Michael Morpurgo

by Maggie Fergusson

  ‘So now, children, we have on one side six famous people who went into the Tower and came out alive; and on the other side, stuck on the poles, we have six of those unfortunates who went into the Tower and never came out at all, which is why they are represented just by their heads.’

  We gaped at him.

  ‘Well, don’t look so shocked,’ he said. ‘That’s what kings and queens did in those days – they chopped off the heads of anyone they didn’t like. I told you about Henry VIII, didn’t I? And remember the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland? “Off with her head! Off with her head!” What you might not know is that when kings and queens chopped off heads, they stuck them on spikes to show everyone what happened to people who displeased them.’

  A few of us said, ‘Yuck!’ But just as many said, ‘Brill!’

  That was the moment Miss Effingham came into the classroom.

  ‘What are you up to now?’ she asked. ‘More heads?’

  As Mr Flamingo explained, Miss Effingham paled.

  ‘It’s all about bringing history to life, Miss Effingham. When we go to the Tower next week, I’ll be taking the children up into the Bloody Tower, where’ – he pointed to one of the severed heads – ‘that one on the end there, Sir Walter Raleigh, was imprisoned for the last thirteen years of his life, before they chopped off his head.’

  None of us had ever seen Miss Effingham speechless before.

  It was the following week, the last time we all met as a group before the school trip, that I had my great moment. Mr Flamingo was up to something: there was a mischievous smile playing on his lips as he came bounding into the classroom.

  ‘Drama!’ he said. ‘I love drama! I’ll need a volunteer.’

  I don’t know why I put up my hand – probably because everyone else did.

  ‘Me! Me, sir. Me!’ I cried.

  To my amazement he was pointing at me. ‘Up here,’ he said, suddenly stern. The smile was gone. I was at his side now, looking up into his face. He reached into his pocket slowly and took something out. A mask, just like the Lone Ranger on the TV! A gasp filled the classroom as he put it on.

  ‘I am the executioner,’ he announced in an overly sonorous voice, hamming it up. ‘And you are about to have your head cut off, like Sir Walter Raleigh. First you have to give me some money.’ He held out his hand. ‘I’ll need some money if I’m to do the job properly – that’s what always happened on the scaffold. A kind of tip.’

  I pretended to put some money into his hand.

  ‘Kneel!’ he commanded me. I did exactly as he said. ‘Close your eyes now, say your prayers. And when you are ready put your head on the chair, and hold out your arms behind you like a swallow. That will be the sign that you are ready. Then I shall strike your head from your shoulders.’

  I closed my eyes, and I did say my prayers, because I was a bit nervous, if I’m honest. I wanted to get it over with. There was no axe, I knew that. He was just Mr Flamingo, but I heard his legs shift, heard what sounded like the blade slicing the air. It was done.

  ‘Behold the head of a traitor!’ he shouted, pretending to hold up my severed head and showing it to everyone. There was a moment or two of silence. Mr Flamingo looked down at me. ‘Don’t worry, Michael,’ he said. ‘Shake your head, and you’ll find it’s still there.’ That’s when everyone started laughing and clapping. Now they all wanted a turn. But the school bell went and the lesson was over. I was the only one to have my head chopped off and I was so proud of that. I was quite the hero of the day at playtime.

  At last the day of the school trip arrived. In the half-light of an early morning, all the parents and teachers were there to see us off on the coach. Flakes of snow were falling. Mr Flamingo was checking us all on to the coach. ‘I’ll try to bring all thirty-five of them back in once piece,’ he quipped to Miss Effingham, who looked more frosty than ever. Mr Flamingo never could say the right thing.

  There were two mothers with us on the coach, and Ken, the school caretaker. It was a long way to London but we were far too excited to sleep. The snow was falling harder all the time. By the time we got there it was settling on the rooves of houses and on the ground, swirling all around us as we stepped down from the coach.

  ‘We’ve got to keep them warm,’ Ken told Mr Flamingo. ‘Keep them moving, that’s what I say. They’ll be fruzzed to death else.’

