Sometimes, visiting children unwittingly put Michael in touch with boyhood feelings, long buried. Sitting in Langlands one morning, he heard a child crying in the field outside. Her classmates were herding sheep, but this little girl was sobbing uncontrollably. ‘Suddenly I knew from the tone of that sobbing that it was homesickness, and that terrible feeling of being completely separate from the world, of wanting to die, flooded back to me.’ The Butterfly Lion, the story of a little boy found running away from school by an elderly lady who takes him home and tells him an extraordinary tale, flowed from that moment. It remains one of Michael’s best-loved books.
In Zennor, too, stories suggested themselves to Michael almost wherever he turned. It is a place where history shades into prehistory, and reality into fable. Legend has it that, in the ‘silent’ years before the start of his public ministry, Jesus came to this part of Cornwall, travelling the trade-routes between the Mediterranean and the tin mines that provided the chief source of income until the early twentieth century.
Today the landscape remains dotted with tumbledown smelting chimneys and counting houses, and in the churchyard at Zennor, among the graves of nameless shipwrecked sailors, are those of miners who lost their lives to landslides and rockfalls. It is said that the ghosts of trapped miners continue to knock at the walls of underground chambers, begging to be released. Michael was fascinated by the ‘knockers’, and by tales of wreckers and smugglers, spriggans and boggarts and mermaids. They became the inspiration for one of his finest collections, The White Horse of Zennor – the title story inspired by his meeting, when rambling one day by the ancient burial chamber Zennor Quoit, a grey stallion which appeared before him out of the mist.
But Tower House, fruitful though it was both for family life and for writing, was a practical nightmare. It was impossibly damp; and the water supply, shared with a neighbouring farm, very often ran dry. After five years Michael decided that it was time to sell up.
The loss of Zennor proved a blessing in disguise, opening the way to the discovery of a corner of the British Isles that was to become even more precious to Michael. Just as Tower House was being sold, one of the boys went on a school trip to Scilly, and came home thrilled by the islands. Clare too had happy memories of Scilly. As a baby, she had travelled to the island of Tresco on holiday, dodging U-boats on the way. And in her early teens she had spent a number of weeks with her father there. But by the time she had persuaded Michael that they should have a holiday there the accommodation on Tresco was all taken. They booked, instead, rooms in a B&B on the much smaller, more rugged, less fashionable island of Bryher. From the moment they arrived, Michael felt he had ‘entered another world’ – a world he has since revisited every summer.
For an island just two miles long, and less than half a mile wide, Bryher offers an extraordinary variety of atmospheres. On a Sunday morning, sitting in its little church, All Saints, with the sun slanting through the stained-glass windows and the organ playing ‘The King of Love My Shepherd Is’, one might be in deep rural England. But, outside the church, the sandy paths (Bryher has no real roads) are edged with wild crimson gladioli and bright red and yellow mesembryanthemums – plasticky-looking flowers, like the ones used to decorate ladies’ swimming caps in the Fifties. Giant green houseleeks sprout from the masonry of Bryher cottages, twisting about in such outlandish shapes that one feels one has stepped into the pages of Where the Wild Things Are. On Rushy Bay, to the south of the island, the sea laps gently on to a beach of fine, white, icing-sugar sand, and when the sun shines, as it does in Scilly more than in any other part of Britain, one might be in the Caribbean. But in Hell Bay, to the north, the Atlantic seems to rage and boil, crashing relentlessly against dizzying cliffs.
This variety of sights and moods, encompassed in a small, traffic-free space, makes for a child’s paradise – and a paradise for anyone inclined to see the world through a child’s eyes. For Michael, the sense that he has put a stretch of sea between himself and his ‘real’ life brings a feeling of release. Sitting with him over scones and jam at the start of his summer holidays, one can feel his mood lightening, and as he putters between the islands in his miniature blue-and-white catamaran, Léa Eloïse, it is as if he is becoming a boy again. Walking round the island before supper, he whistles to the seals across the sea. ‘Just look at that!’ he exclaims, lying on the grass above Hell Bay, eyes fixed on an enormous seagull as it rides the wind above him. ‘I mean, how much fun must that be?’
