CHAPTER ONE: The Two Worlds of Jonah Trelawney
CHAPTER TWO: Kill! Kill! Kill!
CHAPTER THREE: The Phantom Organist
CHAPTER FOUR: Lucky Button
CHAPTER FIVE: Hot Pies and Roasted Chestnuts
CHAPTER SIX: Mein Lieber Freund
CHAPTER SEVEN: Wild Child
CHAPTER EIGHT: Hero of the Hour
CHAPTER NINE: Mr King and Mrs Queen
CHAPTER TEN: Truth or Fairy Tale?
For Jeremy and Sarah
M.M.
To my artist hero William Hogarth, who supported
the Foundling Hospital, and Caro Howell and the
staff of the Foundling Museum, who have been so
helpful in the creation of this book.
M.F.
CHAPTER ONE
The Two Worlds of Jonah Trelawney
THE EIGHTH OF MAY. Jonah hated the eighth of May. It was a date he wanted to forget, yet never could. But he tried to that morning, as he got dressed for school, took breakfast in bed to his mother as usual, and settled her in her chair by the window, so she could look out at her tulips in the garden. He gave her a kiss goodbye. She smiled weakly and squeezed his hand. It looked like it would be one of her silent days. He was used to them.
Jonah gobbled down a bowl of cornflakes, shrugged on his school bag, called out goodbye and left the house. At least he had the play rehearsal to look forward to, he thought. It could be a good day. But then a cyclist came past, and reminded him of what had happened on this day two years before. His mum had been riding her bicycle on the way to work at the library when the accident happened. The lorry had come too close, unbalanced her, knocked her off.
They had come to school that morning to tell him, to take him to the hospital. His mum had lain there for more than a week in a coma, her shallow breathing the only sign of life. She had woken one evening while he was at her bedside. She could talk, she could move everything in her upper body, but she was unable to walk. Ever since then she had been confined mostly to her wheelchair, her condition improving slowly, living through good days and bad days.
The long walk to and from school was always the best part of the day for Jonah. He looked forward to it, an untroubled haven between his two worlds: the world of school, and the home world he had just left behind at No. 3, The Cottages. Until the accident home had been a place of laughter and music. Not any more. As he shut the front gate behind him he turned to look back up at the house, at his bedroom window. The pigeon was there, strutting up and down on the windowsill. She was often there. She had shining purple feathers on her neck and Jonah thought she was very beautiful.
“Bye, Coocoo,” he called out. “See you!”
It cheered him up every time he saw her. What he would give to be able to stay up there all day, sitting by the window and talking to Coocoo in the sanctuary of his room. There he could escape from it all – read, dream and listen to music on his headphones.
In his mind Jonah was up there now, looking out over the fields and woods to his other world of school, the roofs and chimneys just visible over the treetops in the distance. The upstairs of the house was all Jonah’s domain now. Downstairs had been adapted for the wheelchair. On the good days his mum managed to walk with her frame or stick, but she couldn’t manage the stairs.
As Jonah walked away, he hoped she might be feeling strong enough today to sit outside. Nothing lifted her spirits more. On days when the sun shone, like today, he knew his mum often ventured out to sit in the tiny garden at the back, among her beloved flowerpots. Jonah planted the tulip bulbs under her instructions every October, always red and yellow, and kept them weed-free and watered. Her tulips seemed to be her only real interest these days. She would spend much of winter in her chair, gazing out into the back garden, waiting, longing for them to grow.
Doctors and nurses and physiotherapists and health visitors came and went, sometimes when Jonah was there, but mostly when he was at school. They all told Jonah that the more he encouraged his mum to get out of her wheelchair and use her walking frame, the better. But that was all they said. How much of her disability was physical, how much was psychological, they seemed unwilling to discuss with him. His mum didn’t like to talk about it, so he didn’t ask. Jonah did all he could to help her with her physiotherapy exercises, which she hated, and to encourage her to play the piano again.
Before the accident, music had been his mum’s chief joy. She never played or even listened to it now. Her beloved piano, that she used to play so much, remained closed and silent in the sitting room. The house had been empty of music ever since the eighth of May, two years before. The day the music died, as Jonah thought of it. There were many songs his mum used to play and sing. Jonah had grown up with her songs, had them in his head, hummed them, sang them.
He was humming the tune of “American Pie” now, one of her favourites, thinking about her as he walked along. He found himself looking at the photos of her on his phone: his mum sitting on her bike, and smiling and waving at him. And there was his favourite selfie of them both on the beach at St Ives eating ice creams, the summer before the accident. He found himself close to tears as he turned into the school lane.
Jonah cried often, but privately. It wasn’t so much because he felt sorry for his mother, or himself. It was more out of anger, or from loneliness, or both. He had his own way of stopping the tears from coming, by singing, singing out loud, which was what he was doing now – a chorus from another of his mother’s favourite songs, “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life”.
He felt better already. It wasn’t so bad. The two of them managed, didn’t they? So she was a single mother, and he had never had a father. So what? They had each other. He had often wondered about the father he had never known. But you can’t miss what you’ve never had. They did fine without him.