  So we tramped through the snow into the Tower of London, Mr Flamingo spurring us on. The Beefeaters had icing on their hats. We didn’t dawdle, Mr Flamingo didn’t let us. We went into the White Tower and saw all the armour and the swords; we went to see the Crown Jewels, glittering and gleaming in their glass cases. Outside, we counted six black ravens, hopping about on Tower Green. Mr Flamingo warned us that kidnapping the ravens and taking them home wasn’t allowed, because if we did so – according to the legend – the whole country would collapse. By this time, anyway, we were exhausted and our feet and noses numb with cold. But Mr Flamingo, his face a beacon of enthusiasm, was still in full flow.

  ‘Picnic time, children,’ he announced. ‘We’ll have it in the warm, up in the Bloody Tower. Remember what I said, “the best till last”. This will be supreme, I promise. Follow me!’ So we climbed the stone staircase up into the Bloody Tower and had our picnic there. There was hardly anyone else about by now, so we had the place almost to ourselves. We ate our picnics, our ‘Elizabethan hotdogs’, and afterwards we wandered up and down the ramparts outside – Raleigh’s Walk it was called – and looked out over the Thames. After a while Mr Flamingo called us all back in. We gathered round him to listen.

  ‘Well, children,’ he began, ‘here we are in Sir Walter Raleigh’s bedroom. Poet, soldier, sailor, explorer, adventurer, lover – he was the one who first brought back tobacco and potatoes to this country. Here in this tower he lived for thirteen years. He wrote his history of the world in that little room through the door behind you, and his poems too. He wrote one the night before he was executed.’ Mr Flamingo closed his eyes and began to recite.

  Even such is time, that takes in trust

  Our youth, our joys, our all we have,

  And pays us but with earth and dust;

  Who, in the dark and silent grave,

  When we have wandered all our ways,

  Shuts up the story of our days:

  But from this earth, this grave, this dust,

  My God shall raise me up, I trust.

  When he had finished it seemed to me the whole world had fallen still and silent.

  ‘The next morning, children,’ he went on, his eyes open now, ‘they came for him. He got dressed, all in black. He was an old man by now and frail, but brave, very brave. He went out of that door, his bible in his hand, down those steps and they took him off to the scaffold. The executioner was waiting for him there in his mask. Sir Walter Raleigh gave him some money. Remember?’ Mr Flamingo was looking directly at me. ‘Then he knelt down, said his prayers, laid his head on the block, held out his hands behind him, and whoosh! Down came the axe. The end of a great man, one of our greatest.’

  None of us said a word. That had really happened! Here, in this very place! Mr Flamingo paused for a long while before he spoke again, his voice no more than a whisper now.

  ‘And do you know, children? At two o’clock’ – he looked at his watch – ‘and it is exactly two now – every Thursday (and today is Thursday), the ghost of Walter Raleigh comes up those steps, through that door and into this room … with his head under his arm.’

  All of us turned at that moment and looked towards the door. I wasn’t the only one who was quite sure that any moment now, we’d see a ghost coming up those steps. We hardly dared breathe. Then came Mr Flamingo’s voice again, breaking the silence and the expectation. ‘Oh, sorry, children, my mistake. It’s Friday. It’s all right. He won’t be coming today.’ He laughed then and we all did, out of relief. It wasn’t that funny at the time because, by then, most of us were frightened out of our wits. But when he laughed, we had t
o, just to show we hadn’t believed it in the first place.

  On the way back to school most of us slept, a few of us were sick. I thought we’d all recovered from the incident in the Bloody Tower – by now it had become a really good joke, the highlight of the day. We got off the coach and there was a whole crowd of mums and dads and teachers waiting for us in the playground. All we could talk about was Mr Flamingo’s story: the ghost of Walter Raleigh up in the Bloody Tower. My mum thought it was funny, but I could see that some of the mums of the younger children weren’t so happy about what they were hearing.

  Next morning we were in the playground when Mr Flamingo came riding in on his bicycle, hands free, arms folded, showing off as he often did. Miss Effingham’s window opened, and we heard her calling out to him across the playground, ‘In my office, if you please. Now.’

