, without even looking at me. I thought I’d better say something.

  “I can leave the Monopoly game, if you like, if they’ll let me,” I said. “You can play it with your friends maybe.”

  “I don’t have any friends in here,” he said, still not lifting his eyes. “All the friends I had are on the outside. I’m on the inside.” Then he did look up at me. “I’ve got a photo of my friends though. Mother says I should show you.”

  He was looking around the room, making quite sure no one was looking. Then he took a piece of folded paper out of his pocket and handed it to me surreptitiously under the table. I opened it out on my knee.

  It was an e-mail printout of a photo of a school football team, in a blue strip. They were all crowding around one another and laughing into the camera. Matt was standing at the back, his arms raised in the air, as if he had just scored a goal.

  “That is my football team, and there is Matt. See him?” Aman said. “They sent it to me from school. And that’s my shirt.” They were holding up a bright blue football shirt. On the back was a number 7, and above it in large letters, AMAN.

  “If you count the players,” he went on, “you will see there are only ten of them. There should be eleven. I’m the one that is missing. That’s Marlon, centre forward, twenty-seven goals last year, as good as Rooney, better even. And the tall one, like a giraffe – next to Matt at the back – that’s Flat Stanley, our goalie, the one grinning all over his face, and giving me the thumbs up. Can you see him?”

  I could see him, right in the middle of the top row, holding up a huge banner that read, WE WANT YOU BACK.

  “These are my friends,” Aman told me. “I want to go back to them, back to my school, back to my home in Manchester. It is where I belong, where Mother belongs. It is where Uncle Mir lives, where all our family lives. Mother says she is sorry, but she is very tired now, and she must lie down. But she sent me back to see you, to talk to you. When I spoke to Mother just a few moments ago, she said that she had a dream about you last night, even before she met you, and about Father, and about the cave in Bamiyan where we lived, about the soldiers too, and Shadow.”

  “Shadow? What is…who is this Shadow?” I asked him.

  “Shadow was our dog,” said Aman. “She was just like the dog in your photo. We called her Shadow, when she was ours. And then later she was called Polly. She had two names, because she had two lives. She was brown and white, like yours. The same droopy eyes and long ears.”

  It was all too puzzling, too difficult to understand. “So Shadow,” I said, “she’s your dog, and she’s back at your home in Manchester then? Is that right?”

  Aman shook his head. “No. It’s like Mother told me,” he said. “She said I should tell you everything, all about Shadow, and about Bamiyan, and about how we came to be in this place. Like I said, Mother says she had a dream about you last night, before she even met you. And in the dream, she told me you took us by the hand and led us out of here. She says she was not sure about you at first, but now she is. She says you are a good listener with a kind heart, that all good friends are good listeners. Like Matt, she said, just like Matt. Why else would you come to see us if you did not want to listen? She says you are our last chance, our last hope of going home to Manchester, of staying in England. This is why she told me I must tell you the whole story now, right from the beginning, so you will know why we have come here to England, and what has happened to us. She says that maybe you can help us, God willing. She says there is no one else who can, not now. Will you help us?”

  “I will try, Aman, of course I will,” I replied. “But I don’t want to build up any false hopes. I really can’t promise anything.”

  “I don’t want promises,” he said. “I just want you to listen to our story. That’s all. Will you do that?”

  “I’m listening,” I told him.

  think you should know about my grandfather first, because in a way he was the beginning.

  I didn’t know him, but Mother often told me his stories – she still does sometimes – so, in a way, I do know him.

  There was a time, so Grandfather told her, when Afghanistan was not as it is today. Bamiyan, where we lived, was a beautiful, peaceful valley. There was plenty to eat, and the different peoples did not fight one another: Pashtun, Usbek, Tagik, Hazara – my family is from the Hazara people.

  Then the foreigners came, the Russians first, with their tanks and their planes, and after that there was no more peace, and soon there was no more food. My grandfather fought against them with the Mujahadin resistance fighters. But the Russian tanks came to our valley, to Bamiyan, and killed him, and many others.

  All this was long before I was born.

  After the Russians were driven out, Mother remembers that everyone was happy for a while. But then the Taliban fighters came in. At first everyone liked them, because they were Muslims like us. But we soon learned what they were really like. They hated us, especially Hazara people like us. They wanted us dead. If you did not agree with them, they killed you. They left us with nothing. They destroyed everything. They burnt our fields. They blew up all our homes, every one of them. They killed whoever they wanted to. There was nothing anyone could do, except hide.

  That is why I was born in a cave in the cliff face above the village. I grew up in this cave, with my mother and grandmother. I wasn’t unhappy. I went to school. I had friends to play with. I knew nothing different.

