Michael Morpurgo

by Maggie Fergusson

  It was Ant’s brilliant idea. ‘Why don’t we cut him down?’ he said. ‘We can bury him in the orchard, put a cross over his grave. Let’s do it now, while it’s still dark, while everyone’s asleep.’

  So we stole down the stairs to the larder, avoiding all the creaking floorboards. Ant switched on the light. I didn’t want to look, but somehow I couldn’t stop myself. It made me sick to my stomach.

  ‘I’ll get him down,’ Ant whispered. He did everything. I just stood there and watched, full of revulsion, as he got a chair and a knife from the kitchen, climbed up and cut the hare down.

  ‘Here, Mikey, you take him,’ he said, holding him out to me. I shook my head and backed away. ‘He’s dead,’ Ant said. ‘He can’t hurt you. Take him for a minute, while I get down.’

  So I held the dead hare in my arms, trying not to feel his deadness, the cold damp of his fur, the stiffness of him. The only way I could do it was to imagine what he’d been like when he was alive. I’d seen a hare only once, watched him out on a ploughed field near the sea wall. At first I’d thought he was a rabbit, but he was too brown, his ears were too long. When I clapped my hands, he ran off. He seemed to be flying over the ground, his feet barely touching it. I was breathless with admiration at his power and his speed and his grace.

  It was this memory that made me want to go on holding him as we walked out through the laundry room to the back door. Prynne insisted on coming with us. He’d have barked his head off if we’d left him behind, and we didn’t want that. He kept jumping up at me, and sniffing at the hare. As I walked out into the orchard that night, it occurred to me that this might be the very same hare I had seen that day by the sea wall. Ant was digging the hole, and I could feel the blood sticky on my fingers. It was heartbreak I was feeling now, not revulsion any more. When the time came I couldn’t bring myself to lay him down. Ant did it for me. We covered him with the cold damp earth, folded the turf over, and pressed it down. I found a small twig on the ground that did for a cross. We stood for a moment over the place, and then left him there. Ant took my hand and we crept back to the house. Neither of us spoke a word to one another till we were back in bed, but all the while something was worrying me.

  ‘What are we going to say, Ant, when they find out?’

  ‘I’ve thought of that,’ he replied. ‘We’ll blame it on Prynne. He jumped up and pulled him down. He’s always thieving stuff out of the larder, isn’t he? Remember that pork pie he ate?’

  It was true. Prynne was a thief with a long criminal record. It was a good idea.

  As it turned out we didn’t need to say anything. When we came downstairs for breakfast the next morning we could hear Dad blowing his top about Prynne.

  ‘No good as a gun dog, no good as a guard dog. He’s just a lousy thief. I was looking forward to that jugged hare too. Ruddy dog.’

  When we came into the kitchen Prynne was cowering in his basket, blinking with guilt and contrition at Dad’s every word.

  Mum, I noticed, was saying nothing, which was odd, because she was always getting furious with Prynne, for running off, for stealing, for making a mess. Ant asked innocently what was up, and Dad ranted on again about Prynne, while Mum just busied herself about the kitchen. Then suddenly Dad rounded on us.

  ‘That dog didn’t open the door by himself, did he? Which of you left the kitchen door open?’ he demanded. ‘One of you did.’

  Mum spoke up for the first time. ‘Don’t blame them,’ she said, ‘it was probably me. Maybe I didn’t latch it properly last night. It’s easily done. It doesn’t matter that much.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter?’ Dad raged. But then he seemed lost for words. He stormed out, leaving the three of us alone. For a while Mum said nothing more. She brought us our porridge in silence, poured out our milk in silence. Then she sat down opposite us and sipped her tea, looking at us over the top of her cup.

  ‘That Prynne,’ she said, ‘he’s a mighty clever dog. Do you know what he must have done? The hare was still hanging in the larder when I went up to bed last night. I know he was. I saw him there. And I didn’t leave the door open. Do you know, that dog must have opened the laundry-room door, then the larder door, jumped up, cut the string – I’ve had a good look and it was definitely cut. Then he must have carried the hare out of the house, unlocking the back door and opening it as he went. Now that is a clever dog, a very, very clever dog. Something wrong with your porridge this morning, boys? You’re not eating.’

