This was not purely selfish. When Jack was happy, life became easier for everybody, particularly Kippe. During his years at King’s, Michael had watched his mother become steadily sadder and more withdrawn, bowed by Jack’s bullying.
The Sandhurst term was due to begin on 3 September, and before that Michael was to join Kippe and Jack, Mark and Kay for a final family holiday. Jack had been commissioned by Eyre & Spottiswoode, ‘in association with the BP Touring Service’, to write The Road to Athens, a guidebook for holidaymakers planning motor tours of Greece, and in early August the family set off in his maroon Daimler – one of the perks of his new position as Director-General of the National Book League.
Jack had, officially, left Penguin in 1955, but he remained close to the company’s founder, Sir Allen Lane, and nursed hopes that he might one day be appointed his successor. So when Lane mentioned that his twenty-year-old daughter, Clare, was planning to spend the summer hitchhiking round Greece with her sister Christine, Jack invited her to come and see him in his offices in Albemarle Street. ‘He was flirtatious and charming,’ Clare remembers, ‘and I liked him very much.’ He took her on to dinner with Kippe, and they arranged that Clare and Christine should meet up with the Morpurgos in Corfu at the end of the holidays.
What Kippe and Jack told Michael about Clare he cannot now remember; but the first thing he did, on arriving in Corfu, was to go straight to her hotel. It was late evening, and dark. Clare was getting ready for bed when the owner knocked on her door to say she had a visitor. Rather than come downstairs, she stepped in her long white nightdress on to the balcony of her first-floor room, and saw Michael standing below in the half-light, on a rubbish heap. Despite the rubbish heap, her first impressions were good. So were his. Michael was bowled over by Clare’s beauty. With her long black hair, green eyes, high cheekbones and open smile, she must have looked, on that first encounter, not unlike Juliet on her balcony, and she was warm and easy to talk to. Clare, who was already juggling more than one boyfriend, felt Michael might be a perfect match for sixteen-year-old Christine. They arranged to meet on the beach in the morning.
Clare, 1962.
The following day was spent talking, walking, swimming. Clare was struck by how good Michael was at listening, ‘not at all flirtatious, but interested and interesting’. Christine remembers that they talked only to each other, leaving her to make conversation with fourteen-year-old Mark. Michael and Clare arranged to meet the following day, and the one after that, and then made plans to see each other in London. On 3 September, when Kippe drove Michael to Sandhurst, Clare came too. She sensed that Michael was anxious and unhappy; and she was right. For as long as he could remember, he had set his sights on soldiering. Now, alongside the usual twinges of start-of-term homesickness, he felt a bat’s squeak of doubt about the future.
To begin with, Michael was too busy, and too exhausted, for his doubts to develop. He had been placed in Victory College, in Alamein Company, and from 6 a.m., when he and his fellow cadets presented themselves for drill on the parade ground, his days were filled with exercises, inspections, kit polishing and running with weights up and down Sandhurst’s notorious ‘Heartbreak Hill’. All this took place to the accompaniment of volleys of abuse from Sergeant-Major Bostock, later the model for Sergeant Hanley in Private Peaceful: ‘What are you, sir? I’ll tell you what you are! You are an effing waste of space, sir! Get running, sir, or I’ll castrate you with the rough end of a ragman’s trumpet, sir!’
The aim was to test the cadets’ physical and mental endurance, and to knock out of them any vestige of public-school arrogance. ‘They beat you down to nothing,’ says Peter Campbell, who had also gone on from King’s to Sandhurst, ‘before building you up again.’ He doubted, from the start, whether Michael would stay the course. ‘Just a few months ago, he’d been the highest of the high. Now he was the lowest of the low, no longer giving orders, but taking them. Mike has never liked being told what to do.’
For several weeks Michael could only speak to Clare in snatched, reverse-charge calls from the telephone box below Victory College; but they wrote to each other almost daily. ‘For the first time since I left school,’ Clare confesses, ‘I’m longing for the days to go by quickly. If your letters to me come even in the second post, I go quite mad.’ Then, in late October, Alamein Company ‘Passed off the Square’, and the occasional evening out became possible. Michael’s fellow cadet Eddie Tait also had a girlfriend in London, and he had a car – a ‘Frogeye’ Sprite. He would drop Michael in Holland Park, where Clare was living with her mother, studying for A levels in English, French and Biology.
