Some books that you read when you are young make such an impression that they never leave you. Some are life-changing, both literally and imaginatively. The first book I ever really loved was Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island – I must have discovered it when I was nine or ten.
Until then I had been addicted to comics. I liked being read to, but I had a horror of words packed tight on a page. I preferred pictures to tell the story rather than words. For a while, I managed to read nothing but Enid Blyton adventures – great page-turners. But Treasure Island, I could tell, even then, made all the pictures I wanted and needed in my head, and was much more engaging and compelling than Blyton books, because the characters were so well drawn that I cared about them, identified with them. I was Jim Hawkins in the Hispaniola hiding in that barrel of apples on deck, overhearing Long John Silver and his mutinous, villainous cronies hatching their murderous plans. And the island itself – I knew Treasure Island like the back of my hand. I lived on that island, knew its beaches and caves and the stockade. That island was a world of its own, and I loved that.
Then there was Lord of the Flies by William Golding. I read this as a teenager, as many of us do, and was struck at once not only by the dark power of the story, but also the landscape. Golding’s island is not simply scenery against which the story is played out. It is the wilderness and wildness of the island, the isolation from the world and the imprisoning sea itself that determine the behaviour of the boys.
Islands fast became a fascination. I read all the books I could about them. Then later, when I was grown-up, about thirty, I was lucky enough to visit some islands that were isolated and wild, where the sea rules. Every summer we would go to the Isles of Scilly for our holidays, to stay on Bryher, the smallest of the five inhabited islands, rearing cliffs at Hell Bay at one end, and beaches of the finest sand at the other at Rushy Bay. I got to know that island and its people in all weathers, when the fog rolled in and the lighthouse hooted its warning, when storms raged and threatened to flood and overwhelm, when the sun shone over a sparkling green sea. And we caught crabs and shrimps in the rock pools, went fishing for mackerel. Bliss it can be on such days. But the sea always rules. Tides, the wind, the weather dictate the lives of islanders and visitors. There are times when you cannot leave the island for days on end.
The more I got to know the Scillies, the more I became aware of the effect of isolation on how islanders feel, how they see the world, their sense of independence, their toughness. I listened to their stories, stories of wrecks and treasure, of great tragedy and supreme courage. There were ancient burial chambers, field systems now swallowed up by the sea, but visible. The Romans had been here, King Arthur too, maybe, and pirates and monks. Scilly for me was a treasure house of stories, both true and legendary. I immersed myself in the place. So it was hardly surprising that in the end, I sat down and wrote my own stories about Scilly, on Bryher mostly. I wrote Why the Whales Came, then The Wreck of the Zanzibar; The Sleeping Sword; Arthur, High King of Britain; Half a Man; and recently, Listen to the Moon. But there was one island story I could not set on Scilly.
Like many writers, I receive letters from readers from time to time. I like them, because mostly, people write because they have loved the stories. So, I confess it, I love getting fan mail – makes a fellow feel good, especially if he is having difficulty with his new story. About a year after The Wreck of the Zanzibar came out, I got a letter from a boy which went something like this.
Dear Mr Morpurgo,
I read your book The Wreck of the Zanzibar. It is the best book I ever read, better than all the Harry Potter books put together. BUT, it is about a girl. I am a boy. Will you please write me a story about a boy who gets stuck on a desert island?
Yours sincerely…
What a great idea! I thought. Until I discussed it with Clare, my wife. She said it wasn’t an original idea. Didn’t I realize there was Treasure Island, Lord of the Flies – both about boys on desert islands, classics, known and loved all over the world, both by literary giants. That, of course, was precisely why I liked the idea. All right, so Stevenson and Golding were great writers, but I could have a go, couldn’t I?
But try as I did to dream up my story of my boy on the desert island, I couldn’t find a way to make it work. Everything I thought up seemed to have been done before. It was beginning to look as if Clare had been right – she usually is. I couldn’t even find a way of getting my boy onto the island. Then I struck lucky. At a very dull party I got talking to a stranger, a young man, and asked him, as you do, what he did. He told me that he had just returned from five years’ sailing around the world on a yacht, stopping off on uninhabited islands in the Pacific. I remember, as he was telling me, that I felt the hair on the back of my neck standing up.
“Just you, on your own?” I asked him.
“No, with my wife too!”
“The two of you, then?”
“No, three. Our son came along.”
“A boy?” I said.