  I didn’t dare speak.

  ‘We didn’t want to eat it, Mum,’ Ant said.

  ‘I know, neither did I really,’ she said, smiling at us. ‘But don’t tell your father. We’d just better hope he doesn’t find out, eh?’

  It must have been a week or so later. We were all of us out in the garden making a bonfire of branches and twigs from a tree that had come down in a storm, when Prynne came trotting across the lawn, tail high and wagging and proud, and dragging something heavy. It was the carcass of the hare – or what was left of it anyway. Dad hurled abuse at him, and a stick or two as well. Prynne dropped his prize and ran off, tail between his legs.

  The hare ended up on the bonfire on the Fifth of November, which in a way wasn’t so bad because, as Ant said in bed that night, at least he had a proper funeral – a funeral fit for a hero. We found two of the hare’s teeth in the ashes later and kept them in the Cadbury’s tin under Ant’s bed with all our other secret treasures: a grass-snake skin, a blackbird’s skull and our most prized possession, a bright blue kingfisher’s feather we’d found among the bulrushes out on the marshes. And that was the end of it. Mum kept our secret and Prynne did too of course. All was well that ended well – we thought.

  But then one Sunday afternoon a few weeks later I saw Mr Warren’s car pull up at our gate. With his loud booming voice, we heard very clearly what he was saying to Mum: ‘Met your husband in the pub, and he told me what happened to that hare I gave him. Bally thief dog. Needs a good hiding. Anyway, got to put that right, I thought. Can’t shoot the dog, more’s the pity, but I can bring in another hare for you. Shot it a couple of days ago. Just hang it for a week till he’s good and smelly. Jugged hare. Your husband says it’s his favourite. Can’t stand it myself, I just like shooting the beggars. Got it in the car. Shall I fetch it?’

  There was a moment when Mum could have refused, but Dad came out of the house, and it was too late. For a week the poor creature hung in our larder. Neither Ant nor I went near the sweet tin.

  Mum cooked him the next Sunday. A sickly smell wafted through the house all morning. Ant and I knew there was no way we could eat him. Strangely, we both caught the same sudden stomach bug, and lay on our beds, clutching our bellies and groaning in agony, until even Dad was convinced we were really ill. Mum made us have Milk of Magnesia, which was horrible, but not as horrible as jugged hare.

  That afternoon, after their lunch was over, we told them we felt much better, that we wanted to go for a walk. We were tramping together along the sea wall. The late afternoon sun was shining through the clouds and lit up the ploughed field by the old Saxon chapel. And there, right beside it, we spotted two hares playing with one another, running around in crazy circles, up on their hind legs, boxing. We stood and watched. It was the finest sight I ever saw.

  ‘Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you get lucky,’ Michael writes in the Mail on Sunday in the spring of 2011. ‘And I got lucky.’ He is looking back on a decade that has brought him so much good fortune that he still sometimes wonders whether it is all quite real. And his sense of amazement is compounded when he remembers the first two years of the new millennium, when disaster struck and it seemed for a time that a great part of his life’s work was about to unravel.

  In February 2001 Michael and Clare went to spend half-term in a hotel in St Ives. Farms for City Children had just celebrated its silver jubilee. It was now welcoming parties of schoolchildren not only to Nethercott but also to Lower Treginnis on the Pembrokeshire coast, and to Wick Court,
a moated manor house in a bend of the River Severn in Gloucestershire, and both Michael and Clare had been appointed MBE for services to young people.

  Michael and Clare after being invested as MBE, 12 November 1999.

  There was much to be proud of, and they felt they deserved a treat. But, listening to the news in their hotel room, they heard something deeply unsettling: foot-and-mouth had been detected in pigs in an abattoir in Essex. Nobody in the farming community had ever forgotten how quickly the disease had spread when it struck in 1967, and how it had ravaged livestock all over the country. They packed their bags and drove straight home.

