Michael Morpurgo

by Maggie Fergusson

  His talk was entitled ‘Set the Children Free’, and his aim, he explained, was to carry the audience with him on ‘a personal and sometimes uncomfortable journey’ as he explored with them three of the basic ground rules laid down by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child: the rights to survival, to liberty and to education. ‘We shall discover,’ he warned, ‘that even under our noses, these rights have been and still are woefully neglected.’

  Three years earlier, Juliet Stevenson had invited Michael to come with her to the Young Vic to watch a play by Natasha Walter, Motherland. It had made him aware, for the first time, of the existence of Yarl’s Wood in Bedfordshire, an immigration removal centre for asylum seekers – ‘a kind of holding pen before deportation’. Families and children were imprisoned there, often for months, in conditions at best bleak, at worst brutal. Fired by indignation, Michael had visited Yarl’s Wood with a film crew from the BBC Politics Show. Refused entry, they set up their cameras outside the barbed-wire fence, and Michael recited lines from William Blake:

  A Robin Redbreast in a Cage

  Puts all Heaven in a Rage.

  He then poured his fury into the fictional tale of a young Afghan boy who, with his mother and a stray dog called Shadow, escapes from Afghanistan and makes his way to England, only to find himself, six years later, locked up in Yarl’s Wood.

  Writing Shadow, Michael told his Dimbleby audience, ‘was my way of dealing with the feelings I had about such grave injustice’. Similarly, the anger that welled up in him as he watched a documentary about the wall that Israelis were building around Palestine had driven him to write a story about a Palestinian shepherd boy and an Israeli girl who learned to communicate with one another by writing messages of peace on kites, waiting for a good wind, and then flying them over the wall. ‘Sentimental claptrap?’ Michael challenged his Dimbleby audience. ‘Maybe. Or rather a hope that a new generation will one day rise above the prejudice and suspicion, hurt and hatred – as has happened in Europe, in South Africa, in Ireland, and now, only days ago, in Egypt … It is the children of today, yesterday and tomorrow who will do this also in Israel and Palestine, given half a chance.’

  He had the children’s own word for this. After the publication of The Kites are Flying! Save the Children had invited Michael to become their Ambassador to the Middle East. They wanted him to visit children in Israel and Gaza, and to find out whether there was any real cause for hope. Both sides of the wall he had sat and made kites with groups of children, and had asked them what they thought. Might their grandchildren make peace one day? ‘I think it’ll be my grandchildren’s grandchildren,’ one had replied. ‘But there will be peace one day.’

  Relating these experiences, Michael played his audience like a great fish. One moment he was the jocular scoutmaster, drawing them in with stories, eccentricities and jokes, the next he was the fiery evangelist roaring with wrath. Later that evening his performance was broadcast on television, and the following day Veronique Baxter and her team at David Higham were overwhelmed with emails from people who had switched on the television by chance, and had felt compelled to listen to Michael until he had finished speaking. For Richard Dimbleby’s son Nicholas, it had been possibly the most memorable of all the lectures he had heard. ‘Your deep concern came across, both emotional and practical,’ he wrote to Michael. ‘You took us on your journey.’

  Sitting in the audience that evening, one person in particular had reason to feel moved. Few would have recognised the lady in the black hijab as Michael’s half-sister, Kay. For nearly twenty years Michael had not seen or spoken to her, and nor had Pieter or Mark. In 1976 she had married an Egyptian, converted to Islam and, not long afterwards, severed all ties with her blood relations, breaking her father’s heart. ‘If I knew how to pray,’ Jack Morpurgo wrote towards the end of his life, ‘there would be one prayer forever on my lips: that I be granted time and the capacity to recover … the affection of my daughter and my two Muslim grandchildren.’