Jonah liked being with his mum. He liked caring for her; liked helping her in and out of bed; liked making their breakfast and supper; loved lying beside her on her bed every evening, after homework, watching television.
But there were those days when she seemed so low and miserable that she hardly spoke, and then nothing seemed to interest her, not Jonah, not the television, not Coocoo, not even the tulips. Occasionally she would be able to emerge from these dark times on her own, but Jonah knew she needed him more than anyone, that he was the only one who could help her chase away the shadows.
He discovered the best way to cheer her up was to sing to her. She might no longer listen to music or play the piano, but she loved listening to him sing her favourite songs. For her that was a source of great comfort and joy, a relief from the sadness that sometimes felt as if it might overwhelm them. They had become more than mother and son over these past two years; certainly more than carer and patient. They had forged a deep understanding, become the closest and best of companions.
Jonah walked along, happier now, but reflective still. Although he had never for a moment minded having to care for his mother, he knew there had been a price to pay for it. He often found himself very alone in this other world he was walking towards. It was a loud world, of bustle and banter and babble, where he struggled to overcome his shyness, to fit in, to find friends.
He wasn’t sure he had more than one friend in the whole school, and Valeria was hardly a proper friend – he just wished she was. Jonah had barely spoken to her. She was Russian and didn’t speak much English; they communicated mostly in smiles. Smiles had to be enough, and they were. She at least seemed to be a kindred spirit, easy to be with. Jonah thought that might be because both were so often teased: Valeria for her accent, and because she had been new to the school that term; and Jonah because he was a loner.
Jonah wanted so much to make more friends, but
it was impossible. He knew he could never spend time with them after school, or take part in any after-school activities. He would have liked to go with them on school trips, to theatres or museums, but that would usually mean coming home late, so he could never do it. He had to get home. His mum needed him.
More than anything, Jonah longed to be able to sing in the school choir, as Valeria did. She played the clarinet too, like a dream. But choir and orchestra practice both happened after school hours. At least play rehearsals were in school time – that was something.
Even with Valeria, he was wary of mixing his two worlds. He found he could deal with each world better if he kept them apart. He never told anyone about why he had to hurry home after school, nor why he was late sometimes in the mornings. Most of the teachers knew his situation, and made allowances – though nothing was ever said – so he was never in any trouble over his lateness. They realized he was a carer, that his mother was alone at home and that Jonah had to look after her. But they were discreet, and rarely asked about her. That suited Jonah fine. His world of home was his business, and no one else’s, and he would keep it that way.
CHAPTER TWO
Kill! Kill! Kill!
JONAH WASN’T AWARE OF IT, but he had been dawdling on the walk to school, taking his time even more than usual. He was always unwilling to get to school, and this morning there happened to be much to see on the way, much to divert him, much to dawdle over.
It was almost a clear morning, a few white puffy “Simpsons” clouds – as Jonah thought of them – against the deep blue of the sky. Across the fields he spotted a rust-brown deer grazing at the edge of the woods. She hadn’t seen him. He stayed still, watching her. It was a bounding rabbit that disturbed her in the end. The deer sprang away, vanishing into the woods. The countryside seemed suddenly empty when she was gone.
But then the swallows were there, swooping down over his head, skimming the fields. The hedgerows all around were alive with birds: blackbirds, sparrows, chaffinches, wrens, and the pair of flitting goldfinches he so loved to see. The air was full of birdsong.
Jonah found himself singing out loud with them as he walked along the lane – this time it was “Here Comes the Sun”. He knew every word, heard the accompaniment in his head. Yes, he thought as he sang, maybe this is going to be one of the good days. After all, the birds were singing, the sun was shining, and he had his play rehearsal first thing with Mrs Rainer to look forward to.
Mrs Rainer was far and away the best and most inspiring teacher he had. Everything about her was sharp: she had a sharp quick mind, sharp pointed shoes – always green – a sharp nose, and sharp darting eyes. And she was fair too, scrupulously inclusive. So in Lord of the Flies, the school play they were rehearsing, everyone had a part to play, though not necessarily the part they wanted. Mrs Rainer had created a musical adaptation of the book, and composed the songs herself. The pupils could help play the music, make scenery or costumes, or act in it. Valeria was almost the Pied Piper of the play. She played her clarinet on stage, drifting through and around the action, weaving the story, making the magic, setting the tone and mood. She played quite beautifully.
Jonah loved to act. He came alive in the character of others, leaving all his shyness behind. He had wanted to play Ralph, the main – heroic – part, but even in the auditions, he’d known he wasn’t right for the role. In the end Mrs Rainer had chosen him to play Piggy, and he was happy enough with that, proud of it too. It was a big part, important in the story. And he had the best song. Mrs Rainer told him that his singing voice was the main reason why she had given him the part.
Jonah liked the character of Piggy, empathized with his bewilderment, his apartness, his longing to belong and his inability to do so. He didn’t like what happened to Piggy in the end, of course, but he knew from school how cruel some people could be, and how right the author, William Golding, had been about the power of the mob.
