Читать книгу In the Mouth of the Wolf - Michael Morpurgo - Страница 12

Papa, are you there, Papa? You missed a good party. I think of you, and you are sitting there in your tweed suit, with your bird’s nest of a beard, wreathed in pipe smoke. I always wanted to be like you, Papa, smoke a pipe, write fine poetry, stories and plays, be wise. You were so wise about most things – but not everything. For a start, you had far too many children. Four daughters, all of them loud with laughter and full of opinions – Marie, Elizabeth, Catherine, Jeanne – and then there was Pieter and me; ‘the boys’, you called us. There were children tumbling everywhere, crowding me out of the sandpit, and forever making plays where I always had to be a tree, because I was tall.

The sisters chose the plays, took the main parts too. Pieter was the best actor, but they made him play the log that Bottom sat on in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Do you remember that, Papa? And I was a tree again of course. You said Pieter made a very fine log, but you said nothing about me being a very fine tree.

I always liked to have you to myself, but hardly ever could. You never read the poems and stories just to me, always to all of us. I loved the stories, loved the poems, but I loved you more.

You remember those summer holidays in Belgium, Papa, the country walks in the Ardennes forest where you had grown up as a child? Those were the best times, Papa, just you and me, and Pieter trailing along behind, waving a stick. He always had a stick. I asked him once why he was fencing with it, and he said he was fighting off the wolves. And I said there was no need to fight them, that he could turn and face them, and clap his hands and look brave. And Pieter said no, that if they came close and bared their teeth, if they wanted to eat him up, if they wanted to tear our family to pieces, he had to fight them.