  Everyone believed that Kay had cut herself off of her own accord, but this was not the case. As a child she had felt outraged by Jack’s controlling treatment of Kippe; as a married woman she learned very quickly that her own husband was a more extreme bully than Jack Morpurgo had ever been. He tried to poison her against her parents and siblings, and then, using threats, forbade her to have any contact with them. He kept her away from the funerals of both Kippe and Jack, and ripped up copies of Michael’s books in front of their children. Occasionally, listening to the radio in their west London home, Kay caught snatches of Michael’s voice. Sometimes, if she heard a car draw up by the house at night, she dreamed that he and Pieter and Mark had come to her rescue. When finally she broke free of her husband, her greatest fear was that her brothers would want nothing to do with her. She need not have worried. Within days of hearing from her, Michael and Clare had arranged to visit. ‘We went for tea,’ says Michael. ‘It was very moving. We chatted and chatted for nearly three hours.’ ‘And there was Clare, as beautiful as ever,’ says Kay. ‘And when we talked about War Horse and all Michael’s successes, he was just as full of awe and amazement as the rest of us.’

  I hope I’ll never get too old to travel. As you’ve read in this chapter, a new place usually means a new story. It doesn’t always work. When we went down the Nile with Ted and Carol Hughes we laid bets as to whether Ted or I would be first to write an Egyptian story of some kind, a crocodile tale or a camel poem. Neither of us did, so far as I know. But a couple of years ago I went to Norway, to the fjords, to the mountains and valleys of Edvard Grieg, to the land of Beowulf, a country not so long ago living under the heel of a foreign occupier. Here I did write a story.

  From the ship’s log:

  14 July 1965

  As I sailed into Arnefjord this morning, I was looking all around me, marvelling at the towering mountains, at the still dark waters, at the welcoming escort of porpoises, at the chattering oystercatchers, and I could not understand for the life of me why the Vikings ever left this land.

  It was beautiful beyond belief. Why would you ever leave this paradise of a place, to face the heaving grey of the Norwegian Sea and a voyage into the unknown, when you had all this outside your door?

  The little village at the end of the fjord looked at first too good to be true, a cluster of clapboard houses gathered around the quay, most painted ox-blood red. On top of the hill beyond them stood a simple wooden church, with an elegant pencil-sharp spire, and a well-tended graveyard, surrounded by a white picket fence. There seemed to be flowers on almost every grave. A stocky little Viking pony grazed the meadow below.

  The fishing boat tied up at the quay had clearly seen better days. Now that I was closer I noticed that the village too wasn’t as well kept as I had first thought. In places the paint was peeling off the houses. There were tiles missing from the rooftops and a few of the windows were boarded up. It wasn’t abandoned, but the whole place looked neglected and sad somehow.

  As I came in on the motor there was something about the village that began to make me feel uncomfortable. There was no one to be seen, not a soul. Only the horse. No smoke rose from the chimneys. There was no washing hanging out. No one was fishing from the shore, no children played in the street or around the houses.

  I hailed the boat, hoping someone might be on board to tell me where I could tie up. There was no reply. So I tied up at the quay anyway and jumped out. I was looking for a café, somewhere I could get a drink or even a hot meal. And I needed a shop too. I was low on water and I had no beer left on board, and no coffee.

  Almost immediately I came upon a place that looked as if it might be the village store. I peered through the window. Tables and chairs were set out. There was a bar to one side, and across the room I could see a small shop, the shelves stacked with tins. Things were looking up, I thought. But I couldn’t see anyone inside. I tried the door and, to my surprise, it opened.

  I’d never seen anything like it. Th
is was shop, café, bar, post office, all in one. There was a Wurlitzer jukebox in the corner and then to one side, opposite the bar, a post office and shop. And there was a piano right next to the post-office counter, with sheet music open on the top – Beethoven sonatas.

  I called out, but still no one emerged. So I went outside again and walked down the deserted village street, up the hill towards the church, stopping on the way to stroke the horse. I asked him if he was alone here, but he clearly thought that this was a stupid question and wandered off, whisking his tail as he went.

  The church door was open, so I went in and sat down, breathing in the peace of the place and trying at the same time to suppress the thought that this might be some kind of ghost village. It was absurd, I knew it was, but all the same I could feel the fear rising inside me.

  That was when the bell rang loud, right above my head, from the spire. Twelve times. My heart pounded in my ears. As the last echoes died away I could hear the sound of a man coughing and muttering to himself. It seemed to come from high up in the gallery behind me. I turned.

  We stood looking at one another, not speaking for some time. I had the impression he was as surprised to see me as I was to see him. He made his way down the stairs and came slowly up the aisle towards me.