At Sea.
Animals and human beings live in unusual harmony on Bryher. As Michael writes at a table in the garden of Veronica Farm, little birds hop up so close to his exercise-book that it seems they are stealing a first glimpse at a new story, and a starling confounds him by imitating precisely the ring tone of his mobile phone. But it is the history of Scilly, as much as the landscape and wildlife, that draws him back year after year. The islands have been continually inhabited since the Bronze Age, and in the little museum on St Mary’s it feels as if a great wave has crashed across two floors, leaving behind the flotsam and jetsam of centuries. Roman coins are displayed alongside Victorian ‘Karmit’ seasick pills. There are stuffed sea birds and treasures from the 400-odd wrecks that lie submerged around the islands, the giant shell of a leatherback turtle, and the Gannex mac bequeathed by Harold Wilson, who had a house on St Mary’s, where he is buried. The entire archipelago fits into a stretch of the Atlantic just seven miles by five. ‘I have never been anywhere so small,’ says Michael, ‘where so much has happened.’
Michael in Scilly.
The past breeds stories. South of Bryher is the twin-hilled island of Samson, honeycombed with Bronze Age burial chambers. Legend has it that in 1540 Samson was overrun by giant plague-carrying rats, and that in the early years of the nineteenth century all the men of the island were shipwrecked off Wolf Rock, leaving their women and children to starve. What is certain is that, by the middle of the nineteenth century, Samson’s well had run dry, and the last few islanders were forced to abandon their granite cottages and move across the water to Tresco.
One wet summer’s evening during his first holiday on Bryher, Michael asked a boatman to row him out to Samson, and leave him to explore. Sheltering from the rain in the hearth of one of the ruined cottages he felt he was not alone, that the ghosts of Samson were gathering about him. Why the Whales Came began to form itself in his mind. Opening just before the outbreak of the First World War, it is the tale of two Bryher children, Daniel and Gracie, who befriend ‘the Birdman’, a loner shunned and feared by the other islanders – and based, in part, on Seán Rafferty. Through the Birdman, the children learn about the curse put on the island of Samson during his boyhood, and with his help they overcome it. It is a tale that tackles huge themes – shame and redemption, ignorance and prejudice – but they are enfolded in such a page-turning adventure that a child can absorb them almost without noticing.
Even now, with more than a hundred books to his name, Michael is sometimes seized by anxiety that his gift will desert him, or that his ideas will run dry. There are times when he feels ‘becalmed, waiting for another wave, not knowing whether it will ever come’. But on Bryher stories have never ceased to shuttle through his mind, and Why the Whales Came has been followed by a string of further ‘Scilly’ novels including The Wreck of the Zanzibar and The Sleeping Sword. ‘This place imposes stories on you,’ he says. ‘You just can’t get away from them.’
By the time Michael first visited Scilly in April 1982 family holidays with all three of his children were becoming a thing of the past. Sebastian was eighteen, and was about to go to Trinity College Dublin to study English. He had a French girlfriend, Olivia Stahly, whose aunt had once worked as an au pair for Kippe, helping to look after Mark and Kay. The two families were devoted to each other, and Michael and Clare were delighted when, despite the distance between Dublin and Paris, their relationship continued to flourish through Sebastian’s university years. They were delighted
too when, in the spring of 1986, Olivia told them that she was expecting their first grandchild.
Léa Pauline Clare Morpurgo was born in Rouen on 17 December 1986, and the following summer the Morpurgo and Stahly families gathered at her great-grandmother’s ancient manoir in Salies-de-Béarn for Olivia and Sebastian’s wedding. A priest close to the family blessed the couple and infant under a tree in the garden, and friends and family celebrated long into the night beneath a Tricolore and a Union Jack. Michael had brought a barrel of beer from England. He felt deeply contented. He loved the Stahly family, and he loved France.
As a small child, he had been used to hearing French spoken around him at the Eyrie, where Tita had sat him on her knee and sung him French nursery rhymes in her deep voice. His first continental holiday had been to Le Tréport in Normandy, and everything about it – the éclairs, the smell of fresh bread and coffee, the long empty beaches, the seaside architecture – had seemed so thrilling to him that France became his ideal of a foreign country.
