Most memorable of all is the journey he made to Moscow in the autumn of 2003 to attend a conference and celebration for 500 Russian librarians. It opened with a dinner in the Kremlin, and culminated in a prize-giving ceremony. ‘Then came an announcement that a prize was to be presented to the most admirable librarian in all of Russia.’ Drums rolled, and a diminutive man in an ill-fitting suit squeezed his way to the front through the tables and chairs. In his home town, 2,000 miles from Moscow, the library had recently caught fire. Repeatedly braving the flames, he had rescued nearly all the books.
Michael at the Kremlin.
This act of heroism prompted Michael to write a magical and inspiring short story, ‘I Believe in Unicorns’. But by the time he wrote this he had, despite all the demands on his time, embarked on what was to be his longest and most ambitious novel to date. Alone on a Wide Wide Sea is a complex mariner’s tale spanning two generations, opening in an orphanage in Australia in the late Forties, and ending in present-day London.
In the early spring of 2005 Michael and Clare took a holiday in the Engadine Valley in Switzerland so that he could finish it. His term as laureate was nearly at an end, and both of them were exhausted. ‘We had spent two years ricocheting around the world,’ Clare says. ‘Michael was absolutely rolled out; and I remember feeling I just didn’t have much more to give.’
‘We have just walked down to the river through banks of bluebells,’ Clare emails after returning from a literary festival in Dubai. ‘Bliss to be home again.’ Pottering about in Devon, she finds great happiness in small things: watching her tomatoes and her roses flourish, visiting Ros in Exeter, chatting to her granddaughters on the telephone. Michael is different. He cannot relax for long without taking on a project or a cause. During one cloudless week in May 2011, for example, he becomes concerned about the tadpoles burgeoning in the rutty puddles in a field across the lane. The puddles are drying out, and the tadpoles don’t yet have legs, so he makes a series of journeys down to the field with a bucket, carries the tadpoles home and empties them into a granite trough in the garden. But the trough is three feet above the ground. For a baby frog to jump from it would mean certain death. So he constructs a broad wooden ramp, and when he leaves Devon for his annual holiday in Scilly he emails Jane Feaver to check that the frogs are using it.
Michael’s drive, his almost missionary zeal, is fuelled by the need to fight what Clare calls ‘his tendency to sink’. To keep his spirits up, she says, he requires ‘big things, and strong emotions’; he needs ‘to feel plugged into a wider world’. And, just as when he was a junior schoolmaster refereeing Saturday-afternoon rugby, he needs his wife at his side. Sometimes, when Michael introduces Clare to journalists or parents or children as they swarm around him after a talk, ‘they look at me bewildered, as if to say, “What’s she got to do with the price of eggs?”’ But the truth, as he knows better than anyone, is that without Clare Morpurgo there would be no Michael Morpurgo. So when, just after Michael’s retirement as laureate, fate dealt him a trump-card, it was, he says, ‘our joint achievement and our joint reward’.
It began with a telephone call from Michael’s theatrical agent, Marc Berlin. The National Theatre, Berlin explained, was thinking of making a play of War Horse. Images of pantomime horses galumphing across a stage set of trenches and Flanders mud drifted through Michael’s mind. The whole notion seemed so far-fetched it might have been an April fool. But it was not April, and the National Theatre was not fooling.
Following the success of the stage production of Philip Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials, the National’s artistic director, Nicholas Hytner, had asked Associate Director Tom Morris to come up with another show that would play effectively both to older children and to grown-ups. In response Tom immersed himself in contemporary children’s literature, and several novels – Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart, Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl – fired his imagination. Then a friend gave him a copy of Private Peaceful and, intrigued by Michael’s work, he went on to read Kensuke’s Kingdom, The White Horse of Zennor, This Morning I Met a Whale. ‘It was my mum who said, “Have you read the one about the horse in the First World War?” She’d heard Michael talk about it on Desert Island Discs.’
