Alone on a Wide Wide Sea
Discover the beautiful stories of Michael Morpurgo, author of Warhorse and the nation’s favourite storyteller.How far would you go to find yourself? The lyrical, life-affirming new novel from the bestselling author of Private Peaceful“There were dozens of us on the ship, all up on deck for the leaving of Liverpool, gulls wheeling and crying over our heads, calling good-bye…That is all I remember of England.”When six-year-old orphan Arthur Hobhouse is shipped to Australia after WWII he loses his sister, his country and everything he knows. Overcoming enormous hardships with fellow orphan Marty, Arthur is finally saved by the extraordinary people he meets and by his talent for boat-design and sailing. Now he has built a special boat for his daughter Allie – a solo yacht designed to carry her to England in search of his long-lost sister. Will the threads of Arthur's life finally come together?“I was there on the quayside to see Allie take her out for the first time, saw her dancing through the waves, and I knew I'd never built a finer boat.”
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Alone on a Wide
Wide Sea
michael morpurgo
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books 2006 HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 77–85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
Copyright © Michael Morpurgo 2006
Michael Morpurgo asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN:
EBook Edition © 2006 ISBN: 9780007369980 Version: 2014-10-02
To Lula Léa and Clare, who helped make this book with me.
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…
Contents
Part One: The Story of Arthur Hobhouse
Arthur Hobhouse is a Happening
Three Red Funnels and an Orchestra
Kookaburras, Cockatoos and Kangaroos
Cooper’s Station and Piggy Bacon and God’s Work
“Did We Have the Children Here for This?”
“For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow”
“Couple of Raggedy Little Scarecrows”
Scrambled Eggs and Baked Beans
Part Two: The Voyage of the Kitty Four
What Goes Around, Comes Around
Two Send-offs, and an Albatross
Jelly Blobbers and Red Hot Chili Peppers
“Hey Ho Little Fish Don’t Cry, Don’t Cry”
Around the Horn, and with Dolphins Too!
I should begin at the beginning, I know that. But the trouble is that I don’t know the beginning. I wish I did. I do know my name, Arthur Hobhouse. Arthur Hobhouse had a beginning, that’s for certain. I had a father and a mother too, but God only knows who they were, and maybe even he doesn’t know for sure. I mean, God can’t be looking everywhere all at once, can he? So where the name Arthur Hobhouse comes from and who gave it to me I have no idea. I don’t even know if it’s my real name. I don’t know the date and place of my birth either, only that it was probably in Bermondsey, London, sometime in about 1940.
The earliest memories I have are all confused somehow, and out of focus. For instance, I’ve always known I had a sister, an older sister. All my life she’s been somewhere in the deepest recesses either of my memory or my imagination – sometimes I can’t really be sure which – and she was called Kitty. When they sent me away, she wasn’t with me. I wish I knew why. I try to picture her, and sometimes I can. I see a pale delicate face with deep dark eyes that are filled with tears. She is giving me a small key, but I don’t remember what the key is for. It’s on a piece of string. She hangs it round my neck, and tells me I’m to wear it always. And then sometimes I hear her laugh, an infectious giggle that winds itself up into a joyous cackle. My sister cackles like a kookaburra. She comes skipping into my dreams sometimes, singing London Bridge is Falling Down, and I try to talk to her, but she never seems to be able to hear me. Somehow we’re always just out of reach of one another.
All my earliest memories are very like dreams. I know that none of them are proper memories, none that I could really call my own anyway. I feel I’ve come out of half-forgotten, half-remembered times, and I’m sure I’ve often filled the half-forgotten times with made-up memories. Perhaps it’s my mind trying to make some sense of the unknown. So I can’t know for certain where the made-up ones end and the real ones begin. All the earliest childhood memories must be like that for everyone I suppose, but maybe mine are more blurred than most, and maybe that’s because I have no family stories to support them, no hard facts, no real evidence, no certificates, not a single photograph. It’s almost as if I wasn’t born at all, that I just happened. Arthur Hobhouse is a happening. I’ve been a happening for sixty-five years, or thereabouts, and the time has come now for me to put my life down on paper. For me this will be the birth certificate I never had. It’s to prove to me and to anyone else who reads it that at least I was here, that I happened.