Clare had turned down three proposals in the months running up to her meeting with Michael. The relationship between her parents, Allen and Lettice Lane, had been so fraught and unhappy that she had decided that marriage was not something she would ever want for herself. So it surprised her, that autumn, to feel an increasingly clear sense of commitment to Michael. She had never encountered a character so complicated. One moment he was larking about, the next following Canon Shirley’s example and leaving her references to Bible passages to ponder in his absence.
‘Darling, darling, I love you more and more each time you show me one of your six selfs,’ Clare writes in one letter; and in another, ‘I love you, I LOVE YOU, you smooth, rugger-playing, choir-boy humanitarian.’ She was overwhelmed by Michael’s warmth and ‘superhuman generosity’. He was being paid a meagre 12s. 6d. a day, but, as that first term came to an end, he presented Clare with a beautiful necklace, which Kippe had helped him choose and on which he had blown all his savings. ‘No one,’ she says, ‘had ever been so kind to me.’
Not everybody was pleased with these developments. Clare’s parents spent their weeks separately but met up for weekends at Priory Farm near Reading, and on Sundays, after church, Clare often collected Michael from Sandhurst and drove him there for lunch. These were uncomfortable occasions. Whereas in some businessmen success breeds generosity towards the younger generation, in Allen Lane it seems to have had almost the opposite effect. ‘He just did not like young men,’ says Clare, while Christine’s husband, David Teale, recalls Lane’s uncanny ability to sense the chinks in people’s psychological armour, ‘and then blow them to smithereens’.
Penguin Books had made Lane a millionaire several times over. He was suspicious that Michael was after Clare’s money, and he remained suspicious even after commissioning a secret report from his handwriting expert, Mrs Jacoby, who assured him that Michael’s was not the hand of a gold-digger, but of a ‘very intelligent, kind and sympathetic man of high moral principles’.
Lane also found him dull – ‘Michael Morpurgo’s never going to set the Thames on fire,’ Christine remembers her father saying, again and again. Lane never found it easy to form close relationships. ‘I have,’ he once confessed, ‘a little barrier around myself that I find it very difficult to let anybody inside’. The only people he did let inside were his blood relations, and particularly his daughters, Clare, Christine and Anna. He was a marvellous father, arranging bicycling holidays with the girls in Normandy, or allowing them to accompany him on business trips around the world. As soon as Clare was old enough, he began to take her out in the evening, to restaurants and the theatre. She was his constant companion.
Allen Lane with daughter Clare.
He was not going to lose her to another man without a fight.
So, when Michael began to turn up at Priory Farm, Lane either ignored or humiliated him, and he encouraged other weekend visitors to join in the sport. The army was a particularly rich source of ridicule. How did Michael envisage Clare’s future, Lane would ask – as an officer’s wife in Poona? His guests fell about with laughter.
But Clare stood her ground. She was, in fact, very willing to become an officer’s wife, if that was what Michael really wanted. What worried her was not her father’s disapproval, but the unease she sensed in Michael himself about the path he had chosen. ‘I kept asking him,
“Why? Why are you doing this?”’ Michael’s response was increasingly uncertain.
In mid-December 1962 the officer cadets of Alamein Company were instructed to prepare for a final exercise, ‘Exercise Climax’, before the Christmas break. As they drove out through the gates of Sandhurst in whining three-ton lorries, snowflakes began to drift from a leaden sky. It was the beginning of the coldest winter Britain had known for 200 years.
On freezing Berkshire heathland, in the last of the afternoon light, Michael and his Nigerian companion, Sam, dug themselves into a frosty trench. The snow was now falling in flakes so huge that if they looked up from their digging they were blinded; but while the light lasted their spirits were high.