Turning the pages of War Horse, Tom felt increasingly excited. The classic Orpheus structure of the story – ‘the falling in love, the separation, the quest through hell to recover the love’ – gave it clear theatrical potential. And the fact that one of the two central characters was a horse struck Tom as a positive advantage. Some years earlier he had seen Tall Horse, a retelling by the South-African-based Handspring Puppet Company of the true story of a giraffe caught in Sudan in the early nineteenth century, and shipped across the Mediterranean as a gift for the King of France. At its centre was a life-sized giraffe puppet made of a skeletal bamboo frame with internal hinges and articulated by a team of actors, and he’d been bowled over by it. ‘I knew,’ he says, ‘that these people could create a life-sized animal puppet that could hold a big stage. And I wanted to work with them.’
Nick Hytner, once assured that no horse puppet would be given a speaking part, gave Tom his blessing to start ‘playing around’ with War Horse in the National Theatre Studio. He was not making a firm commitment to it – fewer than one in four ideas trialled in the Studio ever reaches the stage – but he had an inkling that it was ‘mad enough to be something that just might work’. Handspring Puppeteers Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler were flown over from South Africa. Eventually, they would create horses on bamboo frames just as they had created their giraffe, but to begin with, using scissors, cardboard and old newspapers, they simply mocked up heads, and invited actors to try them on and experiment with being horses. Nick Hytner sat in on an early workshop. ‘It was weird,’ he says, ‘but I thought, “OK, Tom, if you say so.”’ But Michael, also invited to watch, was much less sceptical. Since Marc Berlin’s initial call, he had been shown a DVD of Handspring’s giraffe walking across a studio and had found it ‘unbelievably, inexplicably moving’. Seeing the actors in their horses’ heads in the Studio, Tom says, Michael became ‘really quite emotional. It was a watershed moment. I felt we had his confidence.’
Toby Sedgwick (choreographer), Tom Morris and Adrian Kohler in rehearsal.
Puppeteer Tim Lewis with Topthorn.
Tom Morris and his co-director, Marianne Elliott, then set to work in earnest. The production involved a vast team – ‘and we were all’, says Tom, ‘well outside our comfort zone’. But from the start the wheels were oiled by Michael’s enthusiasm and support. ‘Graceful is the word that keeps coming to mind when I think of him,’ says Tom. ‘He was graceful in his involvement.’ When it comes to adaptations and collaboration, Tom has learned, writers divide into two types: ‘Some brilliant creative people become paranoid, fearful of competition or of someone else taking the credit for their work. Others understand that their skill as storytellers is enhanced, rather than threatened, by collective effort and enterprise. Michael was definitely in this second camp.’ For Michael, meantime, ‘the sheer enjoyment of watching this huge jigsaw come together, piece by piece, was mind-boggling’.
Not that all was plain sailing. There had never been any question of Michael’s writing the script – ‘We needed a level of detachment from the original source,’ says Tom, ‘we needed to be quite cold-blooded’ – and at various stages he was unhappy with it. ‘Then,’ says Tom, ‘we saw a fiery side to him.’ And, though Philip Pullman had encouraged Michael to trust the National Theatre, and had assured him that all would be well if he did so, the first preview seemed such a disaster that Michael barely slept for several nights. With just a week to go before it opened to the public War Horse was diffuse, ill-focused, clumsy, and far too long. ‘Michael was plainly alarmed,’ Nick Hytner remembers. ‘But I knew the difference between a show that’s not a success and will never be a success, and one that will, with a bit of work, turn into something amazing. And I knew that War Ho
rse was one of those.’ By press night, on 17 October 2006, the play had been radically tweaked and tightened, the script altered, some whole parts removed, twenty minutes cut from the running time. Michael found himself sitting in the audience behind Mike Leigh and in front of Sir Peter Hall and it was clear, by the end, that both were as deeply moved as he was himself.
The reviews the following day were ecstatic: ‘If ever a piece of theatre worked magic, then it must be War Horse’ (Evening Standard), ‘Genius isn’t too strong a word to describe this astonishing performance’ (Daily Telegraph), ‘Extraordinarily fresh and moving’ (Independent). Even critics such as Benedict Nightingale who felt that the story steered ‘perilously close to sentimentality’ were overcome by the brilliance of the puppets. ‘Even “Equus”,’ wrote Nightingale in the Guardian, ‘pales in comparison with the dazzling puppet design of Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler, who ultimately make you forget you are watching fabricated quadrupeds.’