No one was about as Jonah came wandering across the playing fields and through the iron gates. Every time he came into school, even though he’d been there nearly a year, Jonah was amazed at the sheer size and grandeur of it – especially after his little village junior school. There were acres and acres of playing fields and woods, and a wide gravel driveway that swept through wrought-iron gates and into a great courtyard with the school buildings all around. Impressive though it all was, Jonah found the place too huge, too austere, too stark. He loved only the chapel, which stood in the middle of the courtyard and had so often been his refuge from all the noise and clamour of the school, a sanctuary from the sadness of both his worlds. This was where he went when he wanted to be alone, when he needed to gather courage enough to face his worlds again.
The chapel, big enough to seat all seven hundred pupils, was just a small part of this great country house of a school, a place of towering chimneys, magnificent red-brick buildings and pillared cloisters. And this was a school with a story. Like everyone else, Jonah knew well enough what this place had once been, before it had become the local secondary school – they were all told its history by the headmaster at their very first school assembly, in the chapel. Jonah had never forgotten. His school had been built originally in 1935 to house the children from the Foundling Hospital in London, which was a kind of orphanage. For nearly two centuries the lives of tens of thousands of poor and starving children had been saved by this Foundling Hospital in London. The children had been fed, cared for, educated, given a chance in life.
But as the years passed, the headmaster had told them, the city became too crowded and dirty for the foundling children. So this new school had been built out in the Hertfordshire countryside. Thousands more of these foundling children had lived here, in Jonah’s school, boys in one half, girls in the other. They never mixed; they were hardly allowed even to speak with one another. They ate in one dining room – the dining room that was still used today – but in separate halves, at long tables and in silence, and they had to march everywhere, into the chapel, into meals.
Jonah made his way along the same wide echoing corridor where the foundling children had walked all those years ago, past the black and white photos of them on the walls, and imagined again how their lives must have been, this place their whole world, with no home to go to, no mother that they knew of, no father.
The school was quiet, Jonah thought, too quiet. Then he realized. Late, he was late again. Outside the rehearsal room he took a deep breath, dreading all eyes on him as he walked in, as he knew they would be. He knocked, went in, said sorry to Mrs Rainer, who waved him to his seat.
But then the ribald remarks came thick and fast. How often he wished his mother had chosen another name for him, and how he wished Jonah had not been swallowed by that wretched whale in the Bible. No one had made the connection until the headmaster had told everyone the story one day in assembly, so Jonah had him to thank for that. Once the story was out, there had been endless jokes on Facebook about it, about him, some of them so nasty it hurt. Almost overnight, his nickname at school had become Moby or Moby Dick.
“Evening, Moby,” someone sneered as he sat down.
“Dickhead,” said Marlon, so often his tormentor, and well cast as the bully Jack in Lord of the Flies.
To Jonah’s complete surprise, Valeria turned on Marlon. Speaking very slowly and deliberately in her halting English, she said, “I think you should not say this. It is not good. It is not kind.”
Her words fell on deaf ears.
“Blubber, blubber, blubber,” came the whispering chorus all around the classroom. That was the name that really cut him to the quick, and shamed him. He had always tried so hard to hide it, but they knew he cried easily. He felt the tears welling up, and tried desperately to hold them back, but he was failing.
Mrs Rainer saved him. She shut them up, withered them to silence. The tears were already in his throat, in his mouth too. He swallowed them, held himself steady, but all eyes were still on him. Marlon was smirking, waiting for him to cra
ck. Jonah sang inside his head and kept the tears at bay, just. Suddenly the day was not going well at all.
But once the rehearsal began in earnest, he managed to ignore the jibes, become Piggy, and lose himself entirely in the story. He remembered his lines well, and Mrs Rainer made no secret of the fact that she liked the wholehearted way he was playing his part. He did worry, when the time came to sing his “Home again” song, whether his voice would hold, but somehow it did. He was singing it not as Jonah but as Piggy, and Piggy was singing loud and strong, and in tune. “Home again,” he sang. “When will I be home again?” Mrs Rainer was nodding her approval all the way through, and best of all he could see Valeria was enjoying the song, willing him to do well, and then, when he had finished, miming a little clap for him.
Now came the moment of high drama in the play, when the others turned on Piggy to attack and kill him. Mrs Rainer was at the piano. She had turned the murder almost into a ballet: for greater impact, she said. And it worked. Everyone had to slow their movements right down as they gathered round Piggy for the slow-motion kill. “Kill! Kill! Kill!” came the rhythmic chant, their feet stomping in time, building slowly to a thunderous crescendo.
But in among the chanting Jonah began to hear something else, a different chant, not rehearsed, not in the play at all. “Blubber! Blubber! Blubber!” He realized that all the slow-motion pretending, the simulated violence, was becoming real. It was Jonah they were attacking, not Piggy at all. This was personal now. He caught a glimpse of Marlon’s face, saw the venom in his eyes, his face twisted, grinning. Marlon wasn’t acting. He was enjoying it too much. The punching and the kicking might still be feigned, but they were meant. Now Marlon was kneeling on top of him, hand on the back of Jonah’s head, pushing his face into the floor. Jonah tried to squirm away, to curl himself into a ball, to protect his body, his face, his head. “Blubber! Blubber! Blubber!” came the chant again, Marlon’s voice loud in his ear.