  We watched him walk slowly across the playground like a man going to the scaffold. She didn’t chop his head off, but it wasn’t long after that we heard he was going to be leaving at the end of term. On the day he left we gave him a present, a tie dotted with tiny pink flamingoes, which my mum had found in a shop in town.

  And then only last week, nearly forty years later, I thought I saw Mr Flamingo again. I was in Starbucks. I looked up and there he was. He was sitting at the table right next to mine, on his own, reading a newspaper. He was fuller in the face, with less hair, but ruddier than ever, and still wearing a red jacket. It was only when he looked up and caught my eye that I knew for sure that it was him. I think maybe he recognised me too. There was just a flicker around his eyes before he went back to his paper.

  I wanted to lean across and tell him there and then that I was the one he’d chosen that day, whose head he’d chopped off. Did he remember taking us to the Bloody Tower? And did he remember, I wondered, that terrible afternoon in the rain: Littleton 12–Wickhamstead 0? But I didn’t ask him, so I don’t suppose I’ll ever know.

  One Saturday afternoon during his early days as a teacher at Great Ballard, Michael had been asked to referee a rugby match. When Clare said she would stay at home she was struck by the force and firmness of his response. ‘You are my wife,’ he said. ‘I need you to be with me.’

  Frustrated though Michael was taking orders from a head teacher and operating as part of a staff, he was not someone who could work alone. ‘Whatever happens, and whatever you do,’ Clare had promised in a letter written just after their engagement, ‘I will always, always love you.’ Friends who have known them both over nearly fifty years of marriage confirm that she has been true to her word. ‘It is Clare who has kept Michael focused,’ says Peter Campbell. ‘He could not have achieved all he has achieved without her.’

  Very early in their marriage Clare had hoped that she might find some way in which she and Michael could work together. The obvious thing was for them to teach on the staff of the same school. With this in mind, when they moved to Kent, she had embarked on a teacher-training course in Canterbury. But as events at Milner Court unfolded she began to wonder whether they might build a future for themselves outside the classroom.

  Clare had always been acutely aware of those less fortunate than herself. In early childhood she had a strong religious streak. Her sister Christine remembers her, as a small girl, ‘staring out of the window one Christmas Eve, hoping to see God and his angels’, and ‘taking her role as Mary in the school nativity play extraordinarily seriously’. At eleven she was sent to a Quaker boarding school, The Hall, near Wincanton in Somerset. Influenced by the formidable but inspiring headmistress, Monica Brooks, she developed a lifelong passion for the countryside, for poetry, and for reaching out to those on the margins of society. Girls at the Hall learned to think of service to others as far more important than any kind of academic success. In their free time they knitted blanket squares for a village in Switzerland, set up after the war to offer refugee children an education of ‘head, heart, and hands’.

  ‘We felt really close to those children,’ Clare says; and though, after leaving school, her life appeared to unfold like that of any other carefree, middle-class girl of the time – a few months in Paris, secretarial training, a Cordon Bleu cookery course – she continued to feel close to them in spirit, and to hold as her heroes Joan of Arc, St Francis and Albert Schweitzer, the German theologian, philosopher and medical missionary who had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952.

  Now, with her own children at school, she began to think hard about whether there might be some enterprise into which she and Michael could pour their joint energies, giving something back to the world which had given them so much.

  During Michael’s time at Milner Court, they had suddenly become very rich indeed. In 1968 Sir Allen Lane had been diagnosed with cancer of the colon. He was only sixty-six and, unable to contemplate letting go either of life or of Penguin Books, he fought against it. Even in his last illness, propped up in bed, he continued to scrutinise the Penguin ledgers every evening. Finally, towards the end of June 1970, he slipped into a coma, and on 7 July he died. Penguin Books had been one of the most phenomenal business successes of the century. When the long process of winding up Lane’s estate was complete, his daughters came into a substantial inheritance.

  Michael had visited Sir Allen regularly in hospital over the last few months of his life, and they had grown finally to like and respect one another. But, to the end, Lane remained dominant – ‘like a great oak tree, taking up all the light’. Both Michael and Clare wonder whether, if he had not died when he did, they would ever really have grown up, or have dared to contemplate throwing in the comfortable life they had established for themselves in Kent, uprooting their family for the fifth time in ten years, and embarking on an enterprise which Kippe, Jack and many of their friends considered at best idealistic, at worst foolish.

