Running Wild

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Sooner or later, after we got back home, Mum would always ask what we’d had for lunch, and we would always tell her, confess it sheepishly, and she would tell us both off. I knew that sooner rather than later, my grip must weaken and I would fall, or that maybe a branch would knock me off as Oona charged on. Award-winning storyteller Danyah Miller brings best-selling children’s author Michael Morpurgo’s treasured story to life. It seemed to me that she had been playing hide-and-seek with me, that this must be an invitation to come and play with her.

I could see it all in my head now, just as it had happened: Dad going off down the path in his uniform, Mum there beside me, watching him go, her arm round my shoulder, her hand smoothing my hair. It was as I was riding up there on the elephant, swaying in the sun, that Dad’s elephant joke came into my mind. Three years in the planning, the Exclusive World Premiere of Sir Michael Morpurgo’s ‘The Mozart Question’ opens at the Barn on the 21st March until the 30th April.The idea for this book came from a newspaper article about Aamber Owen, who was saved from the 2004 tsunami by an elephant whom she was riding at the time. Somehow I swung myself round so that I could cling on with both hands, trying all I could to scrabble up the elephant’s side, and haul myself up. Only now did I understand what it was that had spooked the elephant, and why she had kept running all this time. I closed my eyes, gritted my teeth, and determined there and then that nothing would ever make me let go again.

The television news kept showing the same photograph of Dad, always in his uniform, never as he was at home. I knew how much she loved her swimming, and her snorkelling, how for a whole week now she’d hardly ever been out of the water, how each morning we’d raced each other down the beach and into the water, and how she always swam like a seal, effortless and powerful. I saw boats being picked up like toys, only to disappear moments later, simply swallowed by the sea. He even had a weekly nature column in the local newspaper, so he knew what he was talking about, and I loved to hear him talking about it too.I knew then that I wasn’t alone in the world, that I had a friend, and that I wanted to survive, that I somehow had to survive, so I could go back to the coast, and find Mum. Everything I was seeing was new and exciting to me, the deep blue of the waveless ocean on one side, the shadowy green of the jungle on the other, where the trees came down to the sand. Oona heads into the jungle with Will on her back, and Will gradually learns to communicate with her and finds fruit and water enabling him to survive in the wild. But even as I was doing it, I could see it was useless, that neither sweet- talking, cajoling, begging, whacking, or threatening was ever going to work. Out on the tarmac of the windswept airfield, we stood and watched the plane land, and taxi to a standstill.

He has written over 150 books, including The Butterfly Lion, Kensuke’s Kingdom, Why the Whales Came, The Mozart Question, Shadow, and War Horse, which was adapted for a hugely successful stage production by the National Theatre and then, in 2011, for a film directed by Steven Spielberg. I could only sit there and listen to her great jaws grinding away, to her almost constantly rumbling stomach. Everything out there was nothing but a blur of grey skies and green fields, interrupted with monotonous regularity by endless passing telegraph poles.was really being honest with myself, that no one could possibly be alive back down there on the coast, and that there was no use any more in pretending otherwise.

As the taxi stopped outside home, she turned to me and told me to stay where I was, that she wouldn’t be long. Michael Morpurgo’s novel Running Wild, based on a true story, is brought to lush life with extraordinary heart, vibrant colour and exceptional creativity, wowing audiences of all ages and critics alike. But this, this was the real thing, this was life or death – I knew it because Oona was trumpeting it. After we’d waved him off, we stood there on the doorstep in our dressing gowns, watching the milk float come humming down the road. As Oona made her way ever onwards and upwards into the forest, I lay there in the howdah, on my back now, staring blankly up at the trees above me, consumed utterly by despair, numb with grief and longing.They’d just gaze back at me from out there in their wild world, interested perhaps, but quite unconcerned. But I found that the current was a great deal stronger out there than I had imagined, and I soon realised that I wasn’t going to make it. I’d be gazing out at the countryside rushing by, at cows and horses scattering away over the fields, at clouds of starlings whirling in the wind, at a formation of geese flying high into the evening sun. As I did so, Oona left it where it was, deliberately it seemed to me, and let me run my fingers along it as she breathed gently on my face. It occurred to me at once that if I threw myself off here, then at least I would have a soft landing.