Yet nobody dreamed of the scale of success that lay ahead of the show Tom Morris now calls ‘the Beast’: that its National Theatre run would be extended from one year to two; that it would transfer to the New London Theatre in Drury Lane and break the record for the highest weekly grossing play in the West End; that shortly after the millionth ticket had been sold in London it would open on Broadway and scoop five Tony Awards – including the award for best play. ‘At every turn, it’s amazed us,’ says Nick Hytner. ‘None of us can remember a play ever behaving in this way. It’s unprecedented.’
What has all this meant for Michael? He has been to War Horse more than forty times now, and has become a familiar figure to the cast, rising to his feet at the end of performances and leading the applause. On a purely practical level, it has made him a very rich man and, though materially his life has changed little, this matters more to him than some might guess. After decades of hard slog, he has finally settled his debts with Allen Lane, and laid his ghost to rest. ‘It’s not that I feel I’m quits with the Lane family, exactly, because I will always owe them a huge amount. But not to have to worry about living off them any more is a relief to me – and to Clare. It makes her happy that things have come right financially through nobody’s efforts but our own.’
More personally, the play has brought Michael a sense of late homecoming. ‘When I’m in the theatre,’ he says, ‘I know that, but for the Second World War and Jack Morpurgo, this is where I would have made my life.’ Every time the War Horse cast changes, he goes in to meet the new actors. He unrolls before them a map of Devon, and points out Iddesleigh. He talks a bit about the First World War and reads from the poetry of Edward Thomas. He tells the actors about how he met Wilf Ellis and Captain Budgett, how he watched a troubled child one evening confiding in a horse over a stable door, how War Horse took shape. It is as if he was once again taking a Year 6 class, and the lesson ends with ‘show and tell’. From a deep jacket pocket, Michael produces one of the brass boxes sent by Princess Mary to soldiers on the Western Front, and it is passed round the cast. Originally it was filled with cigarettes, but Michael has crammed it full of Maltesers. The actors are allowed one each as a reward for attentiveness. ‘I don’t know whether it helps them,’ he says when the session is over. ‘But the truth is it does a lot for me. I’m a bit greedy about my involvement. I’m never quite satisfied.’ War Horse is now touring America for the second time. It has travelled to Canada, Australia and Japan, and in the autumn of 2013 it opens in Berlin. Michael has had to loosen his grip, and this makes him anxious. ‘My role diminishes as the thing widens,’ he says. ‘I don’t want to lose it.’
In letters home from boarding school, Sebastian Morpurgo gently teases Michael about the unlikelihood of any of his books ever selling really well, or being made into a film. ‘I’m anxious to see Dad’s completed “masterpiece”,’ he writes in one. ‘I’ll knock off the inverted commas when it sells more than 150,000 copies, or when you sell the filming rights to MGM.’ Clare joined in the teasing. To keep the atmosphere from turning sour when the telephone rang at awkward moments she often joked, ‘Better answer – might be Spielberg.’ So when, shortly after War Horse had transferred from the National Theatre to the West End, Marc Berlin rang to say that Kathleen Kennedy, an American producer who had worked with Steven Spielberg on ET, Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List, was interested in making a film of the book, Michael wondered whether he was bluffing.
Berlin warned him not to get his hopes up – this was probably just a speculative enquiry. But then Spielberg came to London, saw the play, and invited Michael and Clare to lunch at Claridge’s. Sitting with him on sofas around a low table, sharing a Mexican salad so beautiful that Spielberg insisted on photographing it before they started to eat, it became clear that he was as keen as a hound that had picked up a scent. He questioned them closely about the First World War, about horses, about Devon. ‘For two and a half hours,’ Michael says, ‘I told him stories, and he told us stories. And I thought, “I am listening here to one of the great storytellers.”’
