It came quite definitely from the hayrack about halfway down the barn. Jo took a few steps towards it and the breathing stopped. He thought of the bear cub and of the hibernation Monsieur Audup had told them about, but he thought that it couldn’t be the bear cub because it wasn’t winter yet and anyway a bear cub would hardly be sleeping in a hayrack – but then perhaps it would. He took a few more tentative steps forward and peered into the hay. The breathing began again a little further on and quite suddenly he found himself not looking at hay at all but at two eyes that stared back at him unblinking and terrified. Jo could do nothing for a moment but stare back into them. They were not the eyes of a bear for the face that went with them was pale and thin under a fringe of dark hair.
Jo backed away slowly, swallowing his fear. He had the presence of mind to close the door quietly and it was just as well he did for across the yard Widow Horcada was bent over, holding a bucket under an outdoor tap. She had her back to him and was humming quietly to herself. For a few moments he stood looking at her disbelieving. How could she be back so soon? It wasn’t possible. Yet there she was in front of him. She had only to turn round. It was just a few steps to the corner of the barn and safety. He’d make it if he could move silently. Without taking his eyes off her he began to inch his way along the wall.
He knew he should have looked where he was going. He told himself so as the fork he blundered into clattered to the ground. Jo looked at the Widow Horcada, the bucket fell out of her hand as the black shawl swung round. Jo dropped the shoe, stumbled over the fork and ran and ran. He rounded the corner of the barn, but there he was stopped in his tracks, for up the hill, a large basket in one hand, a stick in the other, came Widow Horcada. She looked up, saw him and shouted at him. He could not hear what she was saying. Jo turned again and ran back into the yard – it was the only way he could go. She was there too and coming towards him. He looked now from one to the other. Fear crept up his spine like a warm cat and he felt the hair rise on the back of his neck. Never in all his life had he felt like screaming until this moment. He wanted to but he could not. And then one of them spoke, the one striding across the yard towards him.
“It’s me.” It was a man’s voice. “It’s me.” And he pulled the shawl off his head. The red beard was longer than Jo remembered but it was the same man. “Don’t you remember me?” he said.
THE DANCING BEAR
It was a Sunday morning in April. We were in the café before lunch. The old man was going on about Roxanne again, and how she ate him out of house and home. He’d had a bit too much to drink, I think, but then he was often that way.
“Gone off again, she has,” he grumbled. “God knows what she gets up to. Nothing but trouble, that girl.”
Just then we heard shouting in the village square and, glad of any diversion, we all went out to look. Roxanne was staggering towards us, clutching a bear cub in her arms, with its arms wrapped around her neck. She’d been scratched on her face and on her arms, but it didn’t seem to bother her. She was laughing and breathless with joy.
“Bruno!” she said. “He’s called Bruno. I was down by the stream. I was just throwing sticks and I felt something stroking my neck. I turned round and there he was. He patted my shoulder. He’s my very own bear, Grandpa. He’s all alone. He’s hungry. I can keep him, can’t I? Please?”
If we hadn’t been there – and half the village was there by now – I think the old man might have grabbed the bear cub by the scruff of the neck and taken him right back where he came from.
“Look at him,” he said. “He’s half starved. He’s going to die anyway. And besides, bears are for killing, not keeping. You know how many sheep we lose every year to bears? Dozens, I’m telling you, dozens.”
Some people were beginning to agree with him. I looked at Roxanne and saw she was looking up at me. Her eyes were filled with tears.
“Maybe” – I was still thinking hard as I spoke – “if you kept him, you know, just for a while. It wouldn’t cost much: some waste milk and an old shed somewhere. And just suppose” – I was talking directly to the old man now – “just suppose you made ‘bear’ labels for your honey jars – you could call it ‘Bruno’s Honey’. Everyone would hear about it. They’d come from miles around, have a little look at the bear and then buy your honey. You’d make a fortune, I’m sure of it.”