“Sons usually are,” he replied. “Oh, yes, and the dog – the dog came too. The dog fell overboard once or twice.”
“Really?” I said.
Suddenly the dull party was dull no more. I quizzed the poor stranger for an hour or more and came away knowing I could do this now. Unseen, in the dark of night, the boy would somehow fall off the yacht, dog too, and there he was in the sea, watching the boat sail away into the darkness, his mum and dad on board, his screams unheard. Swim, swim, swim … sharks, sharks, sharks. Island, island, island! I had my boy on the island, and with a dog too. I added a football, because I felt like it. That was a bonus!
Once I got home and thought about it, I realized this wasn’t enough in itself to make a story. You can’t make bread with just flour, you need yeast, salt, water, oil. All I had was a boy and a dog on an island. Then what? Again, I simply could not go any further. I very nearly abandoned the idea altogether. But it obsessed me, would not leave me alone.
From time to time, I cut out stories that interest me from newspapers, true stories. I kept asking myself who else could be on this island? Maybe it wasn’t deserted but already inhabited? That was when I remembered the story I had cut out of a newspaper, about a Japanese soldier who, after the end of the Second World War, refused to believe the war was lost, and remained at his post on an island in the Pacific. Over twenty years later he had been discovered and brought back to Japan. I had my yeast, my salt, my water, my oil! My boy thinks himself alone with his dog on this island, but it turns out that there is also a Japanese sailor there, who has stayed on the island after the war, hidden himself away from the world and made the place his own, his kingdom. He does not want this intruder on his island. He feeds him, but ostracizes him. So, a young boy of today from one culture, one time, has to get along with an ancient Japanese warrior from another time, another culture, who does not want the boy there, nor his dog. Conflict! I had conflict. In my story, in almost any story, conflict is important, essential.
Before I can begin a story, I have to have names. I have already said that I am not good at choosing names for my characters. With Kensuke’s Kingdom I struggled for weeks, searching for names that might work. Without them, I couldn’t write even my first sentence. In the end, in desperation, I called the boy Michael, as I do! It was a start. Then I happened to be listening one day to a song on our Buddy Holly CD, Peggy Sue. Great name for a boat, I thought. It was difficult, though, to find a name for my marooned Japanese sailor. Then I got lucky again – luck, happenstance, always plays its part in the making of my stories, a large part. I went one day to a school to do a talk, and afterwards was signing books for the children. I looked up and there was this tall Japanese boy.
“What name shall I write in your book?” I asked him.
“Kensuke,” he said. He spelt it for me. I liked the sound of it, the look of it.
“Can I borrow your name?” I asked him.
“What for?”
“To use in my next book,” I told him.
“Can I have a copy of the book when it comes out?” he asked me. I agreed.
Only the dog’s name left to find. All I could think of was Rover or Sally or Scoobydoo, until one dark evening in winter when I was walking down the lane to the milking parlour on the farm, with some of the city children who had just come down for their week on the farm. Our dog, Bercelet, came along with us, as she often did. The children huddled together close to me as we walked – the darkness clearly made them nervous – there are no streetlamps in the countryside. One boy, the biggest of the group, was particularly nervous and talked a lot.
“That dog, what’s his name?” he asked me.
“Bercelet,” I replied.
“Bercelet! Funny name!” he laughed. “What sort of dog is that, then?”
“A lurcher,” I told him.
“Lurcher!” He laughed again, then said, “I got a bigger one than that back home, an Alsatian.”
“What’s he called?” I asked.
“Stella Artois,” he said. Now I was doing the laughing. I had my dog’s name, Stella Artois. The next day I sat down to write my story onto the paper, in my scrawly tiny writing. I called it Kensuke’s Kingdom.
The terrors came fast, one upon another. The lights of the Peggy Sue went away into the dark of the night, leaving me alone in the ocean, alone with the certainty that they were already too far away, that my cries for help could not possibly be heard. I thought then of the sharks cruising the black water beneath me – scenting me, already searching me out, homing in on me – and I knew there could be no hope. I would be eaten alive. Either that or I would drown slowly. Nothing could save me.
I trod water, frantically searching the impenetrable darkness about me for something, anything to swim towards. There was nothing.
