‘Listen,’ he said, ‘before I read to the children, there’s something I have to show you.’
‘What?’ I asked. ‘What’s happened? Is he all right?’
‘He’s fine,’ Michael replied. ‘In fact, I’d say he’s happy as Larry. He’s outside. Come and have a look.’ He put his fingers to his lips. ‘We need to be quiet. I don’t want him to hear us.’
And so it was that the two of us found ourselves, minutes later, tiptoeing through the darkness of the walled vegetable garden. It was so quiet, I remember hearing a fox barking down in the valley.
There was a light on over the stable door. Michael put his hand on my arm.
‘Look,’ he whispered. ‘Listen. That’s Ho, isn’t it?’
Ho was standing there under the light stroking Hebe and talking to her softly. He was talking! Ho was talking, but not in English – in Vietnamese, I supposed. I wanted so much to be able to understand what he was saying. As though he were reading my thoughts, at that very moment he switched to English, speaking without hesitation, the words flowing out of him.
‘It’s no good if I speak to you in Vietnamese, Hebe, is it? Because you are English. Well, I know really you are from Austria, that’s what Michael told us, but everyone speaks to you in English.’ Ho was almost nose to nose with Hebe now. ‘Michael says you’re twenty-five years old. What’s that in human years? Fifty? Sixty? I wish you could tell me what it’s like to be a horse. But you can’t talk out loud, can you? You’re like me. You talk inside your head. I wish you could talk to me, because then you could tell me who your mother was, who your father was, how you learned to be a riding horse. And you can pull carts too, Michael says. And you could tell me what you dream about. You could tell me everything about your life, couldn’t you?
‘I’m only ten, but I’ve got a story I could tell you. D’you want to hear it? Your ears are twitching. I think you understand every word I’m saying, don’t you? Do you know, we both begin with “H”, don’t we? Ho. Hebe. No one else in my school is called Ho, only me. And I like that. I like to be like no one else. The other kids have a go at me sometimes, call me Ho Ho Ho – because that’s how Father Christmas talks. Not very funny, is it?
‘Anyway, where I come from in Vietnam, we never had Father Christmas. I lived in a village. My mum and dad worked in the rice fields, but then the war came and there were soldiers everywhere and aeroplanes. Lots of bombs falling. So then we moved to the city, to Saigon. I hated the city. I had two little sisters. They hated the city too. No cows and no hens. The city was so crowded. But not as crowded as the boat. I wish we had never got on that boat but Mum said it would be much safer for us to leave. On the boat there were hundreds of us, and there wasn’t enough food and water. And there were storms and I thought we were all going to die. And lots of us did die too, Mum and Dad, and my two sisters. I was the only one in the family left.
‘A big ship came along and picked us up one day, me and a few others. I remember someone asked me my name, and I couldn’t speak. I was too sad to speak. That’s why I haven’t spoken to anyone since then – only in my head like I said. I talk to myself in my head all the time, like you do. They put me in a camp in Hong Kong, which was horrible. I could not sleep. I kept thinking of my family, all dead in the boat. I kept seeing them again and again. I couldn’t help myself. After a while I was adopted by Aunty Joy and Uncle Max and came to London – that’s a long way from here. It’s all right in London, but there are no cows or hens. I like it here. I want to stay here all my life. Sometimes at home, and at school, I’m so sad that I feel like running away. But with you and all the animals I don’t feel sad any more.’
All the time Ho was talking I had the strangest feeling that Hebe was not only listening to every single word he said, but that she understood his sadness, and was feeling for him, as much as we did, as we stood there listening in the darkness.
Ho hadn’t finished yet. ‘I’ve got to go now, Hebe,’ he said. ‘Michael’s reading us a story. But I’ll come back tomorrow evening, shall I? When no one else is about. Night night. Sleep tight. Don’t let the bedbugs bite.’ And he ran into the house then, almost tripping over the doorstep as he went.
Michael and I were so overwhelmed that for a minute we couldn’t speak. We decided not to talk about it to anyone else. It would seem somehow like breaking a confidence.
