Michael Morpurgo

by Maggie Fergusson

Michael never experienced what he calls ‘a Harry Potter moment’, but from the mid-Nineties onwards his books began to attract attention. The Dancing Bear, despite its sadness and bleak ending, sold well. ‘People talked about it as a “bestseller”,’ Michael says. ‘It was not – but it was the first time that word had been used in connection with my work.’ The year after its publication, in 1995, The Wreck of the Zanzibar won the Whitbread Children’s Book Award. The year after that, The Butterfly Lion scooped the Smarties Prize. Things were, as Michael puts it, ‘gearing up’.

  He was now on a virtuous circle: success bred confidence, and confidence enabled him to write with new ease and depth. Shortly after winning the Whitbread, Michael had chanced on a newspaper article about a Japanese soldier, Private Yokoi, who had chosen to remain hidden on a Pacific island, Guam, at the end of the Second World War. At about the same time he read the article, a child sent him a letter begging him to write a story about a boy stranded on an island. Then, at a local party, he fell into conversation with a couple who had sailed round the world with their son and dog. The three things began to weave together in his mind. Larking about with a dog on deck, Michael imagined, a boy might fall overboard, and be washed up on the island where the Japanese soldier had created a private kingdom. ‘Anyone got a good name for a dog?’ he asked the children at Nethercott. ‘Ours is called Stella Artois,’ one boy volunteered. He now had everything he needed to set to work on Kensuke’s Kingdom.

  Many of Michael’s books explore fruitful relationships between children and old people – a reflection, perhaps, of the fact that he himself has found it easier being a grandfather than a father. But the relationship that develops in Kensuke’s Kingdom is more subtle and hard won than most. After the death of his wife and children at Nagasaki, Kensuke – proud, meticulous and fiercely independent – has learned to manage his grief by hiding on his island and shutting out the rest of the world. When a homesick, shipwrecked child, Michael, arrives to disturb his sanctuary, it takes him a long time to recognise that this is a blessing.

  As she turned the last page of Kensuke’s Kingdom, Carol Hughes found herself ‘oddly overwhelmed, and yet with a strange feeling of peace’. ‘It seems,’ she wrote to Michael from Court Green, ‘you have touched something, or tapped into something quite different within yourself … it reads almost like some internal, yet necessary journey you have had to travel, confronting early crises, finding oneself in a situation requiring all one’s inner and unknown reserves – and the “coming through” almost a spiritual journey, a “healing”.’

  The public, too, recognised this as Michael’s greatest achievement yet. Kensuke’s Kingdom flew off bookshop shelves. To date, it has sold close to a million copies in the United Kingdom alone – more than any of Michael’s other titles. ‘For the first time,’ Michael remembers, ‘people I met began to say, “Aren’t you the man who wrote Kensuke’s Kingdom?”’ And at Farms for City Children, Wendy Cooling, one of the directors, spoke firmly to the rest of the board: ‘We can’t expect Michael to go on doing what he’s been doing for us now. Not after Kensuke’s Kingdom.’

  Gradually, from then on, Michael began to delegate some of his work at Nethercott; and in the brown-carpeted offices of Faber & Faber in Bloomsbury – an unlikely hunting-ground – he discovered the ideal person to take over from Clare. Jane Feaver had been at Faber for more than ten years and had worked with Michael on an anthology of children’s poetry, Because a Fire was in My Head. When she mentioned, one day, that she longed to move out of London with her small daughter, Michael invited her to Langlands for a weekend. ‘It was deep summer,’ she remembers, ‘and there was this amazing, idyllic village shimmering in a heat haze.’ In the autumn of 2001, as the foot-and-mouth crisis came to an end, she moved into Paradise Cottage, on the lane between Langlands and Parsonage Farm. ‘She is a companion and confidante,’ Michael says, ‘who has helped to keep us young. A great grist to our mill.’

