Alone on a Wide Wide Sea by Michael Morpurgo Page B

and Piggy Bacon. By then we were trotting, and we couldn’t talk because we were laughing so much. We had done it; we had escaped! And Big Black Jack was huffing and puffing underneath us, laughing along with us, I thought, revelling in his new-found freedom every bit as much as we were. But after a while I got to thinking about all the others we’d left behind at Cooper’s Station, that maybe we should have taken them all with us. (All these years later I still feel bad about that. Why is it you never forget what you feel bad about?)
    Marty started singing
London Bridge is Falling Down
then, softly at first, then I joined in, and soon we were bellowing it out over the bush.
    I kept asking Marty questions, the most important first. “Where are we going? Which direction?”
    “Away,” he said. “Anywhere just so long as it’s away.”
    “You been planning this? You never said anything.”
    “That’s because I didn’t think of it until punishment parade yesterday evening,” he said. “It was while he was hitting me. I knew I’d be next, that he’d go after me just like he did with Wes. If I’d stayed he’d have killed me. Sooner or later, he’d have killed me. I know he would. Then I just got lucky. I saw Ida by the stables just before lock-up, told her what I needed. She didn’t even have to think about it. She did say one thing though: I had to remind you about your lucky key, to be sure you took it with you. Hope you have, because I’m not going back, not for all the tea in China.”
    My heart was in my mouth. I hadn’t given it a second thought. But I felt in my pocket, and there it still was. “Got it,” I told him.
    “That’s good,” Marty said, “because we’re going to need it. We’re going to need all the luck we can get.”
    It was fear of getting caught, and sheer exhilaration that we were free, that kept us going that night. We knew that we mustn’t stop, not for a moment, or even slow down, because Piggy would be sure to be coming after us just as soon as he discovered we were missing, and that would be at roll call at dawn. We had until then to get as far away as possible. Big Black Jack didn’t want to trot for long, but he plodded on steadily, never tiring, and we sat up there the two of us, rocking our way towards the grey light of dawn. We were just so happy to be out of Cooper’s Station. We talked a lot as we rode, and we laughed, laughed as hard as we could. I remember I felt cocooned by the night, swallowed up in its immensity, protected. At one point we saw some lights on the horizon. It looked like a settlement of some kind, so we kept our distance. We sang to the stars, all the millions of them up there. We sang
For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow
till we were hoarse with it. They seemed so close those stars, close enough to hear us.
    It was cold, very cold that night. We had no water. We had no food. But none of that worried us. Not yet. We were too happy to be worried. Not even the cry of the dingoes bothered us. Only when the sun came up, and the bush came alive all about us, only then did we begin to feel alonein this wild and unfamiliar place with nothing but scrub and trees for miles around in every direction. We’d been following a dried-up creek for a while when I felt the first heat of the sun. That was when I first thought I wanted to drink. We had stopped talking to one another now. There was no more laughter. I was beginning to realise just how vast this place was and just how lost we were. I didn’t like to say it though. Big Black Jack was walking on, purposeful and surefooted as ever. He seemed to know where he was going, and that made me feel better.
    When finally Marty did say something though, it just confirmed my own worst fears. “I don’t like this,” he said. “We’ve been here before, when it was darker. We were coming the other way then. And I keep thinking something else too, something Wes told me once, and Wes knew all about horses. He said