  Mother and Grandmother argued a lot, mostly about the same thing, about Grandmother’s jewels, which she kept hidden away, sewn into her mattress. Mother was always trying to get her to sell them, to buy food when we were hungry. And Grandmother always refused. She said we were always hungry, and that we would manage to survive somehow, God willing. She would always say that there was something more precious even than food, and she was saving her jewels for that. She would not say what this was, and that always made Mother very angry and upset. But I did not mind them arguing that much. I was used to it, I suppose.

  Everyone I cared about in the world lived in these caves, a hundred or more of us, because there was nowhere else to go, because the Taliban had left us nowhere else to live. They had blown up all of Bamiyan, all of the houses, even the mosque.

  And they did more than that. They blew up also the great stone statues of the Buddha that had been carved out of the cliff face thousands of years before. Mother watched them do it. She told me they were the biggest stone sculptures in the whole world, and that people from far away used to come to Bamiyan to see them because they were so famous. But there is nothing left of them now, just great piles of stones. The Taliban blew up our whole lives.

  They were cruel people.
r />   Then the Americans came with their tanks and their helicopters and their planes, and the Taliban were driven out of the valley, most of them anyway. We all thought things would be better for us from now on. Father spoke a little English, so he became an interpreter for the Americans. People kept saying there would soon be new houses for us to live in, and a new school. But nothing seemed to change. There was more food now, but never enough. So we were still hungry. In the cave Mother and Grandmother started quarrelling again.

  Things were getting back to normal.

  But then one night the Taliban came to our cave, and they took my father away. I was six years old. They called him a traitor, because he had helped the infidel Americans. Mother fought them, but she wasn’t strong enough. I screamed at them, but they just ignored me.

  We never saw my father again. I remember him very well though. They cannot take away my memories of him. He used to show me the house down in the valley where he had lived, and we would sometimes walk the land where he used to graze his sheep, and grow his onions and his melons, and the orchard where he grew his big green apples.

  Father would always let me go with him to load up the donkey with sticks for the fire. And every day we would go down to the stream to fetch the water, and carry it back up the steep hill to the cave. Sometimes he would take me into town to buy some bread, or a little meat from the butcher, if we had any money. Everyone liked him. We laughed a lot together, and he would wrestle with me and play with me.

  He was a good father. He was a good man.

  But the Taliban had destroyed everything, cut down the orchards, burnt the crops, took Father away. I never heard him laugh again. All we had left of him was his old donkey. I would talk to him instead sometimes. He was very sad, like me. I think maybe that donkey missed Father as much as I did.

  After that there were just the three of us left in the cave, Mother, Grandmother, and me. For months after Father was taken away, Grandmother would spend her days lying on the mattress in the corner, and Mother would sit there beside her, gazing at nothing, hardly speaking. It was up to me now to find enough rice or bread to live on. I begged for it. I stole it. I had to. I fetched the water from the stream, a long walk down the hill and a long walk up, and I tried to bring in enough sticks to keep the fire going.

  Somehow we managed to get through the winters without starving or freezing to death. But Grandmother’s legs were getting worse all the time. She could hardly get up at all now, unless one of us helped her.

  What happened to Mother was my fault. I was with her at the market in town when I stole the apple, just one apple, nothing much – we had none left of our own by now. I was good at pinching things. I had never been spotted before. But this time I got careless. This time I got caught.

  remember there was lots of shouting. “Filthy thief! Lousy beggar! Stop him! Stop him!” I tried to run away. But before I could escape, someone grabbed me. He kept hitting me, and would not let go of me.

  Mother came to my rescue, to protect me, but a crowd gathered and then suddenly the police were there. Mother told them it was her who stole the apple, not me. So they arrested Mother, instead of me, and took her off to prison. They beat her there. She still has the marks on her back. She was gone for nearly a week.

  They tortured her.

  When she came back she just lay on the mattress beside Grandmother, and they cried together for days. She turned her face away from me, and would not speak to me. I wondered if she would ever speak to me again.

  It wasn’t long after this that the dog first came to our cave – a dog just like your dog in that photo you showed me.

  But when I saw her that first evening, she was thin and dirty and covered in sores. I was just crouching over the fire warming myself, when I looked up and saw her sitting there, staring at me. She wasn’t like any dog I had seen before – small, with short legs and long ears, and nut-brown eyes.

  I shouted at her to go away – you understand, we do not have dogs inside our homes in Afghanistan. Dogs have to live outside with the other animals. Of course, I have lived here a long time now, and I know that in England it is different. Some people here like dogs better than they like children. Actually, I think if I was a dog, they would not shut me up in here like this.

  So anyway, I threw a stone at this dog to shoo her away. But she stayed right where she was, and would not move. She just sat there.

