Michael Morpurgo

by Maggie Fergusson

  It was an important moment for him. Everything in his upbringing had taught him to stand on the side of authority. He had flourished, as a schoolboy, on conventional recognition and success – and to some extent he continues to do so even now. But, on that Speech Day, he discovered in himself a new urge to express outrage, to expose wrongdoing, and to fight for the rights of his pupils. The path that would eventually lead him to become an ambassador for children not just in Britain but all over the world began here, at Milner Court. When, at the end of the afternoon, the time came for him to drive away from the school for the last time, he found that the boys had filled his car with cards and presents.

  Relief at leaving Milner Court was mixed with anger, sadness and unease about the future. ‘Even with Clare,’ Michael says, ‘everything began to feel unsettled and tense.’ He needed time to recover and reflect. When the autumn came, and the children went back to school, he started work on a series of stories about three children, and their adventures in the countryside around their home. He also made a decision, crucial to his future, that he would never work in a private school again. His own children were by now at the local state school, Wickhambreaux Primary, and in January 1973 Michael accepted an offer to go and teach there, as one of a staff of three.

  This was a bigger step than it might sound. Ever since his days in Bradwell, when the village boys had poked their heads over the garden wall and teased him about being ‘posh’, he had felt nervous of children from different backgrounds. He feared that as soon as they heard his voice they would despise him.

  So it was a relief and revelation to find that the Wickhambreaux pupils responded to him as warmly as any of the children he had ever taught. It was a relief, too, to discover as he drank his coffee in the staff-room at break time that ‘this was a school in which the teachers smiled and laughed. They were happy!’

  Mrs Skiffington, the headmistress, ran Wickhambreaux Primary with enlightened eccentricity. She was firm, and stood for no nonsense, but she also encouraged her small staff to teach in whatever way they found most effective. She was quite happy when Michael began regularly to walk groups of children out of the school gates and down the road to the nature reserve at Stodmarsh. ‘On the way, they were allowed to talk,’ he says. ‘But once we got there, they had to be silent, and they had to remain silent until we had got back to school and they had written a poem or story about what we had seen.’

  By three o’clock, Mrs Skiffington believed, primary-school children were too tired to take in anything new. For the last half-hour of the school day, therefore, she asked the teachers to read them stories. As the weeks went by Michael found that he looked forward to this half-hour. Drawing on his memories of Kippe reading to him as a child he found that, if he could himself enter into a story, he could hold the children’s attention perfectly until the bell went. But some stories worked better than others, and one February afternoon, reading Year Six the first chapter of Stig of the Dump, he realised he had lost them.

  That evening, after talking to Clare, he decided to tell the children a story of his own – one of the ones he had made up during the autumn term. ‘The beginning,’ he remembers, ‘was awful. There were sighs and groans. Then they got into it, and I got into it, and ten minutes later they were completely absorbed. When the bell went, they begged me to carry on.’ And so he did, telling the class a series of related tales that lasted until the end of the week.

  Though he did not recognise it at the time, this was a turning-point in Michael’s life. The frustrations he had suffered since leaving school had been rooted, in part, in his inability to find a way of life that could exercise all his gifts at once. Now, four at least of his ‘six selfs’ – the leader, the teacher, the writer and the storyteller – were working in harmony.

  Mrs Skiffington got wind of the fact that something exciting was happening in the Year 6 classroom. On Friday afternoon, she slipped in to listen to Michael, and was impressed. She asked him to write down his stories over the weekend and, the following Monday, she posted them to a friend at Macmillan Education. Looking back at the stories now Michael is dismissive: ‘the characters have no depth at all, there’s no sense of their motivation’. But Aidan Chambers, who read them for Macmillan, liked them very much. ‘They have a gentle but not at all sentimentalised style,’ he wrote, ‘and it is such a relief to find some stories that have realistic and not at all rosy-spectacled plots and narratives, but which belong to the country and are smooth and pleasant to read.’

