Alone on a Wide Wide Sea (22 page)

They seemed, I thought, a little nervous. Grandpa kept looking away whenever I caught his eye. I thought he was cross with me because I’d insisted on doing the whole circumnavigation. He’d always been so much against it. Mum couldn’t seem to find her voice at all, just sat there patting my hand fondly. I exchanged glances with Michael who shrugged with his eyes, as only he can do.

It was one of those huge modern hotels, made entirely of
glass, and was right on the river. We walked into the breakfast room which was full of laid up tables, all of them empty except for a large round table near the window. Sitting around it were what looked like a family with a couple of kids and all of them were looking at me very intently, which was odd, I thought. And Mum and Grandpa weren’t leading us to one of the empty tables, as I expected they would. Instead they were leading us directly towards the round one by the window. “And this,” Mum said to them, not trying to disguise the pride in her voice, “this is Allie, my daughter Allie. Arthur’s daughter, Allie.”

Still they stared, and then, one by one the stares turned to smiles. “I think you had better introduce yourselves,” Mum went on.

“Shall I start?” I knew who he was before he opened his mouth. I recognised him from his photograph. “I’m Marc, Marc Topolski. From up there, remember? And this is my family, Marianne, Molly and Martha, known in the neighbourhood back home in Vermont as the M&Ms.” I couldn’t speak, partly because I was so choked up. But there was another reason too.

Even as he was talking, I was looking at the old lady sitting next to him. Her smile was Dad’s smile, from the eyes, from the heart.

“And I’m Kitty,” she said. “Your dad’s sister.”

She could hardly speak either, but smiled through her tears. “You got Arthur’s key, dear?” she said. “The one I gave him?” I took it off from around my neck and gave it to her. There was a small wooden box on the table in front of her, carved and painted with red and white flowers. She turned the key in the lock. It fitted. She smiled up at me again. She turned it, then she went on turning it, again and again, which seemed strange. Then she opened the lid, and I understood everything. The box played music. It was a musical box. And the tune it played was
London Bridge is Falling Down
. We listened until it slowed right down, and then finished mid-tune.

“And that,” said the old lady pointing out at the river, and I noticed now that she too had a kind of American accent, “that is London Bridge, and it isn’t falling down. I was born just down the road in Bermondsey. It’s where your dad was born too. My mother and father were killed
in a bombing raid in the war. This musical box was all that was left of our home. We were in the same orphanage together, Arthur and me. We loved listening to this, over and over. We’d listen to it for hours. Then they took your dad away. I gave him the key, and I told him I wouldn’t play our tune again until he brought the key back. Then I would wind it up for him and we would listen to it together—I was the eldest you see, I always did the winding up. I never heard it again until today. It’s yours now, Allie. And if you have children one day, then maybe you’ll pass it on to them, and you’ll tell them the story of how in the end the key found the musical box and the musical box found the key.”

I was still unable to make sense of it all. “But how did they find you?” I asked. “I don’t understand.”

“That was your astronaut friend here,” said my Aunty Kitty. “He went on television in the US when he came down from his space travels and told the whole world about you, this amazing eighteen-year-old girl from Australia called Allie Hobhouse, sailing single-handedly around the world on a little boat called
Kitty Four
, sailing all
the way to England to find her father’s long lost sister to fulfil a promise she’d made to her father on his death bed. The father, he said, was called Arthur Hobhouse, his sister, Kitty Hobhouse. Anyone who can help, phone in. So I did. You see, when they sent your dad off to Australia all those years ago, a lifetime ago, they sent me to Canada. I got lucky. I landed up with a lovely family in Niagara-On-the-Lake. I live there still right by the shore in the same house I was brought up in. You must come and see it sometime.”

I noticed then a copy of Dad’s story in front of her, right by her bowl of cornflakes.

“Have you read it yet?” I asked.

“I only just got it,” she said. “Trouble is, my eyes aren’t very good at reading any more. Maybe you could read it to me after breakfast.”

So that’s what I did, an hour or so later. I read it to them, sitting there overlooking London Bridge and the Thames.

* * *

“‘The story of Arthur Hobhouse’,” I began. “‘Arthur Hobhouse is a happening. I should begin at the beginning, I know that. But the trouble is, I don’t know the beginning. I wish I did…’“

Now you’ve read the book, I want you to know something. The two stories we wrote were never intended to be published. We each of us wrote our story simply as a record of what had happened, first to my father, Arthur Hobhouse, and then to me. I thought long and hard about whether to publish. This is after all a family story. How much you tell the world about your family is a delicate matter for everyone concerned. But the family is happy about it, as I am, because our stories, Dad’s and mine, had already been acted out in public, to some extent at least. And certainly, had this not happened, our story could not possibly have ended as well as it did. In other words our private family story was never totally private in the first
place. It was in the newspapers, on the radio, on television. But the whole of our story has never been fully told. And that’s why we all thought that it should be. Dad would have wanted it, I know, because he believed that we live on only as long as our story is told. I believe that too.

It is estimated that between 1947 and 1967 somewhere between 7000 and 11,000 British children were sent to Australia alone.

It was at one time thought convenient to pack up your troublesome people, whether they were convicts or simply unwanted or orphaned children, and ship them off to what were then the colonies – mostly Canada, New Zealand and Australia.

The first white Australians were convicts settled there forcibly in 1788. It was a form of banishment.

The banishment of children, which went on for centuries and reached its modern peak in the years after the Second World War, was in many ways just as cruel, but it was sometimes well meant. Children who had nothing could be provided with a new land, a new family, some prospects of living a happy life, away from the seething slums of Britain’s cities. And many of them did get lucky, landed up in the right place with genuinely kind people who looked after them and cared for them. However just as many did not. One former child migrant said, “Most of us have been left with broken hearts and broken lives.”* Cruelty, abuse and exploitation were tragically all too common.

Another wrote this:

It was because of harrowing accounts like this that

I wrote my story.

Michael Morpurgo

If you or your family are interested in locating a former child migrant, or you are a former migrant seeking your family, you can obtain a document describing the available resources (including a contact database and financial support) from the UK Department of Health.

As a clickable file:

www.dh.gov.uk/assetRoot/04/09/00/30/04090030.pdf

As a text-only file:

www.dh.gov.uk/assetRoot/04/09/00/31/04090031.pdf

My thanks to Alex Whitworth and Peter Crozier, mariners extraordinaire and quite ancient too, whose emails while circumnavigating the world in their yacht Berrimilla in 2004 informed and inspired this story. Thanks also to Graham Barrett and Isabella Whitworth for all their wonderful help and encouragement. And of course I mustn’t forget Samuel Taylor Coleridge…

MICHAEL MORPURGO is one of Britain’s best-loved writers for children, and was recently awarded an OBE in the Queen’s 80th Birthday Honours List for his services to literature. He has written over 100 books and won many prizes, including the Smarties Prize, the Whitbread Award and the Writers’ Guild Award. In 2005 he won the Blue Peter Book Award for his novel
Private Peaceful
, which was also adapted into a stage play by the Bristol Old Vic and has been toured to great acclaim.

From 2003 to 2005 Michael was the Children’s Laureate, a role which took him all over the UK to promote literacy and reading, and in 2005 he was named the Booksellers Association Author of the Year.

Michael lives in Devon with his wife Clare. Both have been awarded MBEs for their work in founding the charity
Farms for City Children
.

‘Michael Morpurgo’s name on a book is a guarantee of quality.’
Daily Telegraph
michael morpurgo

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