  A few months after its British publication, Kensuke’s Kingdom was published in Canada, and Michael went to help launch it in Toronto. From there he caught a night ferry across Lake Ontario. He was almost the only passenger on board as the ferry ploughed through the dark water, and when it arrived at Niagara-on-the-Lake at midnight his father was on the quayside to meet him. They had hardly ever spent time alone with each other, but now they had three days together – ‘and they were quiet, gentle, good days’. They breakfasted in a diner; they pottered about the town, Tony Bridge pedalling a giant tricycle like Mr McHenry in The Magic Roundabout. Tony was acting in the evenings in Conan Doyle’s A Story of Waterloo, and Michael saw how, like himself, his father was two people: a passionate, energetic man who strode and bellowed about the stage; a shy, sometimes painfully reticent man in private life. After one performance Tony threw a party so that Michael might meet the rest of the company at the Shaw Festival Theatre. The theatre had become his home, Michael saw, and his fellow actors his surrogate family.

  There was unspoken sadness on both sides when the visit came to an end. Michael suspected he might never see his father again, and indeed, when next they met, Tony’s health was declining rapidly. He died on 20 December 2004, leaving instructions that, while half his ashes were to be scattered on a beach in Bermuda where he had walked with his second wife, half should be reunited with his ‘Kate’. Four years earlier, after a bleak final illness in Charing Cross Hospital, Jack Morpurgo had also died, and his ashes had been laid to rest with Kippe’s. Feeling it unsuitable that all three should share the same spot, Michael planted an apple tree on the other side of the lawn, and prepared to scatter Tony’s ashes there. But Sebastian’s six-year-old daughter Alice protested that Tony would be lonely all by himself, and so, at the last moment, he joined Kippe and Jack beneath the hornbeam.

  Kensuke’s Kingdom was not long published when Michael received a letter with a Belgian postmark. It came from Piet Chielens, who had recently opened a museum of the First World War in the Cloth Hall in Ypres – a building left in ruins in 1918, but now perfectly restored. Chielens was organising a conference on ‘War and Peace in Youth Literature’, and wanted Michael to speak.

  Ypres is a city still haunted by the misery and slaughter it witnessed nearly a century ago. In hotel lobbies, where normally guests might expect to see flower arrangements or pieces of modern art, there are instead displays of helmets, buckles and bullets, encrusted with Flanders mud. Every spring, farmers ploughing their fields turn up more of this grim paraphernalia, and with it tons of unexploded shells, and human bones. A quarter of a million men died at Ypres; about 44,000 are still waiting to be unearthed and given a proper burial. ‘They enter into your consciousness,’ says Chielens.

  Striking out from the city, Michael made a pilgrimage to De Kippe, the hamlet after which his mother had been named. He visited the field where, on Christmas Eve 1914, British and German troops laid down their weapons, ventured out of their trenches, and played football in No Man’s Land. Returning to Ypres at dusk, he stood beneath the Menin Gate, on which are engraved the names of 54,896 men whose bodies have never been found, and stood to attention as the city buglers saluted them with the Last Post. There was enough of the soldier in Michael to make this not only moving, but profoundly thought-provoking.

  Once Michael was back at home in Devon one small exhibit in Piet Chielens’s museum began to gnaw at his imagination. It was a letter from a British army officer to a mother in the Midlands informing her that her son had been court martialled, and was to be shot at dawn. Nearly 300 soldiers had been executed in this way, Michael learned, most for desertion or ‘cowardice’, two simply because they had fallen asleep at their posts. Many were known to be suffering from shell-shock, and a disproportionate number were Irish or black. As he began to study the records of their short trials, it became clear that very often executions had taken place ahead of major attacks – as a sort of warning to the other soldiers. ‘There was an agenda here,’ Michael says. Yet, despite repeated pleas f
rom soldiers’ descendants, the British government had doggedly refused to grant retrospective pardons.

  This was not just something Michael wanted to write about; he felt he must. ‘There was a sense of compulsion, and that’s always exciting.’ He knew that the only way to help readers share his sorrow and outrage over the court martials was to tell the quiet, private tale of one victim of injustice. Wandering through the rows of bone-white Portland-bonnet headstones in the Bedford House Cemetery near Ypres, he had come across the grave of Private T.S.H. Peaceful. Around this soldier he began to weave what he feels to be his very best book.

