Listen To The Moon by Michael Morpurgo

Fourteen year old  Alfred (Alfie) Wheatcroft and his parents, Jim and Mary live in Veronica Farm on the island of Bryher, one of the Isles of Scilly off the coast of Cornwall. 

Although Alfie's mother,  Mary warned him to go to school, Alfie is there waiting when his father Jim arrives at his boat on Green Bay. The two spend time fishing for mackerel but when the fishing is poor, Alfie suggests they go in closer to St. Helen's an isolated island where an old quarantine house, Pest House, sits abandoned. Alfie's father is not keen to do this but allows Alfie to row them in near the sandy beach to try their luck. Both Alfie and his father hear what seems to be a child crying. Scared, they beach their boat and soon discover that they are hearing a child, crying and coughing and it is coming from the Pest House.

Alfie discovers a pale, sick child hiding in the fireplace of the ruined Pest House, shivering and wrapped in a blanket. Terrified, the young girl tries to run away but collapses. Alfie and his father put the girl in the boat and take her back to Green Bay. They are met by Mary and many others who live on the island. Mary orders someone to send for Dr. Crow on St. Mary's. 

The girl momentarily awakens and whispers "Lucy" leaving those around her to believe that she is named Lucy. Lucy is taken to the Wheatcroft home at Veronica Farm. Dr. Crow encourages Lucy to eat and drink as she is feverish and dehydrated.  Alfie's cousin, Dave Bishop visits after the doctor leaves and tells Jim and Mary Wheatcroft that he went over to St. Helen's and found a grey sodden blanket and a bedraggled teddy bear. The blanket has the name Wilhelm on it and immediately Cousin Dave jumps to the conclusion that Lucy is German and a "lousy Hun". Alfie's mother threatens Cousin Dave, telling him he is to tell no one about the name on the blanket. He reluctantly promises.

At first the Wheatcrofts believe that Lucy doesn't speak because she might be German and therefore cannot understand English. However Alfie believes that Lucy does understand but for some reason cannot speak. It is June 1915 and with no end to the war in sight, the islanders are growing more apprehensive especially as the papers are filled with "daily reports of ever mounting casualties, those dreadful long lists in the papers of the killed, the wounded and the missing in action." The Isles of Scilly have had the bodies of four drowned Royal Navy sailors washed ashore in recent months. Lucy Lost as she is now referred to, continues to live with Alfie's family while people speculate on who she was and how she came to be on St. Helen's.

All of the Wheatcrofts must deal with harassment from the islanders. Jim is teased about finding mermaids while Mary must fend off constant questions about Lucy when she visits her twin brother Billy. Mary goes every day to visit Uncle Billy as he is called. She rescued him from the County Asylum in Bodmin where he was located after going missing following the death of his wife and baby. Billy who doesn't speak or interact much with the islanders, lives in the boat house on Green Bay. Most of his time is spent restoring an old ship, the Hispaniola which he intends to sail some day. Alfie too is quizzed by the teachers at school and is taunted by Cousin Dave's son, Zebediah Bishop. Eventually Alfie has had enough and the two fight and are given detention from the mean-spirited headmaster, Mr. Beagley. During detention Alfie learns that Cousin Dave has broken his promise not to tell about the blanket with the German writing on it.

Despite Lucy's silence, Alfie enjoys her company. He spends time talking to her in the hopes that she will gradually begin to talk again. Lucy however seems unable to respond. Dr. Crow is concerned that Lucy has been deeply traumatized, leaving her unable to speak. He believes that if she does not recover they will have to send her to the mental hospital.  He insists that the Wheatcrofts attempt to get Lucy out of bed and to that end he brings his gramophone. 

The gramophone seems to draw Lucy's attention, so much so that she begins to play Dr. Crow's records constantly and is especially fond of Mozart's Andante Grazioso. Unfortunately this does not help her to talk. Lucy however gradually becomes more involved in life at the Wheatcrofts; she waits for Alfie to return from school and begins to accompany him in the morning when he opens up the henhouse. 

