Michael Morpurgo

by Maggie Fergusson

  Allen Lane had a sentimental attachment to Devon, as well as to Peggy. His cousin John Lane, who had first introduced him to publishing, had come from farming stock in Weare Giffard, near Bideford, and in middle age Lane developed a longing to return to the West Country, his fortune made, to serve some small community as a benevolent squire.

  He realised this dream through his frequent visits to Peggy Rafferty and the Duke of York. At Priory Farm, as Jack Morpurgo notes in his biography Allen Lane: King Penguin, Lane had had ‘little hope of being anything but a businessman in gumboots’. But in Iddesleigh, as in no other environment, he found ‘relaxation and acceptance that was touched neither by envy nor by obsequiousness’. In the Duke of York today, Lane smiles out from black-and-white photographs, silver-haired and spruce, chatting to local people at the bar, and presenting trophies to the champions of what is known still as the Allen Lane Darts League. The personality he projected here – generous, modest, eager, involved with the community – was, Jack Morpurgo notes sardonically, ‘almost unrecognisable to those who knew him only in London or New York’.

  When Clare was eight, Lane decided that it was time she too was introduced to Iddesleigh. Putting her, alone, on to a train at Paddington, he arranged for Peggy to meet her at Okehampton and to take her back to spend her Easter holidays at the Duke of York. It was to become, over the next few years, a second home to her. At night, she slept in a bedroom over the bar, falling asleep to the clink of glasses, the murmur of pub chat, and the thud of darts on the board. But, as soon as breakfast was over, Peggy expected her to make her own entertainment, and to make it out of doors.

  In Iddesleigh itself there was plenty to keep her occupied. Opposite the pub was a bric-a-brac shop run by a First World War veteran, Wilf Ellis, and filled with treasures – china fairings, candlesticks, Bulgarian poker-worked ornaments. In the sloping churchyard, looking out towards Dartmoor, slow-worms, snails and lizards slithered across the gravestones. Clare liked to trap them, and take them back to the pub to keep in a shoe box under her bed. But what she loved most of all was to wander out of the village, and into the deep green hills and valleys that lay beyond. The land round Iddesleigh, some of it listed in the Domesday Book, had been worked by the same families for generations. They are a tough, circumspect people – ‘quick to show some warmth’, Michael says, ‘slow to show much warmth’. But to a child these distinctions meant nothing. Clare had always found it easy to get on with people. She took it for granted that, when she knocked on the doors of thatched, cob-walled farmhouses, she would be welcomed in. It became a game with her to see how many different drinks she could be offered in the course of an afternoon.

  One farmer, Thatcher Jones, became her particular friend. Living alone, eating fish pie for breakfast, lunch and supper, he found Clare’s company a tonic. He had an old pony, Captain, which he encouraged her to ride. On Captain’s back, she clopped around the narrow lanes – lanes bordered by hedgerows so dense and deep that in summer, when they were covered by canopies of elm and beech, riding down them was like wandering through a green labyrinth.

  Clare with Captain.

  So, when Mark Morpurgo rang to tell them about Langlands, both Michael and Clare were intrigued. Bundling the children into the Land Rover, they drove to Devon. It was getting late when they reached the cottage, and all they could see in the dusk was that its roof was collapsing and its garden overgrown. But when they returned next morning, after spending the night at the Duke of York, a perfect rainbow appeared in the sky. It was a sign, Clare decided. Langlands was meant for them.

  From that moment things moved quickly. On a visit to oversee the renovation of the cottage, Michael drove the Land Rover, all the children aboard, into a deep ditch. A local farmer, John Ward, with his tractor and two teenage sons, Graham and David, came to the rescue. The Wards lived at Parsonage Farm, just down the lane from Langlands, and had been farming in north Devon for generations. Clare and Michael didn’t seem to them convincing as country people. But they liked one another. Suppose, John Ward suggested, the Morpurgos came and stayed at Parsonage Farm until the renovation was complete?