Within months Michael and Clare were watching a $90 million film take shape on set. In the Wiltshire village of Castle Combe they joined a cast of 300 extras, Michael dressed as a whiskery squire, Clare as his glamorous lady. In the grounds of Stratfield Saye, home to the dukes of Wellington, they stood under an oak tree and observed the filming of a cavalry charge: ‘one hundred and fifty horses galloping towards us, with soldiers on their backs, sabres drawn’. They watched the filming of a scene in which Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Hiddleston, playing two army officers, pore over a battle plan. Spielberg filmed the scene again and again – ‘teasing out of them their very best performance’ – then turned to Michael and whispered, ‘They’re just like Ferraris.’ They visited Spielberg in his director’s tent, and noted, next to the banks of monitors and screens, a well-thumbed copy of War Horse. ‘I kept thinking about how it had all begun,’ says Michael. ‘How a chance conversation in the pub had led to all this. I love the arc of that story.’
Michael and Clare as extras in War Horse, with Steven Spielberg.
The arc of Michael’s own story over the same period is just as remarkable. When first he fell into conversation with Wilf Ellis in the Duke of York, he was a would-be author touting his stories around publishers like a door-to-door salesman. Now, he sells well over a million books a year, and it is not only publishers who beat a path to his door. One way to measure his success is to spend time with him at Langlands. Here, during one morning in the spring of 2011, emails arrive from Barnaby Spurrier, a producer, concerning the story Michael has been commissioned to write for Mandeville and Wenlock, the official mascots for the London 2012 Olympics; from HarperCollins about the deal they have struck with McDonald’s, whereby 10 million copies of stories by Michael are to be given away with Happy Meals; from Michel Kains, a French producer with whom Michael is working on an animated version of his Holocaust novel The Mozart Question; and from Simon Reade, who is shortly to start work on a film of Private Peaceful. Another is to visit his agent, Veronique Baxter, in her book-lined cubicle at David Higham, off Golden Square in Soho. She has represented Michael since 2006. In that time, she says, his sales ‘have gone like this’, and she shoots her arm skywards. And sales are only part of the story. David Higham represents a number of bestselling children’s authors, including Jacqueline Wilson. But the postbag that comes in for Michael every day is bigger than anyone else’s ‘by miles’. Letters that seem particularly touching, or interesting, are forwarded to Langlands. When at home, Clare reckons, Michael replies to between thirty and forty a day.
In some writers this level of attention and demand would breed arrogance, in others reclusiveness. In Michael, friends and relations agree, its effects have been mellowing and relaxing – so much so, says his brother-in-law David Teale, ‘that it is hard to believe he is the same man we once knew’. For those who know Michael only through his stories it is easy to recognise what Philip Pullman describes as his ‘deep, true dece
ncy’ – and this, Pullman says, ‘must be the man himself coming through, because all we can write, really, is ourselves, over and over. Michael is a truly good man.’
Yet there is still, mixed in with this sweetness, a dash of anger. Quentin Blake, who has illustrated several of Michael’s books, suspects that, if one could analyse him in terms of the four ‘humours’ believed in the ancient world to govern temperament, Michael would be ‘mainly sanguine, but potentially choleric’. The conductor Stephen Barlow makes a similar observation. Working with Michael on a ballet of his story The Rainbow Bear he was aware of ‘a darkness driving him forward – a kind of tempered irascibility’. Success has liberated him, allowing him to channel this anger outwards, and to positive ends. Michael has become, as Barlow says, ‘a crusader’.
Early in 2011 Michael was invited to give the thirty-fifth Richard Dimbleby Lecture. Founded in memory of the BBC broadcaster, this has been delivered over the years by a formidable roll-call of speakers – Bill Clinton, Richard Dawkins, Stella Rimington and Rowan Williams among them. It had never before been given by a children’s writer. Stepping up to the lectern in the Great Hall at King’s College London – dressed not in his storytelling clothes, but in a sober statesman’s suit and tie – Michael looked unaccustomedly nervous. What followed was an hour of oratory that nobody present that evening will ever forget.
Michael Morpurgo Page 19