  Within days, the countryside was shutting down. The outbreak of the disease had been traced to a farm in Northumberland where pigs had been fed ‘untreated waste’, and the European Union announced a ban on all British exports of livestock, meat and animal products. In late February, foot-and-mouth was found in animals on a farm in Highampton, just six miles from Nethercott. By March there were 240 cases, and teams of soldiers, under Brigadier Alex Birtwistle, had been called in to slaughter infected livestock.

  Michael with Princess Anne on the farm.

  In the lanes around Nethercott, dead sheep and cows lay piled up in the gateways of infected farms, and the smell of death was inescapable. The carcasses were incinerated on towering pyres, and the flames fed with car and tractor tyres to increase the heat. Black, foul-smelling smoke drifted across the valleys. ‘If I could paint a picture of paradise,’ Michael has sometimes said, ‘it wouldn’t be far off the countryside round Iddesleigh.’ But now the place was turning into a vision of hell. In order to stop infection spreading, movement between farms was severely curtailed. ‘Hatherleigh,’ says Michael, ‘became like a plague village.’

  The moment the crisis broke, schools planning visits to Nethercott, Lower Treginnis and Wick Court cancelled their bookings. And when word reached sponsors and grant-making trusts that children were no longer visiting the farms they all took the line that this was a disaster the charity could never survive, and withdrew financial support. With Neil Warrington, now chairman of the board of Farms for City Children, Clare undertook the mournful task of visiting the three farms and laying off the staff. The charity had enough money to keep going until August; then it would be bankrupt. As spring turned into summer, with new cases of foot-and-mouth continuing to break out daily, Michael felt paralysed by a mixture of dread and irrational guilt.

  Early that year he had received a letter from Marion Lloyd, an editor at Macmillan, inviting him to write a horror story. He was toying, in response, with a novel about vampires, and it was not going well. As a child, fantasy had never appealed to him – ‘I never really felt at ease in other worlds, like Narnia’ – and, as a writer, it has continued to leave him cold. ‘I can do ghosts,’ he says, ‘though even then I have to have a historical reality from which to grow them, but pure fantasy I cannot manage.’ Now, he realised, there was no need for fantasy. A real horror story was unfolding around him. In a fortnight, during May, he wrote the imaginary diary of a teenage girl, Becky Morley, growing up on a farm infected by foot-and-mouth. Becky’s father owns a prize herd of Gloucester cows. When they are slaughtered he begins to lose his grip, and is eventually hospitalised with depression. ‘And depression,’ Becky’s mother explains to her, ‘isn’t just sadness. It’s an illness that makes you feel very bad about yourself, that makes you feel completely useless and lost, as if you’re living at the bottom of a deep dark pit of hopelessness that you can see no way out of.’

  Michael’s description of Morley’s depression came partly from personal experience. His impotence in the face of the crisis had driven him into a state of frozen despair from which, without Clare’s calm and buoyancy, he feels it might have been hard to emerge. But his writing sprang also from his observation of anguish in the farmers living around him, in particular Graham and David Ward. ‘I saw in them both,’ he says, ‘this enormous gathering of grief. There was no laughter, no smiling.’ Michael had learned, over the years, that a farmer’s greatest satisfaction comes from seeing his animals flourish. Instead, Graham and David were now going out every day looking for the tell-tale signs of disease: limping, listlessness, lesions on tongues and hooves. ‘I felt they were barely coping with the trauma,’ Michael says, and he was right. ‘I’m not a religious man,’ says David Ward. ‘But I was praying then.’

  Armed with the handwritten manuscript of Becky Morley’s diary, Michael travelled up to Macmillan’s offices in London, and invited Marion Lloyd and six of her staff to gather around the board table, as around a campfire, while he read it aloud. He is always happiest if he can present new work in this way. He began as a classroom storyteller, and he has remained much more confident about the spoken than the written word. His rough copy, editors agree, can be very rough indeed; ‘but if I can tell people a story, I can usually convince them that it works’. The Macmillan team was convinced. Rushed through production in record time, and with a photograph of Léa Morpurgo on the cover, Out of the Ashes was published in July, and within weeks had sold 25,000 copies.