  Michael had called his collection of stories It Never Rained, and in July he signed a contract for their publication. It Never Rained was published in the summer of 1974. But by the time it appeared, Michael had sold Newnham Farmhouse, left Kent and given up teaching.

  A whole new chapter in his life was about to begin.

  I’ve often wondered how it must have been to have been taught by me. I have never asked any of my ex-pupils, maybe I don’t dare. I certainly tried my best to be inspiring, but I’m not sure how effective this was. I do know that it got me into trouble from time to time. I tended to be rather enthusiastic, over the top probably. It’s a tendency I have to this day.

  I’m sure it was him that I saw, but the strange thing was that I couldn’t remember his name – his proper name I mean.

  To us he was always Mr Flamingo. We settled for Mr Flamingo, but it could have been Mr Pongo, Mr Morpingo, or even Mr Montypergo. Mr Flamingo suited him best. It went with his pinkish complexion as he bounded into class after his bike ride from home, and with the red jacket he used to wear. There was a sense about him too that he might just take off and fly at any moment.

  I suppose you’d call him a maverick. He taught only what he liked to teach: creative writing, history and drama were very strong in our class. He wasn’t at all interested in keeping to the curriculum. Maths or Science hardly got a look in – which was fine with me then, but I’ve missed them ever since. I still don’t know how an electric light bulb works. That’s Mr Flamingo’s fault.

  Mr Flamingo particularly liked trips out of school, and so did we. He coached the school football team, not because he liked football or knew anything about it – as we very soon discovered – but because more often than not it meant a trip in the minibus to play our matches in a nearby village.

  I was in the school team. Actually, almost everyone who was in the senior class was in the school team. Competition for places was not that fierce, because it was a very small school, only about sixty of us all together. Our worst defeat, the worst defeat the school team had ever suffered, was when Mr Flamingo took us to play Littleton. Littleton was a bigger village than ours, with a proper-sized football pitch, freshly painted white lines and real nets in their goals, which looked as wide as they are at Wembley. At Wickhamstead we had a little patch of grass for a playing field and a bundled-up coat for each of the goal posts.

  Mr Flamingo was very keen on coach talks and game plans. Whenever he was coaching us he’d put on his New York Yankees baseball cap. We’d all crouch down in a serious semicircle around him before each match, and he’d talk to us very confidentially. His game plan was always the same, whoever we were playing, home or away. ‘Don’t try to do anything too fancy,’ he’d say. ‘Keep it simple. Just chase the ball, lads. When you get it, kick it. Hard. And if they’ve got it, tackle them. Hard!’

  We had plenty of enthusiasm, but no skill – rather like Mr Flamingo when it came to football. We lost pretty well every match we played. Afterwards, he’d always say much the same thing, ‘Bad luck, lads. Don’t worry, you can’t win every time. You did yourselves proud.’

  But that rainy afternoon, after the match against Littleton, even Mr Flamingo was lost for words. We had chased the ball all over the pitch, hard, tackled, hard. I was in goal that day, so I’m not likely to forget the score: Littleton 12–Wickhamstead 0.

  I wasn’t the most popular boy on the pitch that day, and Mr Flamingo wasn’t the most popular coach, either. But the next day,
how did our coach respond to this debacle? First thing in the morning he sat us down and said simply: ‘About yesterday’s match. I want you to write about it. But it’s not the football I want you to write about. It’s not the football that matters, it’s the disappointment we’re all feeling. So think about a time, another time, away from the football pitch, when you’ve disappointed yourself, or others. Close your eyes and think. Then write it as you mean it, as you feel it.’

  That day the writing came quite easily to all of us. We read our pieces out aloud, those of us who wanted to. When we’d finished Mr Flamingo decided we’d done enough work inside the classroom; as it was a lovely day, he took us on a walk to the nature reserve – a favourite haunt of his and by now a favourite haunt of ours too.