For the rest of the week down on the farm Ho remained as silent and uncommunicative as before. But I noticed now that he would spend every moment he could in the stable yard with Hebe. The two had become quite inseparable. As the coach drove off on the Friday morning I sat down in the empty seat next to Ho. He was looking steadfastly, too steadfastly, out of the window. I could tell he was trying his best to hide his tears. I didn’t really intend to say anything, and certainly not to ask him a question. It just popped out. I think I was trying to cheer him up.
‘Well, Ho, didn’t we have a lovely time?’
Ho didn’t turn round.
‘Yes, Miss,’ he said, soft and clear. ‘I had a lovely time.’
Yet Michael was so busy with Farms for City Children, it was hard to see how he would have time to write another book, finer or not. In 1977, the number of bookings at Nethercott jumped from eight to sixteen; in 1978, it reached capacity at thirty-two, and Clare had to start turning schools away. She and Michael, meantime, had established the schedule to which they would keep for the next twenty-five years. In term-time, they worked three seven-day weeks in a row before taking a weekend off, allowing themselves just five hours’ turnaround between visits. Yet Neil Warrington, who brought successive parties of children to Nethercott from Turves Green School in Birmingham, remembers how quick they were to learn new names, and to make each group of children feel ‘that this lovely old house, with its cobbled yard, and horses leaning over stable doors, really was their home; that they were the only people who mattered’.
Having got her own children off to school, Clare supervised the Nethercott children in the lighter jobs – fruit picking, tree planting, egg collecting, grooming the horses. From Langlands she also, single-handedly, managed the administration, liaising with schools about bookings, keeping the accounts, fund-raising. For the first twenty years there was no proper office, and all this had simply to be done at the kitchen table. Mark and Linda Morpurgo remember that when they came to stay the telephone rang constantly, and, no matter how inconvenient, Clare insisted on answering it.
By 7 a.m. Michael was in the yard at Nethercott, ready to head off to the milking parlour. Apart from a quick break for lunch, he then worked alongside the children – mucking out cowsheds, washing down the dairy, stacking logs, clearing ditches – until they went back to Nethercott House for high tea at five o’clock. From 6 to 7 p.m. he was out with them again, milking, and feeding the pigs, lambs and calves. Then, once the children were ready for bed, he sat with them in the drawing room and told them stories by the fire.
David Hicks, a teacher at The Oaks Primary School in Birmingham, brought pupils on no fewer than eighteen visits to Nethercott, and he has compiled a video giving glimpses of every season of the year, and every moment of the farming day. It shows Michael pointing out and naming wild flowers as he leads children through the fields, inviting them to smell lumps of otter droppings by the Torridge (‘Come on! It won’t hurt you!’), explaining why cows have four stomachs. Both his theatrical genes and his Sandhurst training are constantly in evidence. ‘How many of you feel angry?’ he demands, as the children stagger, panting, to the top of a steep hill. ‘Me!’ they chorus. ‘Good!’ he bellows. ‘The angrier you feel, the warmer you’ll keep!’ Between farm tasks, he does not chat to the teachers, but involves himself in the children’s moments of pure pleasure – tobogganing with them down the hill behind Nethercott on a snowy afternoon, skimming stones across the river on a summer’s evening.
‘Sharing these things was no effort,’ he says now, ‘because I was so caught up in it all. I was like a wide-eyed child myself.�
�� Dealing with the children at Nethercott, he assumed a robust persona. ‘If you are trying to engage with forty-odd kids,’ he says, ‘you can’t just stand there like a lemon and talk flatly about what they are going to be doing and why. You have to talk in a way that’s quite heightened, to persuade them by force of personality.’
Michael working with children at Nethercott.
Michael still uses this persona today. If you have been to one of his book talks, you will have seen it in action. It is there when he picks out a child with their hand raised to ask a question by pointing and declaiming, ‘you, in the appallingly coloured top’; or when he describes a new novel by saying that it’s about ‘a young boy … like … you, only much nicer’.
For all the demands that Farms for City Children put on him, he was still determined to pursue his writing. It was an uphill struggle. Even after his Whitbread shortlisting, Puffin declined to buy the paperback rights to War Horse, stating baldly that they were waiting for him ‘to do something better’, and many of the leading publishers continued to turn down his work. A sheaf of rejection letters is preserved at Langlands, and it makes disheartening reading. One publisher finds Michael’s stories lacking in both ‘logical development’ and ‘a sense of humour’. Another criticises his failure to fuse ‘fantasy and reality into an acceptable whole’. For a third he is simply ‘too prosaic’.