Soon she manages to attend school, at first reluctant to cross the Tresco Channel in a boat, taking Peg, "a whiskery old horse" that no one was able to ride, across. Even when threatened by the Headmaster "Beastly Beagley", Lucy doesn't speak. But when she sees the piano, and plays Mozart, Miss Nightingale, the piano teacher is stunned. 

When word gets out that Lucy Lost was found with a blanket with the name Wilhelm on it, people are certain Lucy must be "a lousy Hun". This leads the villagers to treat Alfie's family and Lucy with much cruelty. The Wheatcroft family are considered "Fritz lovers" and are shunned and ostracized. The islanders stop buying Jim's fish and Mary's eggs. The are shunned even at church. The situation reaches a crisis point when the Wheatcroft's door is painted with "Remember the Lusitania" and rocks are thrown through Lucy's bedroom window. 

Dr. Crow suggests that Alfie take Lucy back to St. Helen's and the Pest House in the hopes that this will help her remember and to speak. Against the advice of his mother, Alfie does this and it does seem to help as Lucy begins to speak a few words. But it is Uncle Billy and the Hispaniola and a second tragedy that finally leads Lucy to reveal her identity and what happened to her only a few months earlier.

Discussion

Listen to the Moon is set in the summer of 1915 on the Isles of Scilly off the Cornwall coast. What will someday be known as The Great War is only ten months along. Like most people back in 1914, the islanders believed the war would be over by Christmas of that year, but by May 1915, the number of dead is quickly mounting, with no end in sight. The Isles have casualties among their own and hatred of the Germans or anything German is high. One of those casualties is the sinking of the ocean liner, the Lusitania on May 7, 2015 by the German U-boat SM U-20 in the North Atlantic. 

The Lusitania was one of the largest ocean liners traveling the Atlantic in 1915. The ship was traveling from New York to Liverpool carrying 1959 passengers and around one hundred-seventy-three tons of ammunition when she was torpedoed. She sank in about eighteen minutes. Over one thousand people died in the sinking which happened off the Old Head of Kinsale. Prior to the voyage, the German embassy placed notices in American newspapers warning of the risk of ships being sunk in the waters around Britain. The sinking created an great deal of animosity towards Germany and the German people.

The novel offers a fictional story of Merry MacIntyre who along with her mother, was on her way to England to visit her soldier-father. Merry's father was originally from Toronto but like many of his generation decided to fight for his ancestral homeland, Britain, in the First World War. By the time the war began, Merry's father and mother lived in New York. With her father wounded and stationed at a hospital in England, Merry and her mother decided to travel there to visit him.  They book passage on the Lusitania which is torpedoed and sinks quickly. Merry and a younger girl, Celia are placed into a life boat.

When the life boat they are in is swamped, Merry manages to swim with Celia on her back to the floating grand piano from the ship. Celia dies and her body floats off the piano. Merry is rescued by U-boat 19 and a kindly sailor, Wilhelm gives her the blanket his mother made for him, with his name on it. The U-boat is not able to return to Germany with a child, so they set Merry ashore on the coast, not realizing that the island is deserted. Eventually, after several days, Merry is discovered by Alfie and his father. 

Morpurgo begins his story with the grandson of Merry MacIntyre who has pieced together the story of his grandma whom he describes as having come out of the sea and informs the reader that he has told it as dictated to him. It begins with Alfie and his family set in Scilly Isles in May, 1915. The narrator then switches to Merry in New York, March 1915 who provides the background to how she and her mother come to be on the Lusitania. The narrator alternates throughout the story, from Alfie in third person, to Dr. Crow in the form of his journal entries and first person narrative, to Mr. Beagley. After a short chapter by Merry's grandson, she concludes the novel with her perspective, recorded in New York in 1997. 

