The Classic Morpurgo Collection. Michael Morpurgo

it could be. I was having the time of my life.

      In the evenings I’d be up in Lizziebeth’s room, playing with Kaspar if he was awake, and learning how to play chess with Lizziebeth when he wasn’t. I liked chess, although I never managed to win a single game against her. As for Kaspar, he had the run of the place as I did, and very soon had occupied the piano in the drawing room and made it his own. Everyone in the house, Lizziebeth’s governess, the servants too, all simply adored him. Like me, he couldn’t have been happier. Only one cloud hung over me, the knowledge that sooner or later all these golden days would have to end, and I’d have to leave. How I dreaded that day.

      One evening, some months afterwards, I was called down into the drawing room to find the family all lined up in front of the fireplace. Lizziebeth was in her dressing gown. Kaspar was sitting on the piano watching me, his tail swishing. Lizziebeth was looking at me conspiratorially – clearly she knew something I didn’t. Her mother and father on the other hand were looking very serious and stiff, rather as they had been when I’d first seen them that time back in their rooms at the Savoy Hotel. This is it, I thought, this is when they tell me my time’s up, that I have to go back to London, to my job as a bell-boy in the Savoy.

      Robert cleared his throat. He was going to make some kind of a speech. I prepared myself for the worst. “Johnny, the three of us have come to a decision,” he began. “You know how much we have enjoyed having you with us here as our guest. Lizziebeth has told us of your circumstances back home in England, that you have no family as such to go back to…” He hesitated, and that was when Ann spoke up.

      “I guess what we’re trying to say, Johnny, is that after all that has happened, and knowing you now as well as we do, and what a fine young man you are, we would very much like you to consider not returning to London, but instead staying here and making your home with us in New York. We’d be really proud to have you live here as one of the family, if you’d like it that is. What do you say?”

      I remember Kaspar and Lizziebeth both looking up at me, waiting for me to say something. It took me a while – not to make up my mind – I did that instantly, but to get over my surprise and find my voice.

      “Oh come on, Johnny Trott, say yes, please,” Lizziebeth cried.

      “OK,” I replied – it was a new expression I’d picked up in New York. I was so overwhelmed that it was all I could bring myself to say. But it was enough. Everyone hugged me then, and we all cried a little, except Kaspar who had sprung up on the piano, and was busy washing himself.

      So, by the greatest of good fortune, I acquired a new life, a new home, and a new country. They sent me back to school, which at first I didn’t care for. I thought I’d finished with all that – I’d never been much good at books and reading and all that. But Robert read stories to us all in the evenings, and through him I came to like books a lot better than I had. Gradually school became much easier, and sometimes even enjoyable. They teased me a bit at first on account of my London cockney accent, and so to start with I felt a bit alone. But someone put it about that I was a survivor from the Titanic, and after that I had all the friends I could handle. We spent long summers in Maine, sailing up there on the Abe Lincoln. Lizziebeth and I went walking in the woods and fishing, and everywhere we went Kaspar came with us. They were great days, days I shall remember all my life.

      I was to have gone off to college, to William and Mary in Virginia, where Robert himself had once been a student. I never got there. In Europe the First World War was raging, and my old country was fighting for her life. So when in 1917 America sent troops over to fight in France, I went with them. And who did I find marching alongside me up to the front? Little Mitch. We just picked up where we’d left off all those years before on the Titanic, on the Carpathia, and were best friends from then on.

      While I was at the front I’d get letters every week from Lizziebeth, who was away at boarding school by now. I’d look forward to every one of them because I could hear her voice in her writing, see her face as I was reading her words, and that cheered me more than I can say, when all around me in France I saw nothing but horror and death. And with her letters Lizziebeth would sometimes send me little sketches, and once a beautiful drawing of Kaspar sitting there looking at me, willing me to come home it seemed. I kept it with me in my tunic pocket, along with a photograph of her and me by the sea-shore in Maine. Lizziebeth always said afterwards, when the war was over, that it must have been the drawing of Kaspar that had kept me safe and brought me home. I’m not sure she was right about that, but she insisted on having it framed and put up in pride of place in the front hall. When no one’s looking, I do reach out and touch it sometimes. So I suppose that I must be just a little superstitious. But I’m not admitting that to her.

      Right after the war Mitch came to work with me in Robert’s publishing business – he had become quite a family friend by now. We worked together in the packing room in the basement – Robert said we had to learn the business from the bottom upwards. So we did, literally. For me, books became a part of my life. I didn’t just pack them, I read them voraciously, and very soon began to write stories of my own. And while I was writing, Lizziebeth would be up in her attic studio, drawing or painting or sculpting, animals mostly. On our holidays in Maine we wouldn’t climb trees any more, or go diving off the quay, she’d sit on the rocks by the seashore with her sketchbook out, and I’d scribble away nearby, and Kaspar would wander between us to remind us he was there. We would often talk of the old days in London, of Mr Freddie and Skullface, and the great roof rescue. And more than once she said what fun it would be to go back to visit. But I didn’t think she was serious.

      Then just before her seventeenth birthday she announced to us that she was too old now to be given birthday presents. Instead she was going to give us something, providing, she added, that we didn’t mind giving it away. None of us knew quite what to make of this, until she took us out into the front hall. And there it was. Sitting on the table, below the famous sketch she had sent out to me in France during the war, was a magnificent sculpture of Kaspar, his neck arched, his tail curled around him. “I carved it out of ash wood,” she said, “and then I painted it jet black. And do you know what I want? I want to take it back to London, and give it to the hotel where we stayed, where I first saw Kaspar and Johnny. I want it to be there for ever. It’s where Kaspar belongs. Kaspar could come too. He may be old, but he’s fit as a fiddle. Well?” she said, beaming brightly at us. “When do we go?”

      We went six months later, and Little Mitch came with us too. We wanted him to come, to show him where it had all happened, where the whole story had begun, a story he was part of, that had changed all our lives for ever. I won’t pretend that any of us much enjoyed the crossing of the Atlantic. There were too many terrible memories, but we kept them to ourselves, and never once mentioned the Titanic. In fact we had hardly ever mentioned the Titanic in all these years. It was what bound us inseparably, and what distanced us from others who had not been there, but we had rarely spoken of it among ourselves. All together again on the wide Atlantic, we faced our fears, and took strength from one another’s silence.

      Mr Freddie was there to greet us at the front door of the Savoy, and when we went inside, the staff were waiting to welcome us. Kaspar yowled from his basket as they all clapped us in. So I took him out to show everyone. He loved all the attention, and to tell the truth, so did I. Mary O’Connell was still there, head housekeeper now, instead of Skullface. She gave Ann a huge bunch of red roses, and cried on my shoulder as she hugged me. As or the bell-boy who took us up in the lift, he was a cockney lad, just like me, wearing the same uniform, with his cap worn at the same jaunty angle. He showed us into the Countess Kandinsky’s old rooms, with windows looking out over the Thames down towards the Houses of Parliament. Kaspar made himself at home at once, resuming his place on the piano and proceeding to washing himself vigorously. He was as happy as I’d ever seen him.