  Private Peaceful follows one long night in the life of a seventeen-year-old soldier, Thomas Peaceful, fighting near Ypres in 1915. His older brother Charlie, who has disobeyed orders in order to remain with him after he has been wounded, is to be executed at dawn. As ‘Tommo’ Peaceful keeps vigil with Charlie in spirit, counting down the hours, he is determined neither to sleep nor to dream:

  I have the whole night ahead of me, and I won’t waste a single moment of it … I want to try to remember everything, just as it was, just as it happened. I’ve had nearly eighteen years of yesterdays and tomorrows, and tonight I must remember as many of them as I can … Tonight, more than any other night of my life, I want to feel alive.

  Michael in Ypres.

  In his memory, Tommo travels back to his boyhood in a Devon village, allowing Michael to pour into his writing his feelings for Iddesleigh. It had been his home now for a quarter of a century and, though he knew he could never belong to the place in the rare, deep sense that farmers like Graham and David Ward belonged, it had nevertheless taught him more about belonging than anywhere else. As he imagined the Peaceful boys growing up among its lanes, fields and rivers, the words flowed from his pen – ‘the story seemed to tell itself’. And as the shadow of the First World War fell across the village, and Michael prepared to send Charlie and Tommo to the Western Front, ‘the writing became very intense’.

  Initially there were to have been just two Peaceful brothers; then a letter arrived from Scotland. It was from the mother of three sons, one of them, Joe, autistic. Joe had loved The Butterfly Lion; he had rocked with pleasure when his mother read it aloud to him. Michael was touched by this. He had learned over the years, first from his sister-in-law Anna Lane, who has Down’s syndrome, then from children visiting Nethercott, that those who appear weak and broken often have gifts of the heart that many ‘normal’ people lack. In response to the letter he created a third brother, Big Joe, a gentle giant filled with affection, humour and intuitive wisdom, around whom the Peaceful family revolves. It is to Big Joe, and his favourite song, ‘Oranges and Lemons’, that Charlie Peaceful’s thoughts turn for comfort when, at one minute to six, he walks out to face the firing squad.

  Michael became more involved in Private Peaceful than in any book before or since, and when the reviews came out they confirmed his hunch that this was the finest thing he had ever written. It was, the Observer noted, a story that ‘came from the heart with a passion and anger that pervades every page’. The Guardian called it ‘humanising and humane’, while the Irish Times likened Michael’s lyrical evocation of a Devon childhood to Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie. Ink Pellet, a magazine for teachers, suggested that ‘a better novel … for lower-school English classes is hard to imagine’. But grown-ups were enjoying it too. Among Private Peaceful’s admirers was the BBC radio presenter Jim Naughtie, who invited Michael to speak about and read from it on the Today programme.

  Simon Reade, then director of the Bristol Old Vic, heard the reading in his bath, and was struck by the possibility that Private Peaceful might make a powerful one-man play. He got in touch with Michael; they arranged to have lunch. Reade had decided that, for theatrical purposes, the ending of the story would need to be changed: it was Tommo, and not Charlie, who must die on stage. He sensed that he would need to tread carefully in suggesting this. Behind all Michael’s apparent confidence, Reade was aware of a nagging sense of inferiority – ‘I think he asks himself, “Am I a major minor writer, or a minor major one?”’ He was also aware of an unusual warmth and generosity. That first lunch was the beginning of a close and enduring friendship. For Reade, whose own father died when he was very young, Michael has become ‘a quasi father’, who has nursed him through a time of great trauma. ‘He doesn’t drop you when things get tough,’ Reade says. ‘He’s loyal.’ It was the beginning, too, of a fruitful working relationship. The one-man play of Private Peaceful, after two sell-out seasons at the Bristol Old Vic, went on to tour the country to enormous acclaim.

  And what of the true Private Peaceful? On a cold, bright morning in November 2010, Michael visits the Bedford House Cemetery and walks through the frosty grass to his grave. Many of the headstones he passes are engraved with messages from the families of the fallen: ‘Ever in our hearts’; ‘Thy will be done’; ‘Gone’. This one is absolutely plain – ‘Private T.S.H. Peaceful, 4 June 1915’. Michael has brought a poppy, but a school party has been here ahead of him. They have read his book, made a pilgrimage, and left a wreath of messages.

