My Friend Walter by Michael Morpurgo

read it only slowly.
    Dearest Cousin,
    I have wronged you and your family most dreadfully, and your anger towards me was deserved and your hatred justifiably fierce. I do deserve no better. I ask no pardon, but to say that all I did I did for you as I trust you will one day discover. I pray you make haste to administer the elixir in the bottle to your grandmother. Delay not for I fear she has dire need of it. A few drops in her tea will suffice for a full recovery. Do it now and you will see my time spent collecting plants and herbs and all the hours in your brother’s laboratory were not entirely wasted
.
    Your humble and most affectionate cousin,
W.R
.
    The liquid in the bottle was of a dark, mushy green colour, as much like pond water as anything else. I did not think twice about it. I put it at once into my skirt pocket and made my way along the corridor to Gran’s room. I went on tip-toe as the kitchen was right below, and I could hear Mother still sobbing quietly and Father trying to comfort her.
    Gran lay propped up on a bank of pillows, her face as white as her hair. Her eyes were closed. The tea wasstill warm in the cup by her bed. She had not drunk any. As I tried to release a few drops the bottle trembled in my hand and too much came out all at once.
    â€˜Come on, Gran,’ I whispered, shaking her shoulder gently. Her eyes opened. ‘You’ve got to have a cup of tea. You know you like a nice cup of tea.’ She shook her head. ‘It’ll do you good. I made it specially for you. “Waste not, want not”. That’s what you always tell me, remember.’ A suggestion of a smile moved her lips and that was enough to encourage me. I put my arm around her neck and helped her to drink it down. She spilt some down her nightie, but she took almost half a cup before she fell back against the pillows. ‘That was nice, dear,’ she said. And she closed her eyes again. I left her and went back to my bedroom. I opened the bottle and smelt it. It smelt like minty cough mixture. I pondered again and again over the note. I do not know why, but I had absolute and complete faith in my friend Walter. I never doubted, not for one minute, that his medicine, his ‘elixir’, would work.
    It couldn’t have been more than an hour later when I heard Gran calling from her room. Will raced along the passage outside my door. Mother and Father were taking the stairs in twos with Humph close ontheir heels. By the time I reached Gran’s room they were all there. I was not at all surprised at what I saw. Gran was sitting up in her bed, her face still pale but her eyes bright and alert.
    â€˜I had the strangest dream,’ she said looking somewhat bemused. ‘There was this old man bending over me. Dressed all in black he was, and with a handsome beard on him. He had earrings just like a pirate. I don’t usually like men with earrings. It’s not proper. Anyway, he told me I’d be quite all right just so long as I drank a cup of tea; and then he disappeared, vanished into thin air. Then soon after in comes Bess – it was you, dear, wasn’t it?’
    â€˜Yes, Gran,’ I said.
    â€˜I thought so. And she told me to drink a cup of tea and so I did, and I’m right as rain now.’ Mother and Father and Will looked at each other in utter amazement. ‘I could eat a horse,’ Gran said, smiling, ‘honest I could.’
    â€˜Sally perhaps?’ said Will, and we all laughed or cried – it was difficult to tell which.
    Again and again that night I coughed for my friend Walter, so much so that Mother came in to give me some cough medicine in the early hours. ‘You’ve beencoughing a lot lately,’ she said. The cough linctus made me feel very sleepy, but I forced myself to stay awake. I tried calling him softly by name. ‘Walter! Sir Walter!’ But he never came. ‘I didn’t mean it, Walter,’ I said as sleep