What You Wish For: A Book for Darfur

ALEXANDER McCALL SMITH

THE STRANGE STORY OF BOBBY BOX

Have you ever thought of what your life story would sound like if you told it to somebody? Many people would probably say, Not all that unusual or Not very interesting. And maybe that’s true—for most of us—but then there are people whose life stories are very different. If they told us what had happened to them, we might think, This can’t be true or perhaps You’re making it up.

That’s what they said to Bobby. They said that he must be making it up—but he wasn’t, you know. Everything he said about what happened to him was true—down to the very last detail. And now here’s his story.

1

Most life stories begin with parents. So you say something like, My mother was twenty-five when she had me. She had dark black hair and a lovely smile and . . . And so on. Bobby could not say this. He never knew his mother, and he never knew his father. This was because he was found in an open-topped wooden box, one used for packing oranges, floating down a river. A fisherman who was rowing his boat upstream saw the box coming down to meet him, moving slowly in the middle of the current. He shipped his oars and waited for the box to draw level with him, and you can imagine his surprise when he saw what it contained. By all the stars in heaven, he muttered as he reached out to grab the side of the box before it floated past. By all the stars in heaven—and the moon too! That may sound like a strange thing to say, but then the sight of a box containing a little baby wrapped up in a white blanket was a rather strange sight.

Taking great care, the fisherman took the baby from the box and laid him down on the bottom of his boat. Then he slipped his oars back into the rowlocks and rowed as fast as he could for the jetty he used, which was just a short distance upstream. Unfortunately he forgot all about the box, which drifted away with the current and was never seen again. This was a mistake, because it might have contained some clue as to who the baby was. There might have been a letter, or perhaps even a note saying something like This baby is the property of . . . and then given a name. As it was, there was nothing on the blanket or on the baby’s clothes to give any idea of who he was and why he had been put into this tiny vessel, this orange box, and made to float down the river.

You should have looked, said the policeman to whom the fisherman later reported his extraordinary find. You should have looked in the box. You were very careless!

The fisherman defended himself. What could I do? he protested. I had to get the baby into the boat. I couldn’t fiddle about with the box as well.

They left it at that, but the policeman was clearly annoyed. Remember that this all took place in a remote part of Scotland, in a place where he was the only policeman for twenty miles or so. Now here he was landed with a baby, of all things, and his wife was away staying with her sister on the island of Skye for a month. How could he be expected to look after this baby?

He told the fisherman to sit down while he wrote an entry in his book. Time: 2:30 p.m. Lost property brought into station. Nature of lost property: one baby (male). Action: returned to finder for safekeeping.

Satisfied with the entry in his book, he looked at the fisherman and told him what he would have to do. You found this baby, he said. You’ll have to look after it, I’m afraid.

The fisherman’s eyes widened with astonishment. He struggled to find words, and eventually all that he could say was, What?

The policeman explained, We have no room here to keep a baby. And babies require food and . . . and all sorts of things. You found this baby—you look after him. Sorry about that, but that’s the law.

The fisherman knew little about the law—in fact, he knew nothing about it. And in those days, when a policeman told you that the law said this or that, you believed him. So he picked up the baby and took him home to the small cottage that he had on the edge of the bay. He had no idea what to do. The baby was beginning to cry, and the fisherman thought that perhaps he was hungry. When he got home, he would give him some fish to eat, he decided.

2

Give fish to a baby? exclaimed the fisherman’s aunt. Are you crazy?

The fisherman did not have a wife, and so he had called for help from his aunt, who was married to the man who ran the village shop. At first she had not believed him when she received the message that there was a baby and her advice was needed. But when she arrived at the fisherman’s house, she found the fisherman trying to feed the baby a small piece of fish that he had cooked and put in a bowl.

He’s hungry, said the fisherman.

That may be so, said the aunt. But you don’t give such a small baby solid foods like that.

Not even fish? asked the fisherman.

Not even fish, said the aunt. And anyway, where did you get this baby?

The fisherman told her the story. As he did so, the aunt took the baby and wiped the small bits of fish from his face. Poor little thing, she said. You’ve been abandoned, haven’t you?

Whoever did it was very cruel, said the fisherman. He could easily have drowned.