  It was while staying with the Wards that Michael’s eyes were first opened to what living on a farm really involved – not the life he and Clare had established in Kent, but an endless, arduous round of toil and reward. The Wards were canny: they knew when to sell their livestock for the highest price; whether to take them to market at Hatherleigh, or at Holsworthy; how to feed their cattle to make them happy, but not fat. But they also knew, instinctively, when to infuse science with magic. When their cows had ringworm, they sent for the ‘blessing man’ from the next village. When a dog fox attacked their chickens, David was able to ‘sing’ to him to lure him to his gun. ‘They could read the signs of the moon,’ says Michael, ‘and the wind in the trees.’ Watching them at work, Michael found himself filled with wonder, humility, and excitement.

  Then, flicking through Country Life one weekend just as the building work at the cottage was coming to an end, Michael noticed an advertisement for Nethercott House, a rambling Victorian pile a few minutes’ walk from Langlands, with extensive outbuildings, a cottage, a milking parlour, a barn, a cider-press and fifty acres of land. Not only did the Nethercott fields march with those of Parsonage Farm; they had actually been rented for some years by the Ward family, who had used them to graze their beef cattle. If he and Clare could convert Nethercott into a place where groups of schoolchildren could come and stay, Michael thought, perhaps the Ward family might agree to let the children work alongside them at Parsonage Farm, in exchange for rent-free grazing.

  Nethercott House.

  It was ‘utter insanity’, Michael thinks, looking back. Neither he nor Clare had any idea how the finances would be organised, whether schools could be persuaded to visit, or quite how children might be occupied if and when they came. But, driven by an overwhelming need for radical change in their lives, they were determined to make the project work. By Christmas 1974, Nethercott was theirs, and the Charity Commission had registered ‘Farms for City Children’: a charity whose purpose was ‘to advance the education of boys and girls from urban areas by the establishment of suitable educational study centres in the countryside of England and Wales’. Early in 1975 Michael and Clare sold up in Kent and, with Sebastian, Horatio and Ros, Poogly and Emma, Effie and Duncan, moved lock, stock and barrel to Devon.

  After some negotiation the Ward family had accepted Michael’s invitation to play a part in Farms for City Children. Neighbouring farmers considered them foolish – ‘but to be honest’, says David Ward, ‘we never thought of this as a long-term thing’. Michael and Clare were ‘city types’; this was a temporary whim. The Wards had not reckoned on Michael’s stamina and resolve. While Clare settled the children into new schools, and organised the conversion of Nethercott, he threw himself into learning how to be a farmer. Volunteering as a farmhand alongside John, Graham and David, he got up at cockcrow to help with the milking, and worked until the last cow had been bedded down and the last chicken shut up in its coop. ‘The effort he put in was amazing,’ says David. ‘After a few months, we had come to trust him in everything – everything except tractor work.’

  The diary that Michael kept over these months is a record of gruelling and often solitary labour. During lambing, he battles with a combination of sub-zero temperatures and a severe shortage of sleep: ‘When you turn out yet again at 3 in the morning on a freezing windy night,’ he notes on 3 January, ‘it is a little difficult to be even-tempered with the milking cows 4 hours later down in the dairy.’ Three months on, in late March, the temperatures have barely risen, and it is time for ploughing in gale-force winds and lashing, horizontal rain.

  Every season brings its own challenges. In the summer, the milk overheats in its churns awaiting collection. In the autumn, lured by apples and acorns, the pigs break out of their pens, wreaking havoc in the orchard. And constantly, all through the year, the Wards watch their
livestock for a seemingly endless catalogue of maladies: milk fever, warble fly, wooden tongue, foot rot, fluke, staggers, bloat.

