KK 1 b

Why did he have to live out a lie and what's the reason he's speaking now?
Was there a lot of variety in his days of childhood?
Was his father able to repair anything or was he a complete good-for-nothing man?
What happened after receiving the letter from the bricksworks?
Why did his father say that he had made up his mind?
 

constr after wish

KK 1a

“Silly beggar,” she said. “Your dad’s a silly beggar, Michael, that’s what he is.”

“What’s he done?” I asked her.

“He’s gone off,” she told me, and I thought she meant for good. “He wouldn’t hear reason, oh no. He’s had this idea, he says. He wouldn’t tell me what it was, only that he’s sold the car, that we’re moving south, and he’s going to find us a place.”

My father did indeed seem a changed man. He was waiting for us when we got off the train, all bright-eyed again and full of laughter. He helped us with the cases. “It’s not far,” he said, ruffling my hair. “You wait till you see it, monkey face. I’ve got it all sorted, the whole thing. And it’s no good you trying to talk me out of it, either of you. I’ve made up my mind.”

“What are we doing here?” my mother asked.

“There’s someone I want you to meet. A good friend of mine. She’s called Peggy Sue. She’s been looking forward to meeting you. I’ve told her all about you.”

My mother frowned at me in puzzlement.

“Here she is,” he said. “Let me introduce you. This is the Peggy Sue. Our new home. Well?”

Considering everything, my mother took it pretty well. She didn’t shout at him. She just went very quiet, and she stayed quiet all through his explanation down in the galley over a cup of tea.

“It wasn’t a spur of the moment thing, you know. I’ve been thinking about it a long time, all those years working in the factory. All right, maybe I was just dreaming about it in those days. Funny when you think about it: if I hadn’t lost my job, I’d never have dared do it, not in a million years.” He knew he wasn’t making much sense. “All right, then. Here’s what I thought. What is it that we all love doing most? Sailing, right? Wouldn’t it be wonderful, I thought, if we could just take off and sail around the world? There’s people who’ve done it. Blue water sailing, they call it. I’ve read about it in the magazines.

“Like I said, it was just a dream to start with. And then, no job and no chance of a job. What did the man say? Get on your bike. So why not a boat? We’ve got our redundancy money, what little there was of it. There’s a bit saved up, and the car money. Not a fortune, but enough. What to do with it? I could put it all in the bank, like the others did. But what for? Just to watch it dribble away till there was nothing left? Or, I thought, or I could do something really special with it, a once-in-a-lifetime thing: we could sail around the world. Africa. South America. Australia. The Pacific. We could see places we’ve only ever dreamed of.”

Kensuke Kingdom 1

Peggy Sue

I disappeared on the night before my twelfth birthday. July 28, 1988. Only now can I at last tell the whole extraordinary story, the true story. Kensuke made me promise that I would say nothing, nothing at all, until at least ten years had passed. It was almost the last thing he said to me. I promised, and because of that I have had to live out a lie. I could let sleeping lies sleep on, but more than ten years have passed now. I have done school, done college, and had time to think. I owe it to my family and to my friends, all of whom I have deceived for so long, to tell the truth about my long disappearance, about how I lived to come back from the dead.

But there is another reason for speaking out now, a far, far better reason. Kensuke was a great man, a good man, and he was my friend. I want the world to know him as I knew him.

Until I was nearly eleven, until the letter came, life was just normal. There were the four of us in the house: my mother, my father, me and Stella – Stella Artois, that is, my-one-ear up and one-ear-down black and white sheepdog, who always seemed to know what was about to happen before it did. But even she could not have foreseen how that letter was going to change our lives for ever.

Thinking back, there was a regularity, a sameness about my early childhood.

Sundays were always special, I remember. We’d go dinghy sailing, all of us, on the reservoir, Stella Artois barking her head off at the other boats as if they’d no right to be there. My father loved it, he said, because the air was clear and clean, no brick dust – he worked down at the brickworks. He was a great do-it-yourself fanatic. There was nothing he couldn’t fix, even if it didn’t need fixing. So he was in his element on a boat. My mother, who worked part time in the office at the same brickworks, revelled in it, too. I remember her once, throwing back her head in the wind and breathing in deep as she sat at the tiller. “This is it,” she cried. “This is how life is supposed to be. Wonderful,  just wonderful.”

Then the letter arrived. Stella Artois savaged it as it came through the letterbox. There were puncture holes in it and it was damp, but we could read enough. The brickworks were going to close down. They were both being made redundant.

There was a terrible silence at the breakfast table that morning. After that we never went sailing on Sundays any more. I didn’t have to ask why not. They both tried to find other jobs, but there was nothing