I’d said the right thing. Roxanne’s grandfather had his beehives all over the mountainside, and everyone knew that he couldn’t sell even half the honey he collected. He nodded slowly as the sense of it dawned on him. “All right,” he said. “We’ll try it. Just for a while, mind.”
France during World War Two
Germany invaded France on 10 May 1940. A little over a month later, Maréchal Pétain, the new prime minister of France, asked for surrender terms. The armistice, signed on 22 June 1940, split France in two. The north and west of France, including the Channel and Atlantic ports, were to be under German occupation. The rest of France – “Vichy France” – was “free” to be governed by the French.
Charles de Gaulle, an officer in the tank corps in the French Army, refused to surrender. He fled to England, from where, on the eve of the French surrender, he broadcast a radio message to the French people. This historic speech gave hope to many who disagreed with Maréchal Pétain, and helped to start the Resistance movement, with people fighting secretly to do anything possible to obstruct the Germans and support the British.
At first, resistance was patchy and disorganized. People escaped into the country and the mountains, joining the “Maquis”, groups of Resistance fighters in remote areas. (The word maquis is from the Corsican for “bush”, evoking an image of woods and mountains.) French Resistance fighters blew up bridges, derailed trains, collected information for the British, kidnapped and killed German officers. As the war progressed Resistance groups grew more organized and effective, but many fighters were captured, tortured and shot, or sent to concentration camps.
The Nazis followed a policy of “collective punishment” or civilian “reprisals” for any resistance actions across occupied Europe. On 10 June 1944, following the kidnapping of a German officer by the French Resistance, a Nazi Panzer (armoured tank) division rolled into the village of Oradour-sur-Glane. There was no evidence that Oradour locals had been involved in the kidnapping or the Resistance movement, but that day, 642 men, women and children were murdered. Nazi troops herded the men of the village into a barn and shot them before the building was set ablaze. Women and children were locked inside the church while the village was looted. Soldiers then set off an incendiary device in the church, trapping them in the flames. Finally the rest of the village was destroyed. The ruins can still be seen today.
Many French people chose a non-violent, but equally dangerous, form of resistance to Nazi occupation: they helped people escape from German-occupied Europe. At first these were British soldiers cut off from their units during the evacuation of Dunkirk, escaped prisoners of war, shot-down airmen. As the Allies intensified their bombing campaign from 1941, more and more Allied airmen were shot down. Helped by Resistance networks, many of them were escorted out of France and guided over the Pyrenees to neutral Spain. The “Comet” network, involving some 2,000 Resistance members, helped 700 Allied servicemen into Spain, hiding them, feeding them and providing them with forged identity cards and money. But it came at a price: 800 Comet members were arrested, and 140 were executed.
Meanwhile, other escapees included French civilians trying to avoid forced labour in Germany, and victims of discrimination of all kinds – foreigners, anyone who had been denounced to the authorities, and Jews. Vichy France was the only place in Europe without a German military presence that nevertheless voluntarily cooperated in the rounding-up and deportation of Jews, a cause for guilt in France to this day.
Many of these escapees braved the hazardous trip across the mountains of the Pyrenees. The Pyrenees, with their steep and treacherous paths, were hostile and well guarde
d, a formidable challenge, especially in winter and in the dark. Hundreds of the escapees were already malnourished and exhausted after weeks on the run hiding in barns and attics.
However, even after reaching Spain, escapees were not necessarily safe. Spain was technically neutral in the war, although ideologically leaning towards Germany. Those who were captured by Spanish frontier guards were returned and handed over to the German authorities. Nevertheless, particularly in the early part of the war, Spain allowed a large number of Jewish refugees to cross Spain on their way to Portugal. Later, German pressure reduced the number of Jews admitted entry into Spain.
Many French Jews decided not to escape through the mountains, but joined the Resistance movement themselves. Jews in France constituted only 1 per cent of the French population, but they comprised over 15 per cent of the Resistance.