  Yet what the reader feels on every page of Michael’s diary is his appetite for his new surroundings and his new life. He relishes the names of the fields he is helping to work around Parsonage Farm – Burrow Brimclose, Ferny Piece, Little Rat’s Hill, Watercress Meadow. Between tasks he observes the behaviour of sun and rain, herons, larks and cuckoos; he watches salmon rising in the river Torridge and deer stepping through the shadows in the woods; and he describes everything he sees and feels in language that comes closer to poetry than anything he has ever written. ‘A white, hard frost this morning with mists filling the valleys,’ he notes on 4 December. ‘Cows were gliding legless over the fields.’ On 2 March, as the sun shines warm for the first time in months, all the farm smells take on ‘the mustiness of summer’. By November, ‘both the Okement and the Torridge are in full flood, great swirling brown gashes in the valleys’. This is ‘the dead season’, he notes towards the end of the month. ‘Everything seems to be ending and nothing beginning.’ For Michael personally, the opposite was true. He felt intoxicated, filled with a new sense of purpose. ‘I was high on it.’

  There was a great deal to be done before Farms for City Children could really take off – Nethercott House needed furniture, and a staff to run it – but fate, again, was on Michael’s side. At about the time he and Clare acquired Nethercott, Peggy Rafferty and her husband Seán were preparing to retire from the Duke of York, and were looking for a cottage. Nethercott had come with Burrow Cottage, and Clare suggested that they might live here, rent free, if Seán would take on the running of the large, walled vegetable garden (‘I like vegetables,’ he told an interviewer some years later. ‘You can eat them, and they don’t talk to you.’).

  Joan Weeks, who had worked with Peggy at the Duke of York, agreed to come as cook. She had cooked at Nethercott for the Budgett family just after the war, and had always loved the atmosphere of the house. She would come for just two years, she said, to help get the charity going. She stayed, in the end, for twenty-one.

  ‘Most people in the village were a bit sceptical about the whole thing,’ says Joan, now in her eighties, and living in retirement in Iddesleigh. But because of their affection for Clare, she and the Raffertys were determined to give Farms for City Children their support. ‘We begged and borrowed,’ she says – furniture, kitchen equipment, garden tools. Clare, meanwhile, was busy writing to schools, inviting them to come and stay. During the summer of 1975, with their first few bookings in place, she and Michael drove to London and, in Brixton High Road, bought bundles of bed linen from a defunct Greek shipping company, and a job-lot of ex-army bunk-beds. These were iron-framed, and severe-looking: they would not, Clare thought, appeal to children. Visiting friends from Hampshire helped to paint them in rainbow colours.

  Monday 26 January 1976 was a bright, icy day on which the thermometer never rose above freezing. As darkness fell, twenty-six nine- and ten-year-olds from Chivenor School on the Castle Vale estate, north-east of Birmingham, marched in red bobble hats down the drive of Nethercott House. Castle Vale was one of the most infamous examples of the failure of post-war overspill estates: a sprawl of pre-fabricated tower blocks, where nearly half the residents were unemployed and muggings, drug dealing, joyriding and fly-tipping all part of daily life. It was a place even the police felt afraid to enter; but this had not daunted the young teacher who now led her children down the drive, suitcase in one hand, guitar in the other.

  Joy Palmer was just twenty-four, with boundless energy, a Girl Guide qualification, a passion for nature and the open air, and a determination to help her pupils discover their gifts and realise their potential. In the weeks leading up to that first Nethercott visit she had organised musical evenings and sponsored silences to help buy the children wellington boots and warm clothes. Looking back, Michael and Clare do not believe that there could have been a teacher in England better suited or more eager to help them get Farms for City Children off to a good start.

  Together, that first week, they devised the routine that has remained in place at Nethercott ever since. The children woke at 6.30 a.m., and by seven o’clock were assembled in the dark yard – ‘the moon still in the sky’, one of them noted in a poem, ‘the water frozen in the bucket’. They divided into three groups. One walked with Graham Ward to the milking parlour, to help milk the cows and feed the calves. Another piled into the back of David Ward’s trailer, and bumped down the lane to see to the pigs, sheep and beef cattle. A third stayed with Clare to look after the animals close to the house: the horses and donkeys, ducks, geese and chickens.