The aunt nodded. Well, he’s safe now, I’m happy to say. And we can take him into town and hand him over to the babies’ home. There’s a place that takes babies—orphans and the like. They’ll look after him. She touched the baby gently on the cheek, comforting him. Shall we give him a name?

The fisherman thought for a moment. Bobby, he said.

Why Bobby? asked his aunt.

Suits him, said the fisherman.

All right, said the aunt. Bobby it is. Bobby Box, because he was found in a box.

Good idea, said the fisherman.

They took Bobby into town in the fisherman’s old car. The aunt sat with the baby in the back because the springs in the front were broken and the baby would have a softer ride that way. After half an hour of bumping and bouncing, they found themselves outside a rather grim-looking building on which the words HOME FOR BABIES (AND SMALL CHILDREN) were carved in stone above the front door. And beneath that, there was a bell with a small notice that said, All orphaned or lost babies welcome. Ring for attention.

The aunt rang, and after a minute or two the door was opened by a woman wearing a blue dress and a small, starched white cap. She looked down immediately at the baby in the aunt’s arms. Oh no! she sighed. Not another one!

3

So it was that Bobby went to live in a babies’ and children’s home. And that was where he stayed for the next six years. He was not very happy there—the beds were hard and lumpy and no matter which way you tried to lie, you could never get really comfortable. And that was not the only thing that he did not like about the home: the food was another problem, and the bullying, which nobody did anything about.

The food first. There was never quite enough of it, and there was not a single child, not one, who did not go to bed hungry. Now, waking up hungry is bad enough, but going to bed with hunger pangs gnawing at your stomach is another thing altogether. You lie there, feeling the sides of your empty stomach clinging to your ribs, and think about food. You cannot help it—no matter how hard you try. You just think about food. You think about large pieces of bread, thickly spread with butter and red jam. You think about cakes, and chocolate, and pies covered with sweet yellow custard. You think about bacon sandwiches and marzipan animals. You think about apples and plums, and fried potatoes with crispy brown skins. You think about everything you know you will never get.

Then the bullying. Although many of the children who lived in this home were very small, there were some older ones too. These children were ten or twelve or even fourteen or fifteen. They had been there for a long time, and they lived in two rooms at the top of the building. One of these rooms was labeled BOYS and the other GIRLS. The smaller children were not allowed up there and so they did not see that the older children had taken the best beds and the best rugs and the best of everything.

The leader of the older boys was a very fat boy called Ern. He was fourteen and had spiky red hair. He had a bed at the end of the room and it was piled high with the blankets he had stolen from all the smaller children. It could get rather cold at night, but Ern never felt the chilly air once he was tucked up in his bed with its numerous blankets. Down below, in their bleak, cold rooms, the children whose blankets had been stolen had to make do with a thin coverlet, or a doubled-up sheet, and would shiver their way through the night, drifting in and out of sleep, dreaming, no doubt, of icebergs and polar bears.

Ern was a bully. He would grab the smaller children’s ears or noses and twist them until their eyes watered. Some of the children’s noses were an odd shape as a result of this treatment, and Ern laughed at this. What’s wrong with your nose? he would crow. Walked into a door?

Did Mavis Broon, the woman who ran the home, know that this was going on? She did. Did she do anything to stop it? She did not, not even when she saw Ern helping himself to the younger children’s food.

Don’t eat too much, Ern, she said mildly.

No, I won’t, don’t worry, Mavis old girl, said Ern, popping into his mouth potatoes meant for the smaller children, who would go hungry as a result.

That was the way it was, and that was what Bobby had to put up with until shortly after his sixth birthday, when Mavis Broon sold him to a farmer who wanted a boy to help him to look after his sheep and help cut the hay. She was not meant to sell the children, but she did, spending the money on whisky, which she drank at night, in her room, listening to the radio playing dance tunes until well past midnight.

4

There was more to eat at the farmer’s house. So that was one thing that was better in poor Bobby Box’s life, even if there was little improvement in other respects. His bed was just as uncomfortable, and his room, which was reached by climbing up a small wooden staircase in the barn, was just as cold. It was lonely—sleeping out in the barn with only the animals for company—and scary too, as when he was woken up one night by a great owl that had flown into the barn and was swooping around, trying to find a way out.

