Chewing the Cud (20 page)

Ten minutes later, another fax arrived. It said: “Meet you dockside Sydney 11
A.M
. Sunday. Bill.”

This was that same Grenadier, now in his eightieth year, who had been my platoon sergeant and saved my life on 12 July 1944 and had immigrated to Australia in the 1970s. Hastily I had to fax him back, asking if we could meet on the Monday evening instead, because on the Sunday Myrle and I were being driven to the
Babe
location, and on the Monday morning Chris and I were to be interviewed on some TV chat show (it was fun, they had a pen of pigs in the studio).

The location itself was fascinating, chosen precisely because it had rolling countryside (very English-looking) across which they'd built some drystone walls, and because that particular area, which was the site of ancient rain forest, had no (very Australian-looking) gum trees but only hardwoods.

At all events, it wasn't till the Monday evening that I met Bill Grandfield and his wife, Dorothy. Bill was waiting on the quayside, tall, upright, the regimental buttons on his boating jacket blazing with polish, dazzlingly white shirt, Brigade tie, trousers with a knife-edge crease, shoes you could have shaved in. I was wearing jeans and an old T-shirt and deck shoes (“that baggy officer”). Not until we were seated in a nearby pub did I learn that Bill and Dorothy had traveled nine hours by train to meet me.

On our cruises we visited so many different places in so many different countries and saw some wonderful things. But one little incident, involving one huge creature, stands out in my memory.

The ship was at anchor at Oahu in the Hawaiian Islands, and sitting out on the balcony of our cabin, we could see, perhaps three-quarters of a mile away, a number of whales. Humpback whales they were, who come down from the north in February to spend their mating season in warmer waters. Through binoculars we could see them surfacing to “blow,” and also doing what is known as “lobtailing”' raising their great tail flukes high out of the water to smack them down again on the surface with a mighty splash.

Suddenly, right beneath us as we sat, a huge humpback whale surfaced so close that we could have dropped an apple, say, down either of its twin blowholes. Slowly,
lazily, it moved away from us and lifted one great pale paddle-shaped fin high out of the water and slapped it down again. Then it rolled and did the same with the opposite fin. Then it sank from sight. We felt that it had come to say to us, “Hullo, I am your personal humpback whale. Greetings!”

Of all the animals that either of us had ever seen, this was by far the biggest.

Now for the first time in our long married life, we don't have any animals, not even a dog. Mind you, next-door's cat — a beautiful little black queen with a white tip to her tail — comes round each day for a second breakfast (and I learned recently that she then goes round to the neighbor on the other side for a third one). But our lives, from when we were both small, have always been filled with animals of one sort or another. Which is why, I dare say, I write so many stories for children about animals.

And do you know the nicest thing for me about this, my last career, as an author? It isn't the money, though it's very pleasant at last not to have to worry — as we used to have to do — about how to pay the bills, and it's good to be able to help our children when they need it. No, the nicest thing for me is the thousands of letters that I get from children, all over the world, who take the trouble
to write and tell me that they've enjoyed my books. Sometimes too a mother or a teacher will write to say that Jack or Jill was not really interested in reading until he, or she, was turned on by one of my stories. That's very rewarding.

And of course every fan letter gets an answer (except for the ones without addresses!). So here I am, in my little study in my old cottage in this new millennium, still writing away happily.

I wasn't a particularly good soldier or farmer or salesman or factory worker or teacher, but at last I've found something I can do reasonably well. I'm a lucky man, in my three children, in all my grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and most especially of course in my wife, who's always backed me up and seen us through bad patches. Without Myrle, I could never have been what I now am.

Looking back at my life so far, there's only one thing to be said, in just the same quiet tones of satisfaction that Farmer Hogget used, at the end of the Grand Challenge Sheep-dog Trials: “That'll do.”