Reading these comments, and knowing he persevered, one might guess that Michael was extraordinarily thick-skinned. He is not. He is determined, but he is also, as Ros says, ‘psychologically delicate, just as Kippe was’. The rejection letters, many of which are laced with Michael’s frantic financial calculations, hit him in a number of weak spots. He was struggling not only with the ghost of Allen Lane, on whose money he and Clare were still dependent, but also with the fear of failure planted in him by his stepfather. ‘Jack left us all,’ says Mark Morpurgo, ‘with an insecurity about success, but Michael’s has gone on a long time.’ There is a reason for this. Mark did extremely well in the world of insurance. He made a great deal of money. Pieter Morpurgo, in his twenties, moved on from the theatre to the BBC, where he became a highly respected studio director. Both these careers Jack Morpurgo understood and purred over. But Farms for City Children baffled him. It did not help that he disliked the countryside. On his rare visits to Langlands, he and Kippe sat at the kitchen table, filling the cottage with cigarette smoke. He refused to go outside.
Michael would not have dreamed of talking to Jack about his writing. In his heart of hearts, he suspected that the publishers might be right; that he was no good. ‘The making of stories did not come easily. I didn’t have enough self-confidence to be sure that I was managing it well.’
Meanwhile, Nethercott was changing lives in ways that Michael and Clare had not foreseen. Farm work proved a great leveller. Children who lacked self-confidence, who struggled in the classroom, or whose grasp of English was poor, often turned out to be heroes when it came to shovelling dung, delivering lambs, or reaching under tetchy hens to gather eggs. Working in teams, they not only came to accept and understand one another better, but also saw their teachers in a new light. ‘One of the hardest things for a boy to learn,’ Mrs Lintott tells Irwin in The History Boys, ‘is that a teacher is human.’ Living and working for a week on a farm with their teachers taught the children this lesson.
Removed from television, many of them discovered a new appetite for reading, a capacity for reflection, and a desire to express their feelings in words. ‘As I sat in total silence in the wood,’ wrote one boy on his last afternoon at Nethercott, ‘I looked at the sky and thought. I thought about the Nethercott cows, donkeys and Quest, the great horse. I thought about the cool running river, passing at the bottom of the woods. I wished I lived in this place, where the water runs and everyone is safe.’
Yet life at Nethercott, as at Langlands, was not perfect. Michael never waved off a party of children without feeling that at least some lives had changed for the better, but there were times when it was a relief to watch a coach disappear down the drive, and there were moments of crisis, frustration and near-collapse, when he and Clare asked themselves whether the whole venture had been a terrible mistake. Not all teachers were like Joy Palmer or Neil Warrington or David Hicks. Some made it clear that they disliked the countryside, found watching the birth of farm animals revolting, and objected to getting up early to go out in the rain or snow. Others regarded Michael and Clare, with their posh accents and nice manners, as do-gooders with no real grasp of working-class children’s lives. ‘Sometimes,’ says Michael, ‘we felt that they were actively working against us.’ He remembers trying to restrain a boy who was hurling stones at a horse. The boy’s teacher turned on Michael, shouting that this was an experiment to see how the horse would react, and that it must be allowed to continue.
Children from Hoxton swimming in the Torridge during a week at Nethercott, 1976.
At the end of weeks like these, Michael and Clare turned for comfort to Seán and Peggy Rafferty, and Ted and Carol Hughes. Sometimes they offered gentle teasing, sometimes wise advice. From the start, Michael had had a sense that Ted Hughes understood more deeply than he did himself why Farms for City Children mattered. ‘I knew,’ says Michael, ‘that by bringing children to Nethercott we could offer them an educational experience that could broaden their outlook. Ted understood something more profound: that being close to nature was part of our elemental being, and that it should be a part of every child’s heritage.’
From time to time Hughes came to read at Nethercott. He was apprehensive to begin with, Michael remembers, and he addressed the children ‘in exactly the same tone he used when speaking to six hundred people at the Hay Festival: a hushed voice with a nervous tremor’. Then he relaxed – ‘and I think,’ says Michael, ‘he loved it.’ It was Ted Hughes who, in time, helped to secure Farms for City Children a royal patron, Princess Anne – and she, in turn, encouraged the charity to grow, opening new farms first in Wales and then in Gloucestershire.