  What had Michael and Clare imagined that their lives would be like once they had put Farms for City Children behind them? ‘As usual,’ Michael says, ‘we really hadn’t looked very far ahead.’ Clare had thought that perhaps they would move away from Devon, to make things easier for their successors at Nethercott. ‘But then there was my garden, and my plants,’ she says. ‘And all those dead relations,’ Michael adds. In so far as they had envisaged the future at all, they had thought that Michael would devote himself to writing, and to speaking in schools and at festivals, and that Clare would spend more time in her garden, and with her grandchildren.

  But by the time Private Peaceful was published Michael was already some months into a job more demanding than Farms for City Children had ever been. In the spring of 2003, he had been invited to become the third Children’s Laureate, succeeding Quentin Blake and Anne Fine. Clare’s heart had sunk when the invitation came through, but she had realised, not for the first time, that there was no holding Michael back.

  This two-year post is not one that every children’s writer covets. ‘If you want to celebrate someone’s work,’ Philip Pullman wrote when the idea of a Children’s Laureate was first suggested, ‘then give them a gold medal, give them a silver salver, give them a cheque, give them a vote of thanks – but don’t give them a job.’ It was a role, Pullman felt, that robbed a writer ‘of those most precious things, time and silence’. But Michael is a very different kind of writer from Philip Pullman. He prefers, in fact, not to call himself a writer at all, but a ‘storymaker’ – ‘because while I hope that I can turn a good phrase and weave a powerful tale I know that I am not a great writer’. Writing has remained a tortuous business for him, whereas engaging an audience comes naturally, and gives him energy. Alone in front of a blank page he can too easily find himself brooding on aspects of his life that make him sad. Up on a stage he can, temporarily, forget these, while affirmation and love roll over him in waves from audiences of strangers. Ahead of a performance, says Phil Perry, who manages Michael’s publicity, ‘I can sometimes feel the weight and sadness coming from him. But once he starts, I’ve never seen him off form.’

  Michael reads to children from St John the Baptist School, Hoxton, spring 2003.

  With public performances becoming a regular part of his life, Michael assumed a new costume – red linen suit, red-banded panama in summer, long, stripy scarf and black beret in winter. In late middle age a faint but unmistakable expression of sadness had crept into his face. He looked less the matinée idol now, more the tragic clown. It was in this mode that he became Children’s Laureate, and he immediately staked out his goals: ‘to put literature before literacy’, and ‘to take the fear out of reading, so that people feel it is for everyone, not just for clever people, and not just for learning’. These he summed up in one rallying cry: ‘Let the joy of the book come to the fore!’r />
  As his predecessors had discovered, the title ‘Children’s Laureate’ commanded attention: ‘I was saying exactly the same things I’d been saying for years and years, but suddenly people were listening to me.’ His views and comments were constantly solicited by newspapers, and on the radio and television. His diary became a cat’s cradle of appointments that had him travelling the length and breadth of Britain. ‘Like some superannuated strolling player,’ he says, ‘I set up and performed wherever anyone let me’ – village halls, concert halls, tents, bookshops, libraries, school gyms. One week he was visiting a school with just fourteen pupils on the Hebridean island of Jura; the next addressing an audience of 2,500 in the Albert Hall. He and Clare spent not more than three or four nights a month at Langlands; and even when they were there Michael was regularly whisked off to Exeter to speak in the BBC studios.

  A Children’s Laureate, like a Booker Prize winner, enjoys a huge boost in book sales, and this, added to his speaker’s fees, guaranteed Michael a substantial income. He suspected, however, that during his two years in the post he would have almost no time for writing, and was determined to ensure instead that he had a good store of ideas when the moment came to hand on the laureate’s wreath. His most reliable stimulus for stories has always been travel. ‘A new landscape,’ he says, ‘acts for me like the backdrop in a theatre – stories begin to take shape against it.’ And so he accepted invitations to talk and perform not only all over Britain, but abroad. He went to Australia several times, inspiring his picture book Wombat Went Walkabout as well as his longest and most ambitious novel Alone on a Wide Wide Sea.

  Michael makes two new friends in Australia.

  Twice, he made week-long trips to Scotland, touring the Highlands and Islands in a little yellow bus. He visited South Africa, where, in grilling heat, he was taken to a township in Soweto. The children in the ramshackle, tin-roofed school had done their research and discovered that Michael had spent his early childhood in London, and to make him feel at home they entertained him with a concert of cockney songs.