Then a sudden glimpse of white in the sea. The breaking of a wave perhaps. But there were no waves. Stella! It had to be. I was so thankful, so relieved not to be all alone. I called out and swam towards her. She would keep bobbing away from me, vanishing, reappearing, then vanishing again. She had seemed so near, but it took several minutes of hard swimming before I came close enough to reach out and touch her. Only then did I realize my mistake. Stella’s head was mostly black. This was white. It was my football. I grabbed it and clung on, feeling the unexpected and wonderful buoyancy of it. I held on, treading water and calling Stella. There was no answer. I called and I called. But every time I opened my mouth now, the seawater washed in. I had to give her up. I had to save myself if I could.
There was little point in wasting energy by trying to swim. After all, I had nowhere to swim to. Instead, I would simply float. I would cling to my football, tread water gently and wait for the Peggy Sue to come back. Sooner or later they would come looking for me. I mustn’t kick too much, just enough to keep my chin above the water, no more. Too much movement would attract the sharks. Morning must come soon. I had to hang on till then. I had to. The water wasn’t that cold. I had my football. I had a chance.
I kept telling myself that over and over again. But the world stayed stubbornly black about me, and I could feel the water slowly chilling me to death. I tried singing to stop myself from shivering, to take my mind off the sharks. I sang every song I could remember, but after a while I’d forget the words. Always I came back to the only song I was sure I could finish: “Ten Green Bottles”. I sang it out loud again and again. It reassured me to hear the sound of my own voice. It made me feel less alone in the sea. And always I looked for the grey glint of dawn, but it would not come and it would not come.
Eventually I fell silent and my legs just would not kick any more. I clung to my football, my head drifting into sleep. I knew I mustn’t, but I couldn’t help myself. My hands kept slipping off the ball. I was fast losing the last of my strength. I would go down, down to the bottom of the sea and lie in my grave amongst the seaweed and the sailors’ bones and the shipwrecks.
The strange thing was that I didn’t really mind. I didn’t care, not any more. I floated away into sleep, into my dreams. And in my dream I saw a boat gliding towards me, silent over the sea. The Peggy Sue! Dear, dear Peggy Sue. They had come back for me. I knew they would. Strong arms grabbed me. I was hauled upwards and out of the water. I lay there on the deck, gasping for air like a landed fish.
Someone was bending over me, shaking me, talking to me. I could not understand a word that was being said. But it didn’t matter. I felt Stella’s hot breath on my face, her tongue licking my ear. She was safe. I was safe. All was well.
I was woken by a howling, like the howling of a gale through the masts. I looked about me. There were no masts above me, there were no sails. No movement under me either, no breath of wind. Stella Artois was barking, but some way off. I was not on a boat at all, but lying stretched out on sand. The howling became a screaming, a fearful crescendo of screeching that died away in its own echoes.
I sat up. I was on a beach, a broad white sweep of sand, with trees growing thick and lush behind me right down to the beach. Then I saw Stella prancing about in the shallows. I called her and she came bounding up out of the sea to greet me, her tail circling wildly. When all the leaping and licking and hugging were done, I struggled to my feet.
I was weak all over. I looked all about me. The wide blue sea was empty as the cloudless sky above. No Peggy Sue. No boat. Nothing. No one. I called again and again for my mother and my father. I called until the tears came and I could call no more, until I knew there was no point. I stood there for some time trying to work out how I had got here, how it was that I’d survived. I had such confused memories, of being picked up, of being on board the Peggy Sue. But I knew now I couldn’t have been. I must have dreamed it, dreamed the whole thing. I must have clung to my football and kept myself afloat until I was washed up. I thought of my football then, but it was nowhere to be seen.
Stella, of course, was unconcerned about all the whys and wherefores. She kept bringing me sticks to throw, and would go galloping after them into the sea without a care in the world.
Then came the howling again from the trees, and the hackles went up on Stella’s neck. She charged up the beach barking and barking, until she was sure she had silenced the last of the echoes. It was a musical, plaintive howling this time, not at all menacing. I thought I recognized it. I had heard howling like it once before on a visit to London Zoo. Gibbons, “funky gibbons”, my father had called them. I still don’t know why to this day. But I loved the sound of the word “funky”. Perhaps that was why I remembered what they were. “It’s only gibbons,” I told Stella, “just funky gibbons. They won’t hurt us.” But I couldn’t be at all sure I was right.