  One of Clare’s closest friends at the Hall was a girl called Judith Keenlyside, two years her senior. Judith was beautiful and self-assured, but she was also kind and intuitive. When Allen and Lettice Lane’s marriage ran into difficulties, Clare turned to her for comfort and counsel.

  Despite her sophisticated Chelsea lifestyle, Judith, like Clare, had emerged from the Hall with a social conscience. After working as a nurse she retrained as a teacher, and took a job in a state primary school, The Hague, in Bethnal Green. She loved her work, but over time she began to feel unsettled. Too many of her pupils, she believed, were simply passing through the system, without their lives being enriched or their potential realised. They needed something that classroom teaching was not able to deliver.

  Judith’s feelings struck a chord with Michael. Even at Wickhambreaux Primary, where he was happier as a teacher than in any other school, he felt that not more than half his pupils were gaining anything significant from his lessons. The children who thrived almost invariably came from stable, supportive homes; but the ones whose lives he longed to touch were those from tougher backgrounds, whose experiences were often distressingly narrow and bleak.

  On a holiday in France, he and Clare had stopped one hot midday in a medieval town with a moated château at its centre. As nobody seemed to be about, they wandered across the drawbridge. It was only when they were in the shady courtyard that they noticed towels and clothes draped from the windows. On enquiring in the town, they discovered that this was a colonie de vacances, a ‘holiday colony’, where working-class urban children could escape the city for a week or so and get a taste of outdoor life – canoeing, walking in the forests, cooking on campfires. It was the first time Michael or Clare had come across such an enterprise, and they were moved by it.

  When Judith and her husband Tom Rees suggested the idea of embarking together on some scheme to give city children a break from the classroom, and offer them a taste of rural life, they were immediately enthusiastic. On long walks across the Kent marshes, the two couples tossed ideas back and forth. As Tom was to continue his career in the Civil Service, it was essential that they stayed within commuting distance of London. The ideal, they agre
ed, would be to find a house sufficiently large to accommodate themselves and their families, as well as groups of visiting children from inner-London state schools. They would need outbuildings, and a few fields in which they could keep livestock. Michael and Clare already had a horse, chickens and ducks at Newnham Farmhouse. Now they added two Jersey calves, Poogly and Emma, and two donkeys, Effie and Duncan, to their menagerie. At weekends they drove with Tom and Judith around the home counties inspecting properties.

  But the market was against them; prices were rising steeply. And, as the months passed, both sides began to have misgivings about working together so closely. Even then, decades before he developed a public persona, Michael was, Judith remembers, a powerful and rather controlling character. Judith had always enjoyed working as part of a team. She began to suspect that Michael would not.

  Their plans and dreams might have petered out entirely had not fate, at this juncture, taken the reins. Michael is a believer in fate. Looking back over his life he feels certain that there has been ‘someone conducting things’, introducing opportunities ‘beyond anything I could have dreamed of, or could have used my own will to effect’. Providence, good fortune, serendipity – call it what you will – now propelled him forward in a completely unexpected direction.

  It started with a telephone call. On leaving university, Mark Morpurgo had taken a job in insurance, and in 1972 had been appointed broker consultant for Hambro Life in the West Country. He rang one day to say that while house-hunting to the north of Dartmoor he had come across a tumbledown, thatched farmworker’s cottage. Langlands was on sale for £6,000, and it was just outside the village of Iddesleigh.

  Mark knew that Iddesleigh had a special place in Clare’s heart. At its centre was a pub, the Duke of York, whose feisty landlady, Peggy Rafferty, had been one of Allen Lane’s dearest friends. They had met in London in the early Thirties, when Peggy was working for the Windmill Theatre, and Lane was a young man about town, living high on the hog, out every night. When, after the war, Peggy married a widower poet and playwright, Seán Rafferty, and moved from Soho to the depths of north Devon to run a pub, Lane remained in close touch.