Some time after the publication of War Horse it happened that Canon Shirley’s granddaughter went to work for the French publisher Gallimard. She urged one of the children’s editors, Christine Baker, to read the novel, and Christine did so – ‘with some reluctance and anxiety, as one does when one is “made” to read a text by a friend’. She remembers the relief of realising, very quickly and ‘with absolute certainty’, that ‘this was simply a perfect book’. Cheval de guerre, published in 1986, has never since been out of print. Gallimard Jeunesse has published nearly forty more of Michael’s titles, of which two – Le roi Arthur (Arthur, High King of Britain) and Le secret de grand-père (Farm Boy) – are on the ‘Liste de titres prescrits’ published by the Ministry of Education. Michael has been garlanded with French prizes, and is one of just a handful of children’s authors to have been appointed Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. ‘We French would do almost anything not to crown a British author,’ says Christine. ‘But Michael Morpurgo (which she pronounces Meek-ay-el Mor-purr-goh) is so well loved here he is perceived as an honorary Frenchman.’
For some time Michael had wanted to write a novel set in France. Then, during Sebastian’s wedding celebrations, he fell into conversation with Séverine Puech, Olivia’s grandmother. She talked at length about what it had been like to live in France during the Second World War, and about how, when the Germans arrived, she had at first been dazzled by their impeccable uniforms and manners. She talked, too, about Gurs, a concentration camp near Salies-de-Béarn where Jews and ‘indésirables’ had been held under the Vichy government, and she took Michael to visit the clearing in a forest where it had stood.
‘There was nothing left of it,’ he remembers, ‘but it was dark and silent, and the atmosphere was heavy with sadness.’
Back in Devon Michael set to work on Waiting for Anya, the story of a dreamy shepherd boy, Jo, living in a village in the Pyrenees in the early Forties. Jo befriends Benjamin, who is engaged in smuggling Jewish children across the border to safety in Spain. For the actress Juliet Stevenson, who has read many of Michael’s books aloud to her children, Waiting for Anya is ‘my quiet favourite’. Even more than usual, she says, ‘I feel that Michael was immersed and engaged in that story and that landscape. He brings the history alive.’
The novel is set in Lescun, a mountainside village frequently cut off by snow in the winter. Michael and Clare had spent a few days here after Sebastian’s wedding, and on their way to it they had taken a wrong turning and got lost. They found themselves instead in Bource where, on the village green, they met a caged bear, pacing miserably. The Dancing Bear, which grew from that encounter, is perhaps the most irredeemably bleak of all Michael’s stories. An orphaned girl, Roxanne, adopts an abandoned bear, which she christens Bruno. They form an extraordinary bond, news of which travels beyond the village, attracting the attentions of a film crew. Bruno is made to dance for the crew with a chain around his neck, and when Roxanne is seduced away to seek fame and riches in the city he dies of a broken heart.
Readers, over the years, have written to protest at the sadness of the story. Even Ted Hughes, who saw it in manuscript form, suggested that the ending should be lightened. But Michael is unrepentant. In very early childhood, he believes, there should be a period of ‘pure delight’, when the world seems a bright, safe place, and stories can be relied upon to end happily. It was one of the joys of becoming a grandfather to experience this ‘glowing’ time with a new generation.
As children become aware that the world around them is more complex and disturbing, however, this should be reflected in what they read. ‘One of the first lessons I learned as a teacher,’ Michael says, ‘is that children like to be talked to truthfully. And the truth is that we live in a slough of despond. You’d have to walk about with your eyes closed not to see all around you the effects of greed and selfishness on people’s lives. The trick is to see the joy as well. But to understand joy, you have first to acknowledge suffering. They can’t be separated.’ Perhaps children have more instinct for the interdependence of pain and joy than grown-ups imagine. ‘Michael Morpurgo’s books have always enchanted me,’ writes a London schoolgirl, Laura de Lisle, in her essay ‘My Reading History’. ‘His soft, sad style is perfect for sitting inside on a rainy afternoon with a cup of tea and a bun. I found War Horse and Private Peaceful heartbreakingly beautiful.’
