But the notion of glory remained seductive. In 1956 he was taken to the cinema to see Reach for the Sky, based on the true story of Douglas Bader who, despite having lost both his legs in a flying accident before the war, was called back into the RAF, fought in the Battle of Britain, and was imprisoned in Colditz, where his attempts to escape were so cunning and determined that his captors threatened to confiscate his prosthetic legs. It was a film calculated to fill small boys with dreams of heroism. Bader, as played by Kenneth More, is buoyant in the face of adversity, a man able to inspire those around him without ever raising his voice or pulling rank; to infect others with resolution and hope in the midst of disaster. ‘This is a story of courage,’ the narrator intones as the credits roll. ‘It has no end, because courage has no end.’
Michael Morpurgo shared some of Bader’s qualities. At the end of his second term at the Abbey, when he was just eight, his headmaster’s report noted that he was ‘very much the leader of the younger generation of the school’. His contemporaries looked to him for guidance and found him ‘charismatic’. In his final report, in the summer of 1957, Mr Gladstone wrote confidently that, ‘although not a scholar’, Michael possessed ‘qualities that will ensure success’.
Pieter had by now moved on to Abbotsholme, a ‘progressive’ school in rural Derbyshire, where the headmaster, an old Christ’s Hospital boy, had struck a deal with Jack over fees. For Michael, Jack set his sights higher. The reputation of The King’s School, Canterbury, re-founded by Henry VIII in 1541, and with origins stretching back thirteen and a half centuries, had slumped somewhat between the two world wars. But, since the appointment of Canon ‘Fred’ Shirley as headmaster in 1935, pupil numbers had risen steadily as the school built up a reputation for academic, musical and sporting excellence. Shirley was a maverick and an enigma – to some a saint, to others a sadist. In a volume of recollections written after his death, one old boy offers what reads like a posthumous love letter, while another paints a pen portrait of a monster and madman, who stood behind him brandishing an open penknife during rehearsals for a Shakespeare play, threatening to stab him if he did not speak clearly. Shirley’s only daughter sums him up in a string of contradictory adjectives – ‘devout, doubting, an ardent left-winger, a thorough snob, loving, self-centred, compassionate, hurtful’. But fans and critics alike endorse Shirley’s Times obituary, which described him as ‘one of the most talked about headmasters in modern Britain’, and ‘one of the most successful’.
Shirley was a friend of Jack’s, and the two men agreed that Michael should sit the scholarship examination. ‘Everyone knew perfectly well that I was not scholarship material,’ Michael remembers. ‘I sat the first Greek exam in the lab at King’s, and I knew I was doing really badly. As I was starting on the second, the headmaster’s secretary, Miss Milward, called out my name. She marched me into her office and said that, because I’d only scored 2 per cent in the first exam, there was no point my sitting another Greek paper, and I was to do an intelligence test instead.’ A few weeks later, on 17 June 1957, Shirley wrote to Michael: ‘I have nominated you to a Lord Plender Scholarship – not at all on account of your marks in the exams! – but because I can give one of them for what is called “leadership quality” – so father gets the money value, and you can have your name up on the Abbey Honours Board; but it isn’t a King’s scholarship, so you won’t be able to wear a gown!’ The scholarship meant £100 off the fees – then £350 per annum – and was never officially entered into the school records.
Travellers to Canterbury today are greeted by a railway poster welcoming them to ‘a city where the present keeps step with the past’. In fact, once you have moved through the wooden postern from the city into King’s Mint Yard, it is easy to feel you have left the present behind, and have entered instead a world of cloisters, arches and twisting stone stairways. Lawns and passages have Arthurian names – the Green Court, the Dark Entry – and Tudor buildings jostle with medieval. Michael’s house was Galpin’s, Norman in origin. It was bordered on one side by the old pilgrims’ lodgings and on the other by the thick, flint city walls round which a night-watchman walked in the dark. He came right past Michael’s dormitory window, intoning ‘Twelve o’clock, fine night and all’s well’ as the great cathedral bell chimed midnight.