But Hughes was also protective of Michael and Clare. ‘He worried about us crucifying ourselves with overwork,’ says Michael, ‘and he knew how important it was to remove us mentally from Nethercott and the milking parlour.’ With Seán Rafferty, Hughes would gently guide the conversation away from the troubles of the week and on to books and poetry, and in their company Michael delighted in feeling out of his depth. ‘I loved just to listen to them, to lose myself in their discussions of poets. And often I would come away and look out the works they had been talking about, and try to understand them for myself.’ Literature, which had for so much of Michael’s life been a source of boredom and humiliation, became a treasure house to be plundered.
It was not only dead writers he was getting to know. Ted and Carol Hughes were legendary hosts, and in the dining room at Court Green, eating salmon that Ted had caught in the Torridge, he and Clare found themselves chatting to some of the greatest living writers. ‘When I grow up,’ Michael sometimes quips, ‘I’ll be a poet.’ He envied the ‘extraordinary, miraculous gift’ of these men; he knew it was something to which he could never aspire. Yet when he speaks publicly now about the importance of children meeting great writers, he is thinking of the evenings at Court Green. ‘I caught something from being with these people,’ he says. ‘It gave me self-confidence to be near them.’
In the late Seventies, Clare spotted in the Classified section of the Sunday Times an advertisement for Tower House, near the village of Zennor, five miles south-west of St Ives in Cornwall. A square-built, granite cottage, tucked away down an overgrown lane, it looks out across a rugged patchwork of Iron Age fields to the sea. Above it, rocky, windswept moors offer wide views across the Atlantic as it crashes into the cliffs, jewel green over white sand. Visiting on a warm, bright day in May, the hedgerows filled with campion, bluebells, trefoil, stitchwort and baby fists of new bracken, it is not hard to see why the Morpurgo family loved, and bought, the place. But Michael remembers Z
ennor as magical in all weathers: ‘In there,’ he says, peering through the picture-window into the living room of Tower House, ‘we played chess and Scrabble for hours and hours, with rain and snow lashing against the windows.’
In that room too was a wide, low window-seat looking out towards the sea. When the children were playing in the garden, or had gone into Penzance with Clare to shop, Michael, armed with a biro and a school exercise-book, liked to wedge himself in here with cushions. He had once come across a picture of Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa, leaning back against a mountain of pillows, knees up, notebook before him, and had since tried to ease himself into the same position before beginning to write. Even so, the blank page alarmed him, and over time he developed the psychological tricks he employs to this day to get the words flowing. ‘I’m nervous of writing,’ he confessed in a recent email to a nine-year-old. ‘I keep worrying it’s no good – always been like that. So I find it’s better if I just pretend I’m not writing at all. Instead, I tell the story from my head, down my arms, through my fingers, and on to the page. I’m good at kidding myself, but whatever works, eh?’
If the writing was slow in coming he could comfort himself that this was just a hobby: Farms for City Children was his real work. But in Zennor it came easily. Often he produced 2,000 words in just a couple of hours, his handwriting getting faster and faster, and smaller and smaller, until he was cramming up to forty words on a line.
Nethercott proved a rich source of ideas. Working with the children there, watching them interact and listening to their conversations, Michael found stories constantly suggesting themselves. Before going to bed, he jotted down in a notebook incidents and phrases that had struck him during the day, and he then brought his notebooks with him to Cornwall. There is not space here to give more than a handful of examples of the many reworkings of Nethercott experiences in Michael’s stories. The Ghost of Grania O’Malley opens with little Jessie Parsons struggling, despite her cerebral palsy, to reach the top of Big Hill. It was inspired by a girl with cerebral palsy who came to Nethercott one spring and, against her teachers’ wishes, insisted on taking part in a two-mile race around the village. Sam’s Duck is based on the true story, told to Michael by a teacher who came to Nethercott, of a little boy who stole a penguin from Dudley Zoo and brought it home on the coach hidden in his duffel bag. And Little Foxes, the tale of a miserable foster child on a bleak inner-city estate who befriends a fox and escapes with him to find a better life, took shape in Michael’s mind after he went to see for himself what life was like in Castle Vale.
Michael Morpurgo Page 14