Free Alone on a Wide Wide Sea by Michael Morpurgo Page A

lifting his nose, sniffing the air, and listening. We could hear kookaburras and galahs, all the cackle of the bush at daybreak, but certainly nothing out of the ordinary. But then we heard the sound of whistling, of someone singing, a woman singing, and with it the tread of a horse in among the trees below us, of a saddle creaking. Big Black Jack whinnied again.
    A great bay horse was coming out of the trees and up the hills towards us, on its back a rider in a wide-brimmedstraw hat. But it wasn’t the horse or the rider that we were looking at so much as the cavalcade that was following along behind, a cavalcade of creatures, all of them infants: wombats, wallabies, joeys. And as the rider came closer I could see there was a koala clinging on round her neck, looking at me over her shoulder. She rode right up to us, let the horses touch noses and check each other over. Meanwhile she took off her hat and looked us up and down. I haven’t forgotten the first words she spoke to us:
    “Strewth,” she said. “Look what the cat brought in. But maybe it wasn’t the cat, right? How’d you get here?”
    “It was the bushmen,” Marty told her.
    “I thought as much. Are you waifs and strays then? They only bring me waifs and strays. They know I collect them, see. They don’t eat the little ones, not unless they’ve got to. Good people they are. Just about the best, I’d say. Where are you from?”
    “England,” I said. There was a wombat rooting around my feet now.
    “S’all right. He won’t bite,” she told me. “You’ve come fair ways then.”
    “We were at Cooper’s Station,” Marty said. “We escaped.”
    “I know Cooper’s Station. Mr Bacon’s place, right? Where’s he’s got all those orphan kids.” She looked us up and down.
    “He used to be the preacher in town before they moved out there,” she continued. “If there’s one thing I can’t abide it’s fanatics of any kind, and religious ones are the worst of all. Running away from that place seems a pretty sensible thing to do. You’ll be looking for somewhere to stay then.”
    Marty and I looked at one another. She was turning her horse now and walking away from us, her little animals following her. “Well, are you coming or aren’t you?” she called out. “If you are, then bring the poor old black horse with you. He needs feeding up by the looks of him. Come to that, so do you. Couple of raggedy little scarecrows, that’s what you are. I’ll soon fatten you up. Come along if you’re coming. Don’t spend too long thinking about it. Haven’t got all day.”
    Marty and I didn’t need to think twice about it. We followed along behind the cavalcade, and like us Big Black Jack had a new spring in his step. “That lucky key of yours,” said Marty. “You still got it?”
    “Yes,” I replied.
    “Just don’t ever lose it, that’s all,” he said.

Henry’s Horrible Hat Hole
    Big Black Jack knew it too, just as we did. We all knew we were coming home. He stepped out with new heart, snorting in his excitement all the while at the procession of creatures in front of him. Clearly size mattered to Big Black Jack when it came to kangaroos – the little joey hopping alongside the lady on the horse wasn’t a worry to him at all. Nothing worried him now, nothing worried any of us. If we had been in hell at Cooper’s Station before, now we were riding into paradise.
    We were looking all the while for a house of some kind. But all we could see were trees and green paddocks, and beyond them the winding river, and in the distance the bluest mountains I ever saw. Suddenly there it was, a long low shack of a place, a chimney at one end and a verandah all around. There was a pond nearby which cackled with geese that came out to greet us as we arrived, followed by a flurry of hens and chicks. This was to turn out to be our home for the next seven years, the first real home I ever had, the home of my childhood. And I’ve been grateful all my