  In early August, just in time to avert the closure of Farms for City Children, a Canadian trust stepped in with a grant sufficient to keep the charity going until Christmas; but foot-and-mouth continued to spread, and for the first time in years Michael found himself at a loose end. In the early afternoon of 11 September, when normally he would have been out working with children in the fields, he was lying on his bed half-watching the television when he witnessed something that at first seemed scarcely possible. An aeroplane rocketed into one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York; the tower burst into flames. ‘I thought it was some Hollywood movie. Then I read the news bar, and saw the second plane coming in, and I shouted downstairs to Clare to come and join me.’ They watched together as events unfolded. Outside their bedroom window, black smoke was still drifting across the Okement Valley.

  It was October before foot-and-mouth was brought under control and schools returned to Nethercott. Graham and David Ward were surprised how glad they felt to have the children back. ‘We’d missed them,’ says David. But in Michael and Clare the strain of the crisis had hardened feelings that had been nagging at them for some years. The time had come for a parting of the ways with Farms for City Children.

  The reasons for this were both practical and personal. Michael and Clare had long been aware of the danger that, if they stayed too long at the heart of the charity, it might collapse when they were gone. Roughly seventy per cent of charities do not survive their founders, and they had before them the cautionary example of Sir Allen Lane, whose refusal to loosen his grip on Penguin had resulted in bitter wranglings after his death (‘Penguin Now a Sitting Duck’ was the Daily Telegraph’s headline as the big publishing conglomerates descended on the firm like a pack of wolves).

  Physically, Michael was beginning to feel he was no longer up to the job. Farmers like Graham and David Ward who have grown up working long, heavy days, he says, can continue into late middle age ‘heaving hay bales around in a way that looks so easy and natural it’s almost balletic’. But Michael was struggling, and so, in a different way, was Clare. She had raised £1 million to get Lower Treginnis up and running and, hot on the heels of this, a further £2 million for Wick Court. Her appetite for badgering and cajoling trusts and individuals into opening their wallets for Farms for City Children was exhausted – ‘the sparkle just wasn’t there any more’. Both she and Michael had also become exasperated by intrusive health-and-safety legislation, whose tentacles now seemed to reach into almost every aspect of their work on the farm. At milking time, for example, children were no longer allowed to gather around the cows, but had to watch them from above, standing on a specially (and expensively) constructed gallery. ‘In twenty-five years,’ Michael fumes, ‘no harm had come to a single child who came with us. So all this was hard to stomach.’

  Underlying these concerns, and more pressing than any of them, were Mic
hael’s increasingly frequent absences from home, and the tension they were creating in the marriage. His books, which for years had been a kind of hinterland, were beginning to take up the foreground, and invitations to speak had him ‘regularly flying the nest’. When he came back from his travels to schools or festivals, he and Clare found it difficult to readjust to one another. ‘We didn’t often argue,’ Clare says, ‘but there was a lot of silence; a sense of imbalance.’ Clare, who was working a fourteen-hour day running Nethercott, Lower Treginnis and Wick Court, felt unable to tune in to Michael’s excitement when he arrived home ‘high as a kite’. But for Michael the thrill of holding audiences captive with stories was addictive. It was not something he could bear to relinquish.

  One editor who worked with Michael on a number of books at this time sensed that, after years of relative obscurity, he was now becoming ‘hungry for success’. But Michael considers ‘hungry’ the wrong word. For a quarter of a century, he had been sending his books out like messages in bottles, hoping they would wash up on friendly and receptive shores. Finally, this was beginning to happen. Children, who had previously looked quite blank when he visited their schools, were starting to tell him they had read his books and loved them. The knowledge that he was forming invisible bonds of connection through words and stories satisfied a deep need in him. ‘We read to know we are not alone,’ C.S. Lewis believed. Michael Morpurgo is slightly different. He writes to know he is not alone.