Canterbury Cathedral, soaring into the sky in Romanesque magnificence, seems to keep the school tucked beneath its wing. The public generally enters it by the massive Christ Church Gate, but the pupils of King’s slip in through a side door, which opens straight into what they call ‘the martyrdom’, where Thomas Becket was murdered in 1170. ‘There is a cathedral in the school grounds,’ a new boy once wrote home to his parents – King’s pupils feel that Canterbury Cathedral is theirs. Standing in the nave on a Sunday morning, staring up into the fan vaulting, with the organ thundering and the voices of 650 boys singing ‘All People that on Earth Do Dwell’, remains for Michael ‘one of the most extraordinary experiences on God’s earth’. And even more moving were the early-morning Communion services held in the candle-lit dimity of the cathedral undercroft, in the Chapel of Our Lady, next to Thomas Becket’s original tomb.
Michael at King’s School, Canterbury, 1959.
The influence of this devout environment is obvious in a diary Michael kept during the spring and summer terms of 1960, when he was seventeen. Day by day, he noted his sporting achievements, adding occasional jaunty reflections on events in the wider world: Saturday 27 February, ‘Princess Margaret is engaged to a photographer chap – Jones. ’Bout time too.’ But he rounded off almost every entry with an anxious, beseeching prayer, ‘God, Please aid me to do my best this term, and to enjoy myself, if it be your will. Please.’
Academically, his performance remained mediocre. On arrival at King’s he had been put in the B-stream, where he remained. Maths was particularly problematic. ‘He is not quick to learn,’ wrote the Maths master at the end of his first term, and his reports thereafter are beset with warnings that Michael might fail his O level – as indeed, on first go, he did. Even in English, and in creative writing, he showed little promise. In the composition section of the English Language O level, which he sat in the summer of 1959, he only just scraped through, with 56 per cent.
And yet, as his King’s friend Peter Campbell remembers, ‘he shone personally. He had an authority about him. He didn’t need to be part of the group.’ This is captured, for Campbell, in a photograph of the Rugby XV taken in his and Michael’s last year at the school. Fourteen of the fifteen – Campbell among them – are clearly part of a team; but Michael stands on the edge, chin defiantly in the air, staring outwards. This independence made him likeable and impressive both to his peers and to the staff. ‘He never makes a fuss, and so far as I know he never causes a harsh word or gets one,’ his housemaster, Richard Roberts, wrote at the end of his first term. ‘He has done well to qualify for promotion in the Corps so young.’
First XV, King’s School, Canterbury, spring 1962. Michael stands on the far right, next to Peter Campbell. Sebastian Barker is fifth from the left.
Michael at King’s School, Canterbury.
The Cadet Corps had quickly become central to Michael. One afternoon a week, it involved his dressing up in khaki tunic, blue beret, brass badge, puttees and boots, and reporting for duty to Colonel Kem Gross, whose job it was to initiate the pupils of King’s in the arts of rifle-loading, marching, map-reading, fieldcraft and command. These were skills well suited to a boy like Michael, with natural authority and an ability to get others to do his bidding without raising his voice or becoming unpleasant.
Yet what appealed to Michael most was not so much being in charge of other boys as feeling at one with them, in an organisation that ‘gave a frame to human activity’. And of course the uniform helped. Several of his diary entries refer to the efforts he put into working up a really good shine on his belt and boots and badge, and the results impressed his fellow pupils. ‘I saw him as Spotless Officer Number
One,’ says the poet Sebastian Barker, who was a year below Michael at King’s. ‘I still remember those pink cheeks of his beaming from his army uniform with whitewashed canvas sparkling round his ankles, and him with a straight back like a rifle standing to attention.’ After marrying Jack, Kippe had had two more children, Mark and Kay. Mark, who arrived at King’s in 1962, remembers Michael marching at the head of the Cadet Corps, so impeccably dressed that ‘he looked like an officer in the SS’.
This was not a game to Michael. As he marched in formation across the Green Court, he thought about the courage and sacrifice of Eric Pearce and Ian Macleod, and of those he would never meet – his uncle Pieter, and the 258 King’s Canterbury old boys who had given their lives in the two world wars.
Michael, third from left in the first row, marching in formation.