  I saw then that she was shivering. You could see her hipbones sticking out – she was that thin. She had sores all over her, and you could tell she was starving. So instead of throwing another stone at her, I threw her a piece of stale bread. She snapped it up at once, chewed on it, swallowed it, and then licked her lips, waiting for more.

  I chucked her another piece. Then, before I knew it, she had come right into the cave, and was lying down there beside me, close to the fire, making herself at home, as if she belonged there. I noticed then that there was a wound on her leg, like she’d been in a dog-fight or something. She kept worrying at it, and licking it.

  Mother and Grandmother were both fast asleep. I knew they’d chase the dog out as soon as they saw her there. But I liked her with me. I wanted her to stay. She had kind eyes, friendly eyes. I knew she wouldn’t hurt me. So I lay down and slept beside her.

  Early the next morning, she followed me down to the stream when I went to fetch the water. She was limping badly all the way. She let me bathe her leg and clean her wound. Then I told her she had to go, and clapped my hands at her to try to drive her away. I knew that anyone seeing her might well throw stones at her – like I had after all – and I didn’t want that. But all the way back up the hill, she would not leave my side. Sure enough, as soon as we were spotted, a whole bunch of kids came running down the track and chased her off. They threw stones at her, and shouted at her, “Dirty dog, dirty foreign dog!”

  I tried all I could to stop them, but they wouldn’t listen. I don’t blame them now. After all, she did look different, not like the kind of dog any of us might have seen before. She scampered off and disappeared. I thought that was the last I’d ever see of her.

  But that evening she turned up again at the mouth of the cave. I discovered then that she liked tripe, however rotten it was. You know tripe? It’s a sort of meat, from the stomach lining of a cow – it was the only meat we could ever afford in Bamiyan. Anyway, there were a few rotten bits still left, so I threw her those.

  But then later on, when the dog crept in to be by the fire again, Mother and Grandmother woke up and saw what was going on. They became very angry with me, saying all dogs were unclean, and that she shouldn’t be allowed in. So I picked her up and put her down just outside the cave, where she sat and watched us, until Mother and Grandmother had gone to bed. She seemed to know it was safe to come in then, because when I lay down, she was right there beside me again.

  or weeks and weeks that’s how it went on.

  Somehow the dog just seemed to know that when I was alone, or when they were fast asleep, it was all right for her to come inside the cave. And she knew when to keep her distance too. She’d be sitting there in the mouth of the cave when I woke every morning, and she’d come with me down to the stream. She’d have a good long drink, and wait for me to bathe the wound in her leg. Then, so long as there was no one else about, she would come with me when I went off with the donkey to gather sticks for the fire.

  But there were some days, particularly when my friends were around a lot, that I’d hardly see her at all, just an occasional glimpse of her in the distance, watching me. I’d miss her then, but it was good to know she was still around. And sooner or later every evening she’d be there again at the mouth of the cave, waiting for her food, waiting for Mother and Grandmother to fall asleep. Then in she’d come, and she’d lie down beside me, her face so close to the fire that I thought she’d burn her whiskers.

  One morning, I woke up early and found the dog was not there. And then I saw why. Grandmother was already awake. She was sitting
up on the mattress, with Mother still lying down beside her, and I could see Mother was upset, almost in tears. I thought they’d had another quarrel maybe, or that Mother’s back was hurting her again.

  But I soon learned what this was all about. They had talked about it often enough before, about the idea of Mother and me leaving Bamiyan, and going to England on our own, without Grandmother. She was far too old to come with us, she said. Grandmother would sometimes read out Uncle Mir’s postcards from England. I had never even met Uncle Mir – he is Mother’s older brother – but I felt as if I had. I knew his story. He had left Bamiyan long before I was born.

  Everyone in the caves knew about Uncle Mir, how he had gone off as a young man to find a job in Kabul, that he had met and married an English nurse, a girl called Mina, and then gone off with her to live in England. He had never come back, but he wrote often to Grandmother. Uncle Mir was her only son, so all his letters and postcards were very precious to her.

  She was always taking them out and looking at them. They had been brought over to her from time to time by Uncle Mir’s friends when they were visiting from England, and she’d kept them hidden in her mattress with all her other precious things. She loved to show me the postcards, of red buses, or of red-coated soldiers marching, of bridges over the river in London. There was one that she read to us, over and over again. I remember almost every word of it. Whenever she read it, it started an argument.

  “One day,” Grandmother would read out, “you must all come to England. You can live in our house. Mina and I have plenty of room for everyone. There is no war here, no fighting. My taxi business is good now. I have money I could send. I could help you to come.”

  And Mother would always argue. “I don’t care about Mir and his postcards. And anyway, haven’t I told you and told you? I’m not going anywhere without you. When your legs are better, God willing, then maybe.”