Listen To The Moon is quite long for a juvenile novel at 444 pages and the pacing is sometimes inconsistent. In some ways it is a complex novel, with many narrators, a story within a story, that begins in 1915 and ends in 1997. 

Morpurgo does his usual excellent job of creating the setting for the novel which is the Isles of Scilly. A map of the isles would have been helpful in orienting young readers, who outside of the United Kingdom, are probably not familiar with this part of the world.

The simple life of the people is well portrayed as are the attitudes common in the early twentieth century. The anti-German sentiment of the islanders is a main focus of the storyline and is directed towards the young girl, "Lucy Lost" who comes to the island community and the family who generously takes her in. At times the bad treatment of the Wheatcrofts seems overdone, perhaps to demonstrate that such emotions are often not rational and at the time were very intense.

The people of Scilly have a reputation for risking their lives to save sailors who are shipwrecked. Capitan Klausen of the U boat that sank the Lusitania tells Merry that he rescued her because of the courage and kindness of the islanders from Scilly who rowed out to the wreck of the Schiller many years ago to save his uncle. As a result, "...the order was given at the beginning of the war that no German warships will ever attack any boats of any kind around the Isles of Scilly." This same act of courage and kindness is repeated months later when Uncle Billy rescues a German sailor, Wilhelm Kreuz who had saved Merry, from his wrecked U boat. When their connection becomes known, the islanders are forced to reconsider their views on Germans. As Dr. Crow writes in his journal, "Anyone who knows what he did for Lucy - or, as I should now say, for Merry - will, I trust, remember him as a good German, a kind German - one, I am sure, of many. Even in the midst of this terrible conflict, we should all do so well to remember that, and remember him."

Morpurgo's description of the torpedoing and sinking of the Lusitania, experienced through the eyes of Merry MacIntyre are very well done. The author effectively portrays the horror and trauma a young Merry experiences during the chaos of the rapidly sinking ship which was listing so badly many of the lifeboats could not be launched. Placed into a lifeboat with a small child, Celia, Merry is traumatized by seeing her mother in her distinct Chinese dressing gown, floating facedown in the ocean. She must also watch people down. "I had to turn away. I could not bear to see any more. But I could not turn away from the screaming, from the wailing of the small children desperate for lost mothers and fathers."

Later on Merry tries to distract Celia "...to take her mind and mine away from everything that had happened, from the dying that was going on all around us, from the horror of all we were witnessing. The ocean itself seemed to be writhing and moaning in despair, crying out in fear, wailing in pity."

Readers also get the perspective of the German sailors who torpedo boats but must also watch and listen to the sailors dying. Seeman Wilhelm Kreuz tells Dr. Crow that "It is a terrible thing for a sailor to sink a ship, to watch it go beneath the waves, to see men die. You can hear them shout, hear them scream. For a sailor to kill a sailor is like killing a brother. There were many brothers on the Lusitania, and mothers and fathers, and little children like Lucy. We could save only this one. So we did."

The novel's unusual title is a reference to the practice Merry's father had involving the moon. He told her before leaving for the war in Europe, "Whenever I see the moon, Merry,... I will think of you and sing our Mozart tune. You do the same, so that whenever we look up at the moon, wherever we are, we shall listen to the moon, and hear one another and think of one another. Promise me." Later on, in a letter written to her as he's recuperating in a hospital named Bearwood in England, "I sing to the moon and I listen to the moon, as I promised." 

 

Listen To The Moon is a wonderful story, that offers young readers plenty of themes to consider: when is war just, the morality of submarine war as waged by the Germans in World War I, identity, racism during war, post traumatic stress in soldiers and civilians as a result of war. Morpurgo provides young readers with more information regarding the  S.S. Lusitania, the German U-boat campaign, the Isles of Scilly and the S.S. Schiller in a short section titled Read On For Some Background Information on Listen to the Moon.

Book Details:

Listen To The Moon by Michael Morpurgo
London: HarperCollins Children's Books     2014
433 pp.