From where I now stood I could see that the forest grew more sparsely up the side of a great hill some way inland, and it occurred to me then that if I could reach the bare rocky outcrop at the summit, I would be able to see further out to sea. Or perhaps there’d be some house or farm further inland, or maybe a road, and I could find someone to help. But if I left the beach and they came back looking for me, what then? I decided I would have to take that chance.
Second World War Japanese soldiers, especially officers, fiercely adhered to a rigid code of “No surrender”. Japan had the oldest continuous hereditary monarchy in the world, and had never been invaded or lost a war. Japanese soldiers were fervently loyal to their Emperor, and believed in a variant of the Bushido code (literally, “the way of the warrior”). The most honourable fate for a warrior was to die taking enemies with him. Ordinary death in battle was the next most honourable fate; surrender unthinkable. Japanese troops who found themselves in a hopeless situation often adopted a suicide (or banzai) charge. They would die rather than surrender. Very few Japanese officers were captured alive until the final months of the war, and even then not many.
Towards the end of 1944, American forces were sweeping through the Pacific Islands to drive back the Japanese. The island of Guam was of strategic importance. Its airfields could handle large bombers, it had a deep harbour and its capture would assist the push towards the Philippines and Taiwan. When the attack began, the Japanese Guam garrison numbered 22,000. Over 18,000 were killed in the subsequent fierce fighting. As only 485 were taken prisoner, some just melted into the jungle.
On 24 January 1972, two fishermen from Talofofo village on Guam were checking their shrimp traps when they heard a sound in the tall reeds. Out came an old and wild-looking Japanese man, who tried to grab one of the hunter’s rifles.
Eventually, the story of Shoichi Yokoi’s twenty-eight years of survival became known. Yokoi, an apprentice tailor, was born in 1915, and conscripted in 1941. When US forces invaded, soldiers such as Yokoi became cut off from their commanders during the fierce fighting, and had to fend for themselves.
Yokoi’s long separation from the world began. He and a handful of other soldiers hid in the jungle. They took enormous care not to be detected, erasing their footprints as they moved through the undergrowth. They killed local cattle to eat. Later, fearing American patrols and local hunters, they withdrew deeper into the jungle, supplementing their diet of nuts and berries with venomous toads, river eels and rats.
Yokoi knew, from leaflets dropped by plane in 1952, that the war was over. But neither he nor the others would give up, because they thought the news might be false Allied propaganda. “We Japanese soldiers were told to prefer death to the disgrace of getting captured alive.” Over time their numbers dwindled to three, who shared a cave. Eight years before Yokoi was captured, the two other men died, but he continued to survive completely alone.
One of Michael’s inspiration triggers for Kensuke was a press article about another Japanese soldier found years after the war was over. After Yokoi’s return, there were searches for soldiers hiding out on islands and in the jungle. Another straggler turned up two years later in the Philippines. Unlike Yokoi, whose rifle had rusted and become useless, Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda had kept a working firearm and was accused of killing several villagers before he was discovered in the jungle. Onoda survived on coconut milk, bananas and stolen cattle.
Neither Yokoi nor Onoda found adjusting to life in modern Japan easy. Yokoi became a popular television personality, and advocate of simple living, but he disliked the country’s rapid post-war economic and industrial development. Japan had become a powerhouse of capitalism and technology. Yokoi became increasingly nostalgic about the past, and returned to Guam on several occasions before his death in 1997. There is a small museum on the island displaying Yokoi’s prize possessions from those years in the jungle.
Onoda, like Yokoi, returned triumphantly to his homeland as a symbol of the irrepressible soldier, and, like Yokoi, did not like what he found there. “Japan’s philosophy and ideas had changed dramatically. That philosophy clashed with mine, so I went to live in Brazil.” In South America he set up a cattle ranch. Eventually, he returned to Japan, teaching survival skills to youngsters.
Onoda had only surrendered when his ageing former commander visited him and read the thirty-year-old orders stating that combat activity had ceased. Onoda remembers the time with a mixture of emotions: “I became an officer and I received an order. If I could not carry it out, I would feel shame. Every Japanese soldier was prepared for death, but as an intelligence officer I was ordered to conduct guerrilla warfare and not to die… We really lost the war! How could they have been so sloppy? Suddenly everything went black. A storm raged inside me. What had I been doing for all these years? Gradually the storm subsided, and for the first time I really understood. My thirty years as a guerrilla fighter for the Japanese army were finished. This was the end. I pulled back the bolt on my rifle and unloaded the bullets.”