Out somewhere beyond the trench was an ‘enemy’ of Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, who might attack at any moment. Michael and Sam, and the rest of Alamein Company, had been instructed to remain on ‘stand to’ all night, watching, eyes peeled, for shadows drifting through the darkness towards them. They had been ordered not to talk, just to watch.
As dusk fell, what had initially seemed like a game became fraught, for Michael, with irrational fear. He could hear the voice of the enemy somewhere out in No Man’s Land, laughing, taunting; but, blinded by the snow, he could see nothing. The frost began to gnaw at his bones. He could no longer feel his fingers; his kidneys ached. Beside him, curled up in the trench, Sam began to sob with cold.
Michael longed, but did not dare, to sleep. Instead, he began to think about other soldiers, and other freezing nights. In Greece, over the summer, he had read Tolstoy’s great novel War and Peace, and he thought now about the troops around Napoleon retreating through the snow and ice from Moscow. Then he thought of the Italians, high in the bitter cold of the Alps, fighting the Austrians in the First World War, and then of the soldiers in the Serbo-Croat wars he had read about as a schoolboy, poring over the Illustrated London News in the library at the Abbey.
At some point towards dawn, these thoughts became almost like hallucinations. Crouched in his trench, looking out over No Man’s Land, he began to imagine that he was a young soldier in the First World War. A figure in grey moved towards him in the snow, waving a white flag. No one fired a shot; the longer no one fired, the more certain he became that he should climb out of his trench to meet his enemy.
The Christmas truce of 1914, which Michael had first learned about reading Eagle at prep school, became, that night, absolutely real for him. Entering into it imaginatively, he found himself, though physically frozen, ‘warm to my very soul’, and he questioned more urgently than ever the course his life had taken. If peace was what he really cared about, why was he training for war? ‘I had always wanted to fight the good fight,’ he reflects, looking back. ‘That night, I began to wonder whether there was another way to fight it.’
Clare and Michael at the Beagle Ball, Sandhurst, 20 December 1962.
From then on, things moved swiftly. On the evening of 20 December, at the Beagle Ball, the Sandhurst cadets celebrated the completion of their first term. Photographs show Clare on Michael’s knee at the end of the evening, staring into the distance in a daze of happiness, while he looks at her, besotted. Two evenings later they met for dinner at the Maison Basque in Albemarle Street and, without much planning on either side, got engaged.
‘Nowadays, I can’t buy a dress without taking it back to the shop,’ Clare says. ‘So it amazes me how easily it all happened. Michael was saying he’d be another two years in the army, and I said, “Don’t worry, I’ll wait. I’ll marry you, if you like.” He said, “Would you?” And that was it. It was unsoppy, unheavy stuff, and we didn’t doubt what we’d done at all.’
The following day they went their separate ways for Christmas, Clare to her father’s house in Spain, Michael to Kippe and Jack. ‘We woke this morning to hear Michael coming down the drive whistling,’ Kippe wrote to Clare on 23 December, ‘a very tired but very happy soldier. He told us your news with our early morning tea … I could not be more delighted, we already feel you are part of the family. It’s almost too good to be true.’
They planned to marry in the summer of 1964, after Michael had completed his army training. Back at Sandhurst, at the beginning of a snowy spring term, he wrote out a list of things Clare might reflect on to buoy her up through the long wait. One was ‘the knowledge that nothing really matters – that no two people could possibly love as we do, that Clare and Mike will never, never be separated by anything or anyone’. Another was ‘the nasty thought of little Michaels, or even worse, little Clares!’ These were to appear much sooner than either of them had planned. In late May Michael took a call from Clare in the telephone box below Victory College. She was pregnant. ‘I remember going warm all over,’ Michael says. ‘I knew something huge had happened. But I also knew that I wanted to be with Clare for the rest of my life, and that I wanted to have this baby.’
On 12 June Michael and Clare met Kippe and Jack to break the news. Clare had already spoken to Allen and Lettice Lane. Despite their misgivings about Michael, they had put a good face on the engagement, and they were now happy at the prospect of becoming grandparents. Jack, too, expressed cautious approval of the engagement, but to Allen Lane’s great irritation made it very clear he felt Michael and Clare were too young to be parents.