It is thought that the efforts of Resistance networks helped around 33,000 men, women and children to escape successfully along the entire length of the Pyrenees. As one escapee, Jean Souque, said, “You never really know what freedom is until you’ve lost it.”
The Butterfly Lion
THE DREAM
I was in Hay-on-Wye at the literary festival, strolling through the streets past all the second-hand bookshops, when I happened to glance in at the window of one of them and caught sight of a book called The White Lions of Timbavati. On the front cover was a striking photograph of a white lion in the African bush. He was looking directly at me, staring at me. I was interested, intrigued. I’d never heard of white lions before. I had thought until then that all lions were tan in colour, or dusty gold. I went in and asked if I could have a closer look. The book turned out to contain a study made over several years of a pride of white lions in South Africa, and there were numerous photographs throughout, of white lions with their cubs, sleeping through the heat of the day, hunting, then sleeping again. It was £4.45. I bought it and took it back to my hotel room.
After that, I took the book with me wherever I went. These rare and beautiful creatures became ever more magical to me as I turned the pages, and I kept dipping into it, kept wondering at them, at their magnificence. So it was that I had the book with me and was reading it again, a couple of weeks later, when I found myself on the train travelling home from London to Exeter. Just before we came into Westbury Station in Wiltshire, the train stopped. I looked up from my book, to see where we were, I suppose, and there, right across the hillside, carved out of the chalk, was this huge white horse. White horse. I looked down at the cover of my book. White lion. I looked up again. White horse, white lion, white horse. From that moment, I knew I was going to tell a story about some great white lion carved out of a chalky hillside. But no story came. My white lion remained simply an image in my head, not a story. Try as I did, I could make nothing more of it.
Then I heard a story, a true story that enabled me to bring that white lion on the hillside to life. I was at a dinner party, and everyone was exchanging stories, I remember, of grandparents. Who knows why! A particularly boring fellow opposite me was sounding off, at length, and in a voice like a trombone, about a grandfather of his who had been in the trenches in the First World War. The tone of his storytelling was so ponderous and pompous that I nearly stopped listening altogether. But I am very glad I didn’t. I know I only went on listening because he said this story was about a lion. It was, it turned out, about a lot more than that.
His grandfather, it seemed, had been sent to the Front in France as a young eighteen-year-old officer. After just a couple of days in the trenches, a shell exploded near by, and he was wounded in the leg. He was stretchered to a field hospital, treated there, and then taken to a large convalescent hospital in a chateau, some thirty miles behind the lines. As part of his treatment, the doctors made him walk into the nearest village every day, with his walking stick, to build up the strength in his leg.
One day, having walked the mile or so from the chateau to the village, he was sitting, having a glass of wine in a café, when he heard the sound of shooting. Wondering what was going on, he got up and limped off round the corner into the square. Drawn up around the village square were a dozen or so wagons and cages from a travelling circus. And then he saw an old Frenchman going from cage to cage shooting the animals one by one, and crying his heart out as he did so.
Enraged, the young soldier wrenched the rifle out of his hand, “Why?” he cried. “Why are you doing this?”
“Listen,” said the old circus keeper, “these are my animals, my family. But I can’t feed them any more. No one comes to the circus. I have no money. And even if I had money, there is no meat to buy, no straw or hay to buy. Everything goes to the soldiers and the horses at the Front. My animals are starving. I have no choice but to shoot them.”
There was just one circus animal still alive, the old circus lion.
“Well, you’re not shooting that lion,” said the young man.
“Then you look after him,” the Frenchman replied. “I cannot.”
Not long afterwards, villagers and soldiers witnessed an extraordinary sight. Coming down the street towards the grand house that served as military headquarters was a young soldier and an old man, the circus owner, who was leading the circus lion. People disappeared into their houses, and shut the doors and windows. Children were hauled off the street. As they approached the headquarters, the commanding officer came running down the steps, demanding to know what was going on.