Michael’s homesick nights at the Abbey set the pattern for a lifetime of insomnia; but while, as a schoolboy, his anxieties had focused on the next day, in middle age it was the next life that began to concern him. Would the God with whom he had pleaded and bargained so intimately in his teenage diaries be waiting to welcome him when the end came? Or would death open a door on to nothing but darkness and void? His questions both fuelled and fed on hypochondria. The slightest illness or physical weakness had him leaping to catastrophic conclusions.
In fighting these night hauntings, stories became his best weapon. He found that, almost without fail, he could escape in his imagination into whatever he was working on, involving himself with characters and situations, allowing them to ‘weave’ in his mind. Clare sleeps soundly, and in order not to disturb her Michael resists switching on the light or writing anything down. Sometimes, thoughts and images melt away with the dawn, but this ‘dream time’ is, he believes, an essential prelude to his writing with integrity – ‘writing in such a way as to awake a sense of wonder, and truth, and joy’. When it has been squeezed out in the race to meet deadlines (and he is a stickler for these) his books have suffered.
Running a schoolmaster’s eye down a list of his titles to date, Michael’s verdict on roughly one in four is, ‘Nice try. Could have done better’. But in the late Eighties and early Nineties, so gradually that he cannot be precise about the timing, publishers began to take his work more seriously. None would have spoken of him in the same breath as Roald Dahl or Alan Garner or Clive King; nor was he rising to fame like his near-contemporaries Anne Fine or Berlie Doherty. But he was, none the less, proving himself a solid, slow-burn seller. His books were in demand in public libraries; and he was in demand in schools. Children and teachers who had stayed at Nethercott regularly invited him to speak on prize days, or at the opening of libraries, and were gratified to find that, away from home, he communicated the same energy and charisma and ability to make individual children in a packed room feel that he was talking directly to them. ‘Everybody tells me when they’ve seen him,’ says Christine Baker, ‘“Well, we’ve never had an experience like that!”’
Michael himself began to have a sense that he was ‘on the circuit’, and to build up relationships that were to be vital to his work. In a corridor at St Ives Primary School, for example, he fell into conversation with the illustrator and writer Michael Foreman. They took to each other immediately. ‘It was,’ says Foreman, ‘as if we’d been friends a long time’ – or more than friends. ‘People say you can’t choose your relations, but in Michael Morpurgo I have c
hosen a brother – a posh brother.’
Despite a difference in background – Foreman’s widowed mother kept a small shop in the seaside village of Pakefield in Suffolk, and he went on from the local primary to Notley Road Secondary Modern – both had grown up in the Forties, and felt moved to communicate the futility of war to succeeding generations. Both, too, had an almost insatiable appetite for work, and an openness to the other’s ideas. ‘There’s a kind of cookery that goes on between us,’ says Foreman. ‘It sometimes feels like telepathy.’ The first book they produced together was Arthur, High King of Britain, a retelling of the Arthurian legends, set in the Scilly Isles and opening memorably with a small boy’s attempt to walk from Bryher to Tresco and from Tresco to Samson at low tide. Since then, they have collaborated on a book almost every year.
The two Michaels.
Professional relationships like this mean more to Michael Morpurgo than to most writers. Had he been brought up by his real father, he is confident that he would have made a professional life for himself on the stage, not the page. As it is, the theatrical genes he has inherited from both the Bridge and the Cammaerts families mean that he is happiest when he is involved with a team, or a cast. As he became gradually better known, his work, too, seemed to invite involvement and interpretation by other artists and art forms. In 1982 the Children’s Film Foundation spotted the potential in Friend or Foe, Michael’s story of two evacuees, David and Tucky, who meet and befriend a pair of German airmen whose plane has crashed on Dartmoor, and made ‘a very good little film’ for Saturday-morning viewing in cinemas. And, early in 1988, the producer Simon Channing Williams booked up every cottage, B&B and campsite on Bryher, and shipped in a star cast to make a film of Why the Whales Came.
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