  When we arrived back he got us painting herons and moorhens and ducks. That was when the head teacher, Miss Effingham, came storming in. She did not look happy. She ticked him off right there in front of us.

  ‘I’ve told you time and again to ask me before you take the children out of school,’ she told him, her fury thinly disguised.

  ‘I’m really sorry, Miss Effingham,’ he replied. ‘It’s such a supreme and wonderful day. I thought, let’s go for a walk on the wild side – it’ll cheer us all up after yesterday’s match. Sorry.’

  We loved these spats between Miss Effingham and Mr Flamingo. She went very pale and thin-lipped and Mr Flamingo turned even pinker than usual. But he kept smiling, which only infuriated her more.

  ‘A round dozen this time, I hear,’ she said acidly. ‘That’s a school record I’d say.’

  ‘Everyone did their best, Miss Effingham,’ Mr Flamingo said, still smiling. ‘You can’t ask for more than that.’

  Without another word, Miss Effingham stomped off.

  She was still in a stomping mood the next day when she came into our classroom again, and called Mr Flamingo to the door. ‘A word in your ear, if I may,’ she began, in a voice that was hushed, but quite audible.

  ‘It’s about the school trip to the Tower at the end of term,’ she went on. ‘As you know, Mrs Merton was going to take the children. But I’ll have to ask you to take the trip instead – I’ve just learned that Mrs Merton will be taking maternity leave.’

  ‘That’s not my fault,’ quipped Mr Flamingo.

  The Effingham lips thinned visibly. ‘I’ve no one else available to do it, otherwise I wouldn’t have asked,’ she said. ‘It’s in three months. Make sure you prepare them properly. No point in going all that way to the Tower, unless they know what they are going for.’

  So that winter term at Wickhamstead School Mr Flamingo took over all the responsibility for our school trip. Half of us in the school, the senior half, a coach load, would be going off to the Tower of London, and every one of us was more than pleased with the news that Mr Flamingo was taking us. Not that we weren’t looking forward to going with Mrs Merton. We were. A school trip was a day out of school, and that was always a great day, even with Mrs Merton. But with Mr Flamingo, anything could happen, and often did.

  We had already done some project work on William the Conqueror and the Normans with Mrs Merton. We had learned about how the Normans had built the Tower of London, and about the Crown Jewels, which were always kept there. All quite interesting, but Mr Flamingo, we soon learned, had a rather different approach.

  He wasted no time. The next day he gathered us all together in the hall and told us straight that we were going to have the most supreme school trip ever – supreme was his favourite word.

  ‘And do you know what’s going to make it supreme, children?’ he went on. ‘The Bloody Tower.’

  We looked at one another, amazed.

  When teachers swore, even Mr Flamingo, it was truly shocking. I mean, they shouldn’t, they didn’t, and he just had.

  ‘No, no, no,’ he said. ‘Bloody, in this instance, children, means what it says, the red, dribbly stuff. It’s not a rude word when it’s the real thing, real blood. There’s this place in the Tower of London called the “Bloody Tower” – it’s what they call it, that’s all.’ We still didn’t believe him.

  ‘Honestly it is. And we’ll be going there, visiting it. But before we do, you need to learn what happened there, how people lived then, how they died. So twice a week from now until we go on our trip in November, we’re going to make things and do things, all to do with the Bloody Tower. We’ll be doing drama and dressing up, and dancing, and even cooking! By the time we go off to the Tower, you’ll be completely soaked in the history of the place, and a pretty bloody history it is too.’

  We now knew for certain that whatever Mr Flamingo had in store for us was going to be a lot better than Mrs Merton’s projects on nasty Normans or jangling jewels – Mrs Merton liked us to put lots of adjectives into our writing. We had no idea then just how far Mr Flamingo would go with all his ideas, only that it sounded as if it was going to be a lot of fun.