“Sir,” said the young soldier, saluting. “This is a circus lion. It belongs to me now, because this Frenchman, who is the circus owner, cannot feed him any more. So I arranged that we would look after the lion – he was going to have to shoot him otherwise. And the lion is the emblem of England, isn’t it, sir? So we could not let that happen, could we, sir?”
“I should jolly well think not,” said the commanding officer. So they looked after the old lion, and in time sent him back to England, where he lived out his life in a zoo.
“Well, what do you think of that?” said the teller of the tale when he had finished. All of us had listened to every word. Not surprisingly, after a story like that, no one else seemed to have a grandfather story to tell. I later found out there was truth in his story, that something like that had actually happened.
So now I had a story to tell, but not the confidence to tell it. The truth was, I knew little or nothing about lions, or about Africa. Help came, by great good fortune – I have had a lot of this! – from a chance meeting in a lift in Dublin. I was there to give a talk at a conference. That was now over, and I was making my way up to my room after breakfast, when into the lift stepped someone I knew, a face I instantly recognized. But I hadn’t a clue who this person was. She was maybe about my age, exceedingly beautiful and elegant. All I knew was that this was a face I had loved. As the lift went up, I struggled to recall her name. I did, just in time, but I was so overwhelmed at being so close to someone I had so much admired that I couldn’t think what to say. So I said the first thing that came into my head: “I think your Born Free Foundation is wonderful,” I told her.
“Thanks so much,” said Virginia McKenna, great and beautiful star of the film Born Free, and many other films and plays, and founder of the Born Free Foundation. The lift stopped, the door opened, and off she went. Off I went too, distraught at my clumsiness.
I was packing my suitcase a few minutes later and saw there on my bed a copy of the book I had just published, The Dancing Bear. Leave a copy for Virginia McKenna, I thought. Her whole life has been about caring for wild animals, fighting to ensure they are not locked up in cages or treated cruelly. I knew that was why she and her late husband, Bill Travers, had set up the Born Free Foundation. So I wrote a little dedication to her in my book and left it for her at the reception desk.
A week later I received a wonderful letter from her, saying how much she had liked The Dancing Bear and how heartened she was by my kind words. If ever I needed it, she wrote, if ever I was to think of writing a book
about a lion, she would be only too pleased to help, because she knew lions quite well, had lived with them and worked with them, and loved them. I needed no further encouragement. I asked for her help by return of post. And help came. Armed now with all this new inside knowledge about lions from Virginia McKenna, with my story of the white horse carved out on that hillside in Westbury, with that story I’d heard round the dinner table about the young soldier in the First World War, surely I could do it. Surely I could begin. But I couldn’t.
I needed to find the voice for my story. 1914 is a long time ago. I couldn’t start: “Once upon a time…” It wasn’t a fairy story. Someone in the story had to tell it, someone who was there, alive at the time. But who? Someone old now, with a tale to tell, I thought. Memory helped me there, memories of me as a schoolboy, a small frightened boy running away from boarding school – as I had – meeting an old lady a mile or so away from the school who took pity on me and looked after me. She brought me to her home in the village, gave me tea and sticky buns, calmed me down and told me about the photo on her mantelpiece of her husband in uniform and how he had gone off to the First World War and came home deaf from the guns. Then she drove me back to my school, so that no one ever knew I had run away.
The voice of the storyteller in The Butterfly Lion is hers, and the little boy in the story is me. I even call myself Michael. I often do that in my stories. It helps me feel I am inside the story as I am writing, that I am living it. There are more Michaels in my stories than I care to remember. I am not very inventive with names. Often I write in the first person. So then it makes sense to be Michael, even Michael Morpurgo sometimes. I am Michael Morpurgo, for instance, in another story set in my boarding school, the story I call My One and Only Great Escape – also about my running away. I was never very good at running away. But, though I did not realize it at the time, it helped me write my stories, and more than once too. If I had not run away, I think I should never have found a way to write The Butterfly Lion.