Escape from Shangri-La. Michael Morpurgo

      

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       Also by Michael Morpurgo

      Arthur: High King of Britain

      Friend or Foe

      The Ghost of Grania O’Malley

      Kensuke’s Kingdom

      King of the Cloud Forests

      Little Foxes

      Long Way Home

      Mr Nobody’s Eyes

      My Friend Walter

      The Nine Lives of Montezuma

      The Sandman and the Turtles

      The Sleeping Sword

      Twist of Gold

      Waiting for Anya

      War Horse

      The War of Jenkins’ Ear

      The White Horse of Zennor

      The Wreck of Zanzibar

      Why the Whales Came

       For Younger Readers

      Conker

      Mairi’s Mermaid

      The Best Christmas Present in the World

      The Marble Crusher

       For Conrad and Anne

      CONTENTS

       1 A bit of old goat

       2 Water music

       3 Barnardo’s boys

       4 The prodigal father

       5 Nowhere man

       6 And all shall be well

       7 Shangri-La

       8 The Lucie Alice

       9 Gone missing

       10 Dunkirk

       11 The great escape

       12 Earlie in the morning

       13 Message to my father

      1 A BIT OF AN OLD GOAT

      I WAS KNEELING UP AGAINST THE BACK OF THE sofa looking out of the window. Summer holidays and raining, raining streams. ‘He’s been there all day,’ I said.

      ‘Who has?’ My mother was still doing the ironing. ‘I don’t know why,’ she went on, ‘but I love ironing. Therapeutic, restorative, satisfying. Not like teaching at all. Teaching’s definitely not therapeutic.’ She talked a lot about teaching, even in the holidays.

      ‘That man. He just stands there. He just stands there staring at us.’

      ‘It’s a free world, isn’t it?’

      The old man was standing on the opposite side of the road outside Mrs Martin’s house underneath the lamppost. Sometimes he’d be leaning up against it, and sometimes he’d be just standing there, shoulders hunched, his hands deep in his pockets. But always he’d be looking, looking right at me. He was wearing a blue donkey jacket – or perhaps it was a sailor’s jacket, I couldn’t tell – the collar turned up against the rain. His hair was long, long and white, and it seemed to be tied up in a ponytail behind him. He looked like some ancient Viking warlord.

      ‘Come and see,’ I said. ‘He’s strange, really strange.’ But she never even looked up. How anyone could be so obsessively absorbed in ironing was beyond me. She was patting the shirt she’d finished, sadly, her head on one side, just as if she was saying goodbye to an old dog. I turned to the window again.

      ‘What’s he up to? He must be soaked. Mum!’ At last she came over. She was kneeling beside me on the sofa now and smelling all freshly ironed herself. ‘All day, he’s been there all day, ever since breakfast. Honest.’

      ‘All that hair,’ she tutted. ‘He looks a bit of a tramp if you ask me, a bit of an old goat.’ And she wrinkled up her nose in disapproval, as if she could smell him, even from this far away.

      ‘And what’s wrong with tramps, then?’ I said. ‘I thought you said it was a free world.’

      ‘Free-ish, Cessie dear, only free-ish.’ And she leant across me and closed the curtains. ‘There, now he can look at the back of our William Morris lily