  We began the next day. Mr Flamingo got us to make six standing figures from chicken wire and coat hangers, some of them representing taller people, some shorter, all of them life-sized. He sent us away that same afternoon with lists of dressing-up clothes to bring from home.

  ‘And I don’t want just dressing gowns,’ he told us. ‘Remember these are Tudors, Elizabethans.’

  He’d shown us pictures of how they had looked in those days. ‘So we need lots of old curtains, for ruffs and doublets and hoses, and beads so we can make necklaces and earrings (they were big on jewellery).’

  It took another few weeks, and lots of parent and teacher volunteers, to get all the costumes just right. Like a lot of the mothers, my mum entered into the spirit of the whole thing and got busy with her old Singer sewing machine. Meanwhile, this is what we did: we learned to dance like Henry VIII and all his six wives – quite a few of whom we learned had ended up in the Tower of London with their heads chopped off; we listened to Mr Flamingo playing music on his guitar that Henry VIII had written; and we made pasties with the school cook from an old sixteenth-century recipe Mr Flamingo had found – ‘Elizabethan hotdogs’ he called them.

  Soon all the figures in the school hall were dressed and bejewelled and Mr Flamingo gathered us together to admire our handiwork.

  ‘Like the ending to a good story, the best bit is yet to come,’ he said. ‘Look at our figures and tell me what’s missing.’

  Well it was obvious, so we all said it together.

  ‘Heads, sir.’

  ‘Such observant children. We’re going to make their heads now, out of papier mâché.’ So that’s what we did, all twelve of them. We needed some spares, Mr Flamingo told us. And did we have fun doing it! By the time we had finished we were scuffling ankle deep through drifts of shredded newspaper, and all our hands and hair were sticky with glue. We went home reeking of marzipan that day – school glue always smelled of marzipan.

  When the papier-mâché heads had hardened at last, and were dry, we painted them – eyes, noses, lips, ears, some smiling faces, some sad. We boys painted the heads of the lords, and kings and princes; and the girls did the ladies, queens and princesses.

  Everyone seemed to be lords and ladies in those days! True, some of them did look a bit of a mess – too much dribbled paint, not enough care. But it was the hair that made them come truly alive – hair made from wool and string, some from straw. There were even a couple of real wigs; goodness knows where they came from.

  By now, everyone had either seen or heard about the statues in the hall. Parents came in to see how they were coming on and were very impressed, which was probably why Miss Effingham suddenly became very enthusiastic about them, too. She was always popping in to see how we were getting on.

  Each of our figures had to be someone who had been in the Tower of London and come out alive, Mr Flamingo said. So these weren’t just any old historical characters. Among them was Queen Elizabeth I herself, with her bright-red hair. She had more jewels than all the others put together. Each statue had its name printed o
ut on a card and pinned to the wall, along with birth and death dates, and beneath there was the story of each life in a few lines. ‘Information cards’, Mr Flamingo called them.

  There they all stood, completely finished now, along one side of the school hall, and we thought that was that. We were very proud of them and so, it seemed, was Miss Effingham. She even had the press come in to take a group photograph of us crouching down in front of our ‘historical creations’, as the newspaper called them the next day.

  But Mr Flamingo hadn’t finished. He had a surprise in store for us – for everyone.

  ‘Those six extra heads you made are not just spares, children,’ he told us. ‘Watch, and all will be revealed.’

  From behind the cupboard in the corner he then produced six broomsticks, each of them sharpened to a point. He had made a wooden base for every one of them, a block with a hole drilled through. We looked on in silence as he placed these blocks along the opposite side of the school hall, and then stuck a broomstick into each one, point uppermost. Then, very solemnly, he took the spare papier-mâché heads we’d made, one by one, and stuck them firmly, crunchily, on the poles. Beside each head he put up more information cards. Among them were Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Thomas More, the Earl of Essex, and Lady Jane Grey. I can’t remember the other two, probably two of Henry VIII’s wives. Once he’d finished Mr Flamingo turned to us all with a satisfied smile on his face.