These were the men he wanted to model his life on, and becoming a soldier seemed the best way to do it. Shortly after his sixteenth birthday, he applied for an army scholarship, which would pay his last two years’ school fees on the understanding that he would move straight from King’s to Sandhurst to train as a Gunner in the Royal Artillery. As the exam approached, the pious pleadings at the end of his diary entries reached fever pitch. Even reading them now, half a century on, one breathes a sigh of relief on reaching the entry for 18 May 1960, when success was confirmed in a telegram from Sandhurst.
‘Spotless Officer Number One’, January 1961.
Sandhurst had not only given him a scholarship, but the top scholarship of the year. Within weeks this resulted in an invitation that a teenage boy could scarcely have dreamed of – to accompany the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh on a three-week tour of India, as guests of the Indian government, marking the thirteenth Republic Day celebrations. While his schoolmates returned to King’s for the start of the Easter term in January 1961, Michael found himself instead boarding a plane at RAF Lyneham, and flying, via the Libyan desert, to Bombay.
What knowledge he had of the sub-continent came from Kipling and Tintin, and he was overwhelmed, at first, by the dirt and squalor, the seething crowds, the smell and the ceaseless movement. ‘The work never stops, the noise never ceases,’ he wrote in his diary. But he warmed immediately to the Indian Army officers deputed to take care of him – ‘kind, hard-working, hospitable, grateful and proud’ – and he was moved by the spirit of the Indian people: ‘They are a people living with a hope,’ he wrote. ‘A hope of making India a great, happy and prosperous nation.’ As he was driven through the shanty towns on the outskirts of Bombay, an Indian Army major assured him that ‘soon there would be no more poverty of this sort’.
His unease at the poverty did not detract from his delight at the pampering and exoticism lavished upon him by his hosts: the white-turbaned servants who stood, silent and ramrod straight, behind his chair at dinner; the Camel Corps, followed by painted elephants, who paraded through the streets of Delhi on Republic Day; the introductions to men and women familiar to him from newspapers and postage stamps. At breakfast in the Prime Minister’s palace – an occasion made extra thrilling by the presence of a baby tiger, which wandered among the guests on a lead – Michael chatted not only to Pandit Nehru (‘one of the most outstanding personalities I have ever come across’, he noted in his diary, ‘very affectionate and always interested’) but also to his daughter Indira Gandhi (‘I’d seen her before on television, and there she was, shaking my hand, no taller than I was’).
Michael meets Pandit Nehru, 28 January 1961.
In the midst of all this, his thoughts strayed occasionally to King’s Canterbury, and the chilblains and burst pipes that always accompanied the beginning of the Easter term. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be back at school?’ the Duke of Edinburgh demanded when they were first introduced. ‘Yes, sir,’ Michael replied. ‘That’s one of the best things about it all!’
India reinforced Michael’s conviction that he was on the right path, that the army was the place for him. Only one person struck a note of caution. On arrival at King’s, each boy was appointed a tutor whose job it was to keep an eye on his development, not only academic and sporting but also spiritual and psychological. Michael’s tutor, Sydney Sopwith, was generally acknowledged to be one of the kindest and most remarkable on the staff. Born at the height of Queen Victoria’s reign, he was a Mr Chips figure, a widower who had devoted his life to passing on to generations of boys his love of English literature. He was in his seventies by the time Michael arrived at King’s, small and balding, and brimming with the accumulated wisdom of nearly sixty years’ teaching.
Michael in India, January 1961.
Over sherry in his tiny flat in Lardergate, Sopwith tried gently to suggest to Michael that there was a life full of promise and richness beyond the rugby field and the Corps, and that literature had more to offer him than he might dare believe. He lent him books to read, and introduced him to the work of the First World War poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon; and Michael responded. His love of words was dormant, not dead. Yet, when he left Sopwith’s sitting room, this delight and excitement were difficult to keep going. In English lessons, set texts remained a chore; and at home, in the holidays, expressing a feeling for poetry or words opened him up to ridicule. Jack Morpurgo allowed himself, occasionally, to be sentimental; but he despised sentimentality in others. He was the literary authority in the household. He did not tolerate competition.
