Kensuke's Kingdom by Michael Morpurgo

Author:Michael Morpurgo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2014-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

I smelled vinegar, and thought I was at home. My father always brought us back fish and chips for supper on Fridays and he loved to soak his in vinegar — the whole house would stink of it all evening. I opened my eyes. It was dark enough to be evening, but I was not at home. I was in a cave, but not my cave. I could smell smoke, too. I was lying on a sleeping mat covered in a sheet up to my chin. I tried to sit up to look around me, but I could not move. I tried to turn my neck. I couldn’t. I could move nothing except my eyes. I could feel, though. My skin, my whole body, throbbed with searing pain, as if I had been scalded all over. I tried to call out, but could barely manage a whisper. Then I remembered the jellyfish. I remembered it all.

The old man was bending over me, his hand soothing on my forehead. “You better now,” he said. “My name Kensuke. You better now.” I wanted to ask after Stella. She answered for herself by sticking her cold nose into my ear.

I do not know for how many days I lay there, drifting in and out of sleep, only that whenever I woke, Kensuke was always there sitting beside me. He rarely spoke and I could not speak, but the silence between us said more than any words. My erstwhile enemy, my captor, had become my savior. He would lift me to pour fruit juice or warm soup down my throat. He would sponge me down with cooling water, and when the pain was so bad that I cried out, he would hold me and sing me softly back to sleep. It was strange. When he sang to me it was like an echo from the past, of my father’s voice, perhaps — I didn’t know. Slowly the pain left me. Tenderly he nursed me back to life. The day my fingers first moved was the very first time I ever saw him smile.

When at last I was able to turn my neck I would watch him as he came and went, as he busied himself around the cave. Stella would often come and lie beside me, her eyes following him, too.

Every day now I was able to see more of where I was. In comparison with my cave down by the beach, this place was vast. Apart from the roof of vaulted rock above, you would scarcely have known it was a cave. There was nothing rudimentary about it at all. It looked more like an open-plan house than a cave — kitchen, sitting room, studio, bedroom, all in one space.

He cooked over a small fire that smoked continuously at the back of the cave, the smoke rising through a small cleft high in the rocks above — a possible reason, I thought, why there were no mosquitoes to bother me. There always seemed

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