  After a large cooked breakfast at nine o’clock, there were all manner of farm tasks to tackle: mucking out stables, cleaning the hen-houses, collecting eggs, helping with the lambing. On Tuesday morning Michael walked the children over the moor to Hatherleigh to see the livestock market. On Thursday afternoon he took them to Iddesleigh to visit the village hall, with its photographs of turn-of-the-century children in hobnailed boots; and to wander round the church, and read the headstones in the graveyard. It was a learning experience for the villagers as well as the children: ‘We had none of us ever seen a black child,’ says Joan Weeks.

  In the evening they gathered in front of the great log fire in the Nethercott drawing room, shared their memories of the day, sang to Joy’s guitar, acted out plays, told stories.

  Routine was vital, Joy insisted – but it must be flexible. That first week, Poogly began to calve. All twenty-six children dropped their tasks and were led into the barn. Many of them, at school, found concentration near impossible: they could ‘scarcely sit through one lesson’, Joy remembers. But a photograph of them watching the birth of Poogly’s calf has the stillness of a nativity. They are lost in wonder.

  Thirty-five years on, one of Joy Palmer’s pupils, David Kelly, tracked her down on the internet, and sent her an email. He is now living in Portland, Oregon, father to four boys, and he wanted to thank her for her devotion to her work in Castle Vale, and especially for taking his class to Nethercott. His memories of the place remain vivid. He had lived in Castle Vale since his parents’ marriage broke down when he was six, and he had never been into real countryside before. He remembers feeling, as he stepped off the coach, that he had ‘walked into paradise’. He was amazed by ‘the sheer size and grandeur’ of Nethercott House; by ‘how clean the air smelled – how fresh everything seemed’; and by ‘how the farmer really cared for his animals: this affected me a lot’. As the week drew to a close, he felt desperately sad: ‘Don’t get me wrong, I missed my family a lot, but this place was just so beautiful – so different from life in Castle Vale. I didn’t want to leave.’

  Children from Chivenor School, Castle Vale, watch the birth of Poogly’s calf, January 1976.

  He was not alone. As one of his schoolmates wrote:

  Oh my beautiful memorys of Sweet Devon

  Are like the one’s I have of heaven,

  …

  each minute felt like a secound each day like an hour

  and how that country air gave me phsical power!

  but we had to leave devon –

  my pardise like heaven.

  On the Saturday evening, before the children headed home, there was a disco. Flushed with joy at the success of the week Michael leapt and whooped among them in something resembling a Highland fling.

  If the children had been enriched by their week, so too had everyone involved. Joy Palmer returned often in the years that followed, and what she calls her ‘Nethercott days’ instilled in her ‘a very deep sense of the significance of children’s experiences in the natural world’, propelling her from teaching into educational research, and leading, ultimately, to her appointment as Pro Vice-Chancellor of Durham University. The Ward boys – Graham quiet, intelligent, reserved; David an extrovert and a joker – found themselves, as time went by, wanting to share more with the children
than just the essential farm tasks. They took them out in the darkness to look at the stars; they played football with them after tea; they encouraged them to stop talking and listen carefully to the sounds of the river, the birds, the wind in the crops. Joan Weeks not only cooked, meanwhile, but invited the children to cook with her. Some of them, she discovered, had never had a birthday cake. For children whose birthdays fell during a visit to Nethercott, she made sure there was always a huge iced sponge, and candles.

  And at the centre of them all, like the hub holding the spokes of a wheel, were Michael and Clare. They were, Joy Palmer remembers, always open, keen to listen and learn, to ensure a ‘return flow of benefit’ for children, teachers, farmers and staff. ‘It was,’ says Joy, ‘a winning formula.’

  Those early days of Farms for City Children were exhausting. Eight schools made bookings during 1976, but Michael and Clare’s ultimate aim was to get four times that number – about a thousand children – to Nethercott each year. On top of their farm work, they were busy writing to state primary schools in West London, Bristol and Birmingham, and following up their letters with visits to those schools that expressed interest.

  Michael reading on the farm.

  With so much to preoccupy him, one might imagine that Michael, for a time at least, would have ceased to think about producing books. But Aidan Chambers’ encouragement had planted a seed of hope and ambition; and, soon after moving to Devon, a new friendship had made him more determined than ever to keep writing, and to write better.