Michael and Clare’s engagement was announced in The Times on 18 June, but news of the pregnancy was kept from their wider families and friends. At Clare’s twenty-first birthday party in the barn at Priory Farm on 6 July, she danced all night, deaf to her mother’s warnings about the effects her energetic rock ’n’ roll might have on her baby. And she wore a plaster round her finger so that no one would know that she and Michael were, in fact, already married.
In order to extract Michael from Sandhurst for a secret wedding, Kippe had, on 25 June, sent him a telegram: ‘URGENT YOU GET HOME SITUATION CRITICAL MOTHER’. Three days later, on 28 June, Michael and Clare, Allen and Lettice Lane, Kippe and Jack, gathered at Kensington Register Office, and then drove through the rain, in near silence, to Lettice’s flat at 23 Holland Park. It was, Michael remembers, ‘an absolutely horrible day’. Clare’s parents were barely speaking to his, and he himself was overcome with shame at having deceived his senior officers.
After wedding cake and one bottle of champagne, he and Clare set off for Caversham, where Michael took and failed his driving test. They moved on to The Compleat Angler in Marlow. ‘And then,’ says Michael, ‘it became funny. We sat in our attic bedroom, and we didn’t know what to do with ourselves. So we went out to a movie, Barabbas, and then came back to the hotel and ate steak Diane.’ The other diners could not disguise their fascination with this mysterious couple. It seemed likely they were on their honeymoon – Clare’s pregnancy was beginning to show – yet neither looked more than about fifteen years old.
Early next morning Clare drove Michael back to Sandhurst. He had known for six months now that he must leave the place, but making the final break had defeated him. He had no idea what he was going to do with himself when he left, and the prospect of abandoning his fellow cadets in Victory College filled him with gloom. During the rigours of the Sandhurst training they had supported one another through thick and thin: ‘We were cemented together.’ To say goodbye to them now felt like betrayal.
In the end, however, there were no goodbyes. That summer, Alamein Company was sent on an exercise to Schleiden in Germany, and from here Michael wrote to inform his Commanding Officer of his decision. The moment he returned to Sandhurst he was summoned before a board of high-ranking officers, ‘civil but cold’, and urged to change his mind. When it became clear that he would not, he was ordered to leave immediately, without speaking to anyone. Michael laid aside his army uniform, and walked out through the Sandhurst gates. He felt no excitement, only guilt – ‘and when, occasionally, I have passed that place since, I have felt a shudder of shame’.
Michael’s future was now unclear. The moment on the frozen heathland when he had becom
e suddenly certain that he must leave the army had been accompanied by no corresponding inspiration about what he should do instead. A family friend offered to help him into a job in insurance, but the thought of any kind of professional or business career appalled him. In order to play for time, and to gain some sort of qualification, he decided he must apply for university.
Michael travelled to Oxford for an interview at Christ Church.
In a short but excruciating meeting, he was questioned by an English tutor about aspects of Shakespeare’s King Lear. ‘I floundered horribly,’ he remembers. ‘We both knew it was hopeless.’ A letter of polite rejection followed.
In the end, it was Kippe’s sister Elizabeth who came to the rescue. Her sister-in-law Muriel Hudson was tutor to women students at King’s College London, and, having met and talked to Michael, Dr Hudson arranged that he should come to King’s to study French, English and Philosophy.
Michael was due to start at King’s in the autumn of 1964, and to fill the intervening months he answered an advertisement for a post as junior master at a prep school, Great Ballard, near Chichester. He was to teach everything from Maths to rugby. Clare was to help a bit with art. It would be pleasing, with hindsight, to claim that both felt drawn to work with children – and in Clare’s case it would not be entirely wrong. In a number of her letters to Michael at Sandhurst she considers teaching, and she would later go on to get both a Montessori qualification and a BA in Education. But Michael, at this time, had no particular interest in children. He had never especially enjoyed the company of his half-siblings, Mark and Kay – when they were small, he had found them whiny and irritating – and he didn’t expect to like the pupils at Great Ballard any better. ‘It was just a wage,’ he admits. ‘I fell into it.’
Michael Morpurgo Page 8