TEST DRAFT 3 With LLaregub footnotes The Boy Who Shot Flimzy Bubbletrumpett- macbook 2

her to university. She was always clever at school. Not like me. But I think going to university
made thing worse. She got to see another kind of life. She saw opportunities.
She went off with an American schoolteacher and they got married and she went to live in the
USA. She sent a card to tell us and that was all we heard from her. She disappeared from my
life. As I said I was never close to her but I still miss her and now she is the only family I
have. I don’t even know if she knows our parents are dead. There had been fighting going on
all around us but my parents would not leave the farm. They had nowhere to go to. They just
hoped it would just pass us by. We had managed not to get involved or take sides. Soldiers
from both sides had come to the farm and taken food, stolen chickens, killed our sheep but
they had left us alone. Then one day I was out in the fields when there was an explosion. I
looked around and the farm was on fire. I could hardly see it through dust and smoke. My
mother had been inside. I raced back and as I entered the yard I saw my father dash into the
burning building. He never came out.
I just stood and waited. I did nothing. The heat was almost unbearable and I was afraid. Afraid
there would be another bomb or shell, or whatever it was that hit the farm. When I was certain
my father was not going to come out, I turned and ran. Ran until I couldn’t run any more.
Then I walked from village to village looking for work. Like I’m doing now.
Do you have any tea or coffee in that bag?
I had tea and sugar. I couldn’t think of anything to say. Mi took a blackened pan and two tin
mugs out of his pack and made us sweet tea.
The murmuring moan of Magpies in melancholy Monmouthshire?
Yes, that’s good. I said though I have never heard a magpie murmur or moan.
While we drank we speared sausages on the sharpened stick and roasted them above the
embers of the fire. Mi talked about growing up on the farm, how the family had lived with the
constant threat of war and how he believed that things would change for the better now the
old system had gone. And poetry. His bird poetry. The sky darkened and the fire died down. I
wrapped the blanket around myself and fell asleep.
I woke suddenly sometime in the middle of the night, the fire had long burned out. Above me
hung a bright dust of stars and the thin curl of a pale crescent moon; there was barely enough
light to make out the dark shape of Milan where he lay and the black shadow of the bushes
around us.
The night was warm, still and silent. No touch of wind stirred the leaves and the grass. I lay
with my eyes open, listening, but I heard nothing. I listened until tiredness overcame me and I
closed my heavy eyes, then not a minute later I heard a rustling. The cautious rustling sound
of an animal or person slowly pushing through the tufts of heather. Then suddenly the soft
thud of hoof beats on the soft turf. The sound jerked me into consciousness but it quickly
died away. Mi continued to sleep and I made no effort to wake him, it was all as still and
silent again as it had been before, and I soon drifted off to sleep.
We had hoped to cross the heath and reach the town of Kristina the next day, but things did
not go according to plan and we were forced to spend another night in the open air. We had
intended to start off early, but taken the time to light another fire to make tea and the sun was
high in the sky before we set off. The sky was clear and the day was hot, we were both tired
from our walk the day before, and I had a blister on my foot that slowed me down, so we
made frequent stops and very slow progress.
I told Mi about the sound of the horse I had heard in the night but he was unconcerned and
suggested that it was probably just a wild pony and that there plenty of them roaming the
heath.
Mi chatted away with his usual good humour, asking what I thought of various alliterative
lines for his poem.
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