Out of the Ashes (7 page)

Best of all, he’s making plans for the future, and when he talks about it he’s really excited. He says he can’t wait to get back home. He wants to get the farm ready for when
he buys in a new herd of Gloucester cows. We’re not allowed to have animals on the place for another five months. He’s already got the compensation money, but he’s going to start
slowly, he says. He reckons in a year or so the farm’ll be ‘just like it was, I promise’. And there was a real sparkle in his eye when he said it.

Mrs Merton was right in her letter – there
is
going to be life after foot and mouth.

(Dad's drawings, not mine)

Everyone’s saying that the worst of the foot and mouth is over now. There are still a few cases each week, most of them up north, but none around here. And for the first
time this morning when I went down the road to catch the school bus, I couldn’t smell the fires. And the birds were singing.

I’m back at school now – have been for a few days. I felt a bit out of place at first. No one seemed to know what to say to me, except Jay. She’s been great. She’s the
only one I’ve told about Dad – that’s because I really know I can trust her. Most people at school don’t live on farms, so they only know what it’s been like from the
television. They know the animals are killed and burnt, but they don’t know how it affects people, the farmers, the families. It’s not their fault. How could they know? And then today,
Mrs Merton asked everyone in the class to think up questions to ask me about how it had been, about what had happened on the farm, about the animals. (She’d spoken to me first. I was a bit
nervous about it, but it seemed like a good idea so I agreed.) When I told them about Little Josh I could feel the sadness and the stillness in the room around me. It felt right to talk about it,
to tell them about Little Josh and Molly and Jessica and Hector. And I didn’t cry once, not so that anyone could see or hear anyway.

When I got off the bus this afternoon and walked up the lane I saw there were swallows swooping over the fields, and primroses in the hedgerows, and the bees were out, and there was warmth on
the back of my neck and in my heart too. All the trees that were winter-dead are alive again and green with leaves.

Dad’s coming home soon, probably next Monday. I can’t wait. I can’t wait to see his face when he sees what we’ve done.

Mum went off early to fetch Dad back from the hospital. Everything worked out just as we had planned it. I was waiting in the yard as the Land-Rover drove in.

‘Come and see,’ I said, and I took his hand and led him round. The whole yard, all the sheds and shippens and barns were all cleaned out and spotless. No muck, no smell, no
reminders. Dad beamed as he looked about him. And then I told him how it had been Uncle Mark’s idea to get the place all tidied up and ready for him when he came home, and how Uncle Mark and
Auntie Liz and Big Josh had come to stay over Easter to help out, and how Mr Bailey had lent a hand as well. Dad shook his head in disbelief and then went off on his own into the cow barn for a
while. When he came out, he said, ‘It’s like it’s all wait­ing, isn’t it? Waiting for a new chapter to begin.’

On October 5th (Dad’s birthday!), six new Gloucester cows arrived, four of them already in milk with calves at foot, and Dad started milking again and making his
cheese.

On October 30th when I got back from school I found a new flock of twenty-five ewes, Cotswolds again, out in Front Field. The grass has grown over the grave site now – you’d
hardly know it was there. We’ve planted an oak tree at the far end of it in memory of Little Josh and Hector and all of them. It’ll grow out of the ashes and be there for hundreds of
years.

And today it’s November 5th, and the pigs have arrived. Just three, but as Dad says: ‘With pigs, three soon becomes thirty’. They’re all Gloucester Old Spots. The boar
we’ve called Guy, and his two sows are Geraldine and Georgia. They’re gorgeous!

It’s half-term and Dad’s finally stopped smoking. I was out riding Ruby this morning with Bobs trot­ting along beside us when I saw Dad out on his tractor. He was ploughing in
Drot Field up against Bluebell Wood. He came closer and closer, looking back over his shoulder from time to time at the plough. He didn’t notice we were there. And, as he came past he was
singing. He was singing ‘Danny Boy’ at the top of his voice
.

In the last few months, foot and mouth has spread like wildfire through our countryside. Thousands of farming families have seen their life’s work destroyed before their
eyes as over three million animals have been slaughtered. It has been an unimaginable catastrophe.

It was to reflect the impact of this tragedy that I wrote
Out of the Ashes
. The story in itself is not true but has been woven together from events that I know to be true or have
witnessed myself.

Michael Morpurgo is the author of over ninety books for children and has won numerous literary prizes, including the Whitbread Book Award. Together with the poet Ted Hughes he
devised and set up the Children’s Laureate, a position created to bring attention to the importance of writing for children.
Out of the Ashes
was written at the height of the 2001
epidemic of foot-and-mouth disease in Britain and published nine weeks later. It won the 2002 Children’s Book Award for Younger Readers and was shortlisted for the WHSmith Children’s
Book of the Year. It was dramatized for BBC children’s television in a one-hour film shot entirely on location in Devon, and was nominated for three major television drama awards.