So as the summer term of 1961 drew to a close, with A-level exams in English and French successfully completed, Michael turned his back on his studies without regret. But the end of academia did not mean the end of school. One strand of Fred Shirley’s strategy for transforming King’s from minor to front-rank public school was to invite boys to return to Canterbury for what would now be considered their ‘gap’ years. It was good for them, he argued, to spend a few months ridding themselves of what he called the ‘exam-grab mentality’, and developing more fully as human beings.
This system had obvious advantages for Shirley. It meant that there was always a group of older boys able to devote themselves exclusively to music, drama and sport, bringing glory to King’s in all these fields. But there were other, more subtle, benefits. Shirley was a control freak. It suited him to surround himself with a close inner circle of favoured senior boys in whom he could invest temporary power, thus keeping some of his masters relatively weak. The King’s monitors, who strode about the school like a bench of bishops, purple gowns flying from their shoulders, were often made to feel more powerful, more in the know, than heads of department, or even housemasters.
For Michael, Shirley had even higher things in mind. Their first meeting, just after Michael arrived at the school, had not been auspicious. Shirley had spotted him across the Green Court, pointed at him, and called him over. ‘Mmm,’ he said. ‘Morpurgo. Know your father.’ Then he poked him in the stomach: ‘White belly. Do your jacket up. White belly! Do it up!’ But from then on, he kept an eye on him. Michael’s lack of academic prowess made him, if anything, more interesting to Shirley, who, as his Times obituary reported, liked nothing better than ‘“getting hold” of a boy with moderate natural gifts, and pouring into him his own liveliness and single-mindedness’. During the summer holidays following A levels, he telephoned Michael at home and asked whether he might return to King’s in the autumn as Captain of School.
It is hard to exaggerate the authority that this position gave to a not-quite-eighteen-year-old boy – Michael was even presented with a private key to the cathedral (‘Shirley’s Temple’ to the boys), so that he could wander there alone after the public had left in the evening. If Shirley was absent it was the Captain’s job, effectively, to run the school; and Shirley was absent often. Every Thursday he took a day’s holiday and set off, sprucely dressed and wearing a wide-brimmed hat, on a marathon hike across the Kent countryside. He had regular governors’ meetings in London, and meetings in Oxford and Cambridge; and not infrequently he lapsed into a mysterious malady and refused to leave h
is bed. Even when he was at home, and fit, he often preferred the Captain of School to address the boys on his behalf when they assembled in the monstrous Shirley Hall after breakfast. On these occasions he would leave in the Captain’s pigeonhole small, square cards with hastily penned instructions. Sometimes, these were reasonably clear:
Hats.
Orchestra.
No contemptuous reports on the cricketing abilities of other schools – however tempting.
Why do the monitors still read so badly?
Sometimes, they simply offered a biblical reference: ‘S. Matthew 5 v. 5’. Then it was up to the Captain to puzzle out the point that Shirley wished him to make.
Michael, as Captain of School, was to take on responsibilities greater than any who had gone before him, because his last year at King’s was Fred Shirley’s also. At seventy-two, after twenty-seven years as headmaster, Shirley was determined to go out in a blaze of glory. Tributes were paid to him in words, in paint and in bronze, and, as proof that King’s had ‘arrived’, he busied himself welcoming important guests. It was Michael’s job, on these occasions, to put on Court Dress (gown, breeches, black tights, ribboned pumps), to make conversation with the grandees as he guided them round, and to lead the school in giving them a rousing ‘three cheers’ as they departed.
Shirley’s crowning moment came on 12 July 1962 when, descending through heavy clouds in a red helicopter, the Queen Mother arrived at King’s to attend a thanksgiving service conducted by the Archbishop of Canterbury. After lunch at the headmaster’s house (‘roses, Liebfraumilch, cold chicken’, notes the school magazine), she was accompanied by Michael first to unveil a plaque to Shirley in the Shirley Hall, then to the cathedral. As he escorted her up the nave to a fanfare of trumpets, the wife of a school governor leaned towards him and whispered in his ear, ‘You’ll never be so important again.’
Michael Morpurgo Page 6