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Read it, his eyes were telling me
Who I am, What I’ve done, and Who you are
Other titles by Michael Morpurgo
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It had happened somewhere in this field, definitely this field – we knew that much from the maps. We knew Leroy had run on ahead of the others, that he was leading the attack. But where exactly had it happened? Closer to the crest of the hill, near the trees? Probably. Nearer the farm buildings? Maybe. We had so little to go on.
Jasper had run on ahead of us, and was snuffling about under a fallen tree at the edge of the wood. Then he was exploring along the tree line on the crest of the hill, nose to the ground.
“Wherever Jasper stops,” I said, “if he ever does, wherever he next sits down for a rest, that’s where we’ll do it. Agreed?”
I didn’t have a father, not one that I ever knew anyway. You don’t miss what you’ve never had, so I didn’t mind that either, not much. There were compensations too. Not having a father made me different. Most of my pals at school lived in two-parent families – a few had three or even four parents, if you count step-families. I had just the one parent, Maman, and no brothers and sisters either. That made me special. I liked being different. I liked feeling special.
Maman was French, and spoke English as if it was French, with lots of hand-waving, conducting her words with her hands, her voice as full of expression as her eyes. We spoke mostly French at home – she insisted on it, so that I could grow up ‘dreaming in both languages’ as she put it, which I could and still do; but that was why her English accent never improved. At the school gates when she sometimes came to fetch me I’d feel proud of her Frenchness. With her short dark hair and olive brown skin, and her accent, she neither looked nor sounded like the other mothers. We had a book at school on great heroes and heroines, and Maman looked just like Joan of Arc in that book, only a bit older.
But being half French had its difficulties. I was ‘Poodle’ on account of my frizzy black hair, and because I was a bit French. Poodles are known in England as a very French kind of dog, so Maman told me. Even she would call me ‘my little poodle’ sometimes, which I have to say I preferred to ‘mon petit chou’ – my little cabbage, her favourite name for me. At school I had all sorts of other playground nicknames besides ‘Poodle’. ‘Froggie’ was one, because in those days French people were often called ‘Frogs’. I didn’t much like that. Maman told me not to worry. “It’s because they think we all eat nothing but frogs’ legs. Just call them ‘Roast beef’ back,” Maman told me. “That’s what we French call the English.”
So I tried it. They just thought it was funny and laughed. So from then on it became a sort of joke around the school – we’d even have pick-up football teams in the playground called the Roastbeefs and the Froggies. In the end I was English enough to be acceptable to them, and to feel one of them. Maybe that was why I never much minded what they called me – it was all done in fun, most of the time, anyway.
Somehow it had got around the school, and all down the street, about my father – I don’t know how, because I never said anything. Everyone seemed to know why Maman was always alone – and not just at the school gates, but at Nativity plays at Christmas time, at football matches. It was common knowledge that my father had been killed in the war. Whenever the war was spoken of around me – and it was spoken of often when I was growing up – voices would drop to a respectful, almost reverential whisper,