Читать книгу Little Foxes - Michael Morpurgo - Страница 8

CHAPTER ONE

BILLY BUNCH CAME IN A BOX ONE WINTRY night ten years ago. It was a large box with these words stencilled across it: ‘Handle with care. This side up. Perishable.’

For Police Constable William Fazackerly this was a night never to be forgotten. He had pounded the streets all night checking shop doors and windows, but it was too cold a night even for burglars. As he came round the corner and saw the welcome blue light above the door of the Police Station, he was thinking only of the mug of sweet hot tea waiting for him in the canteen. He bounded up the steps two at a time and nearly tripped over the box at the top.

At first it looked like a box of flowers, for a great bunch of carnations – blue from the light above – filled it from end to end. He crouched down and parted the flowers. Billy lay there swathed in blankets up to his chin. A fluffy woollen bonnet covered his head and ears so that all Police Constable Fazackerly could see of him were two wide open eyes and a toothless mouth that smiled cherubically up at him. There was a note attached to the flowers: ‘Please look after him’, it read.

Police Constable Fazackerly sat down beside the box and tickled the child’s voluminous cheeks and the smile broke at once into a giggle so infectious that the young policeman dissolved into a high-pitched chuckle that soon brought the Desk Sergeant and half the night shift out to investigate. The flowers – and they turned white once they were inside – were dropped unceremoniously into Police Constable Fazackerly’s helmet, and the child was borne into the Station by the Desk Sergeant, a most proprietary grin creasing his face. ‘Don’t stand there gawping,’ he said. ‘I want hot water bottles, lots of ’em and quickly. Got to get him warm; and Fazackerly, you phone for the doctor and tell him it’s urgent. Go on, lad, go on.’ And it was the same Desk Sergeant who to his eternal credit named the child, not after himself, but after the young Police Constable who had found him. ‘I’ve named a few waifs and strays in my time,’ he said, ‘and I’ll not condemn any child to carry a name like Fazackerly all his life. But Billy he’ll be – not Billy Carnation, he’d never forgive us – no. Now let me see, how about Billy Bunch for short? How’s that for a name, young feller-me-lad?’ And Billy giggled his approval.

Billy did not know it, but that moment in his box on the table in the Interrogation Room with half a dozen adoring policemen bending over him was to be his last taste of true contentment for a long time. He was not to know it either, but he sent a young policeman home that night to his bed with his heart singing inside him. Billy Bunch was a name he was never to forget.

Billy Bunch was taken away to hospital and processed from there on. First there was the children’s home where he stayed for some months whilst appeals and searches were carried out to see if anyone would claim him. No one did. In all that time he had only one visitor. Once a week on his afternoon off Police Constable William Fazackerly would come and sit by his cradle, but as the months passed the child seemed to recognise him less and less, and would cry now when he reached out to touch him. So, because he felt he was making the child unhappy, he stopped coming.

By his first birthday Billy Bunch had entirely lost the smile he had come with. A grim seriousness overshadowed him and he became pensive and silent, and this did nothing to endear him to the nurses who, try as they did, could find little to love in the child. Neither was he an attractive boy. Once he had lost the chubby charm of his infancy, his ears were seen to stick out more than they should and they could find no parting for his hair which would never lie down.

He did not walk when it was expected of him, for he saw no need to. He remained obstinately impervious to either bribes or threats and was quite content to shuffle around on his bottom for the first two and a half years of his life, one leg curled underneath him acting as his rudder, thumb deep in his mouth and forefinger planted resolutely up his left nostril.

And speech did not come easily to him as it did with other children in the home. Even the few words he spoke refused to leave his mouth without his having to contort his lips and spit them out. This stutter made him all the more reluctant to communicate and he turned to pictures and eventually, when he could read, to books for comfort.

No foster family, it seemed, wanted to keep him for long; and each time his case was packed again to return to the children’s home, it simply confirmed that he was indeed alone and unwanted in this world.

School made it worse if anything. The frequent changes from one foster home to another spoiled any chances he might have had of making firm friends in those early years. And certainly he was not proving to be a favourite with the teachers. He was not bright in the classroom, but most of the teachers could forgive him that. The trouble was that he seemed completely uninterested and made little attempt to disguise it. All he wanted to dowas to read, but he would never read what they wanted him to read.

And with his fellows he was no more popular, for he was neither strong nor agile and had little stomach for competitive games of any kind. At play time he would wander alone, hands deep in his pockets, his brows furrowed. The other children were no more beastly to him than they were to each other, in fact they paid him scant attention. Were it not for his stutter he would have gone through each day at school almost unnoticed.

Mrs Simpson, or Aunty May as she liked to be called, was the latest in the long line of foster mothers. She had thin lips, Billy noticed, that she made up bright scarlet to look like a kiss, and she wore curlers every Sunday night in her fuzzy purple hair. She was a widow with grown-up children who lived away. She kept a clean enough house on the tenth floor of a block of flats that dominated that wind-swept estate on the outskirts of the city. The estate had been built after the War to accommodate the workers needed for the nearby motor factory, and accommodate was all it did. It was tidily organised with rank upon rank of identical box houses, detached and semi-detached, spread out like a giant spider’s web around the central block of flats where Billy now lived. There was little grass to play on and what there was was forbidden to him because he might get muddy, and Aunty May did not like that. ‘After all, you know,’ she was continually reminding him, ‘they only give me so much to keep you each week, Billy, and I can’t be for ever spending on extra washing just because you go out and get yourself in a state. I can’t think why you don’t go and play in the adventure playground with the other children. It’s all concrete there, and much better for you. It’s not fair on me, Billy, not fair at all. I’ve told you before, Billy, if you can’t do as you’re told, you’ll have to go.’

That was always the final threat, and not one to which Billy was usually susceptible, for most of his foster homes had meant little more to him than a roof over his head and three meals a day. Seen like that, one such home was much like any other. But this home was the only one that had ever been special to him. This one he wanted very much to stay in, not on account of Aunty May who nagged him incessantly, and certainly not on account of the school where he lived in dread of the daily torture Mr Brownlow, his frog-eyed teacher, inflicted upon him. ‘Stand up, Billy,’ he would say. ‘Your turn now. Stand up and read out the next page, aloud. And don’t take five minutes about it, lad. Just do it.’ And so he did it, but the inevitable sniggers as he stuttered his waythrough added yet more tissue to the scar of hurt and humiliation he tried so hard to disguise. No, he endured all that and Aunty May only because he had his Wilderness down by the canal to which he could escape and be at last amongst friends.