But the real problem was the work, which went on from the crack of dawn until the last rays of sunlight faded from the sky. It seemed to Bobby as if the farmer never did anything but work; he was always up first, walking around the farmyard, feeding the hens or fiddling with this or that bit of farm equipment. Then, during the day, he would be walking through his fields or driving his tractor while Bobby chased after stray sheep or did some other task set for him by the farmer. And this was how it was every single day, with no time for rest.

We don’t need to bother with school, said the farmer. Waste of time, school.

Bobby did not reply. The farmer tended to become moody if you disagreed with him on anything, and so Bobby just bit his tongue. He wished that he could go to school like other children. He wished that he had parents, as other children had. He wished for so much, but it seemed that he never got anything that he wished for, and so he tried to stop wishing. If you don’t wish for anything, he thought, then you won’t feel so disappointed when you don’t get it.

He spent four years on that farm—four long, hard years. Four harvests, cutting hay with a scythe until his back and arms ached. Four winters, carrying hay up to the sheep, taking load after load until his hair was covered with hayseeds and his nose blocked with tiny pieces of dried grass. Four springs and four summers of weeding vegetable beds and breaking the hard earth with fork and spade.

Then, just after his tenth birthday, he decided to run away. I’m not a slave, he thought. I don’t have to work here all my life for nothing.

He would have liked to write a note to the farmer to tell him that he was going, but he could not write. Nobody had bothered to teach Bobby to read or write, and now he could not even leave a message to say good-bye. He did know, however, how to write the letter B. And so he wrote that on a piece of paper and left that on the kitchen table along with a small present of a couple of feathers he had found on the hill, a flower he had picked from the roadside, and a green stone he had found at the edge of the river and had polished until it glowed with hidden light. The feathers meant: I have gone, I have flown away. The flower meant: I do not think badly of you. And the stone meant: I shall not give up. I shall not be broken.

He left in the early morning one day, before even the farmer had got out of bed. Packing his few possessions in a small bag, he walked down the farm track and onto the road that led off in the distance to the places he had heard of but could only just imagine—the cities of Scotland where the great ships were made and where the sky was filled with the smoke of factory chimneys.

He was filled with a sense of freedom. There was nobody around now to tell him what to do. The sky above his head was his and his alone; the air he breathed was free. And nobody, he thought as he lifted his head in the morning air, could take the sun away from him and switch it off.

After walking for four miles, he stopped to rest at a place where the road ran beside a small stream—what in Scotland we call a burn. He took off his shoes and socks and put his feet in the deliciously cool water, relishing the feeling of water between his toes. He closed his eyes and listened to a bird calling high in the sky above him. Then he opened his eyes and saw that a large truck had stopped on the road behind him.

The driver got out of his cab and came down to where Bobby was sitting beside the burn.

What are you doing? asked the man.

Sitting here, said Bobby. I’m walking to Glasgow. Glasgow was the name of the place he was heading for; he was not sure where it was, or how far away, but that was where he was going.

Hop in, said the man, nodding in the direction of his cab. Come on.

Nobody had ever told Bobby that one should never do a thing like that, and so he did not waste any time. Pausing only to put his socks and shoes back on, he climbed up into the cab and they set off.

Don’t bother going to Glasgow, said the man. I can give you a job.

Bobby did not want to work on a farm again and started to tell the man that before he was cut short.

I’m not a farmer, said the man. I run a circus.

Bobby had never heard of circuses and asked the man to tell him what they were.

Circuses are big shows, said the man. They take place in a big tent and move from town to town. There are clowns and trapeze artists and performing dogs. There are two fierce lions and a lion tamer. There are dancing horses and a ringmaster who wears a red coat and a top hat. He paused, looking quizzically at Bobby. Interested? And then, without waiting for Bobby to answer, he said, Good. Well that’s settled then.

5

The circus was camped on the edge of a small town, on a piece of waste ground. Well before they reached it, the man, who was called Mr. Macgregor, had pointed out the tent in the distance, with its large red notice saying Macgregor’s Circus.

That’s us, said Mr. Macgregor. And you see those caravans over there? That’s where you’ll stay with the other children.

Other children? asked Bobby. Who are they?

Acrobats, said Mr. Macgregor. Funny bunch. Nobody knows where they come from. Nobody speaks their language, you see. But they’re very good at their job, you see, and that’s the important thing. Their act brings the house down every night.

There was a question that Bobby wanted to ask, and