  He had strange eyes, this man, unusually light, like his hair. He might have been fifty or sixty and was weathered, like the village.

  ‘Looking at you,’ he began, ‘I would say you might be English.’

  ‘You’d be right,’ I told him.

  ‘Thought so,’ he said, nodding. Then he went on, ‘I ring the bell every day at noon. I always have. It’s to call them back. They will come one day. You will see, they will come.’

  I didn’t like to ask whom he was talking about. My first thought was that perhaps he was a little mad.

  ‘You need some place to stay, young man? I have twelve houses you can choose from. You need to pray? I have a church. You need something to eat, something to drink? I can provide that too, and my prices are very reasonable. You’re looking a little pale. I can tell you need a drink. Come along, follow me.’

  Outside the church he stopped to shake my hand and to introduce himself: ‘Ragnar Erikson.’ As we walked down the hill he told me who lived in each of the houses we passed – a cousin here, an aunt there – who grew the best vegetables in the village, and who was the best pianist. He spoke as if they were still there, and this was all very strange, because it was quite obvious to me by now that no one at all was living in any of these houses. Then I saw he was leading me back to where I’d been before, into the bar-cum-post-office-cum-village-store.

  ‘You want some music on the Wurlitzer?’ he asked me. ‘Help yourself, whatever you like, “A Whiter Shade of Pale”, “Sloop John B”, “Rock Around the Clock”. You choose. It’s free, no coins needed.’

  I chose ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ while he went behind the bar and poured me a beer.

  ‘I don’t get many people coming here these days,’ he said, ‘and there’s only me living here now, so I don’t keep much in the bar or the shop. But I caught a small salmon today. We shall have that for supper, and a little schnapps. You will stay for supper, won’t you? Supper is free – you will be my guest. You must forgive me – I talk a lot, to myself mostly, so when I have someone else to talk to, I make up for lost talking time. You’re the first person I’ve had in here for a month at least.’

  I didn’t know what to say. Too much was contradictory and strange. I longed to ask him why the place looked so empty and if there were people really living in those houses. And who was he ringing the church bell for? Nothing made any sense. But I couldn’t bring myself to ask. Instead I made polite conversation.

  ‘You speak good English,’ I told him.

  ‘This is because Father and I, we went a lot to Shetland in the old days. So we had to speak English. We were always going over there.’

  ‘In that fishing boat down by the quay?’ I asked him.

  ‘It is not a fishing boat,’ he said. ‘It is a supply boat. I carry supplies to the villages up and down the fjords. There is no road, you see. Everything has to come by boat, the post as well. So I am the postman too.’

  After a couple of beers he took me outside and back down to the quayside to show me his boat. Once on board, I could see it was the kind of boat that no storm could sink. It was made not for speed but for endurance, built to bob up and down like a cork and just keep going. The boat suited the man, I thought. We stood together in the wheelhouse, and I knew he wanted to talk.

  ‘My family,’ he said, ‘we had two boats, this one and one other just the same. Father made one, I made the other. This is the old boat, my father’s boat. He made it with his own hands before I was born, and we took it over to Shetland, like the Vikings did before us. But we were not on a raid like they were. It was during the wartime, when the Germans were occupying Norway.

  ‘We were taking refugees across the Norwegian Sea to Shetland, often twenty of them at a time, hidden down below. Sometimes they were Jews escaping from the Nazis. Sometimes it was airmen who had been shot down, commandos we had been hiding, secret agents too. Fifteen times we went there and back and they didn’t catch us. Lucky – we were very lucky. This is a lucky boat. The other one, the one I built, was not so lucky.’

  Ragnar Erikson, I was discovering, wasn’t the kind of man you could question or interrupt; but I did wonder, all through our excellent supper of herring and salmon, what had happened to the other boat. And I still hadn’t dared to broach the subject that puzzled me most: why there seemed to be no one else living in the village but him. When he fell silent I felt he wanted to be lost in his thoughts. So the right moment never came.

  But after supper by the fire he began to question me closely about why I had come sailing to Norway, about what I was doing with my life. He was easy to talk to because he seemed genuinely interested. So I found myself telling him everything: how at thirty-one I was suddenly alone in the world, that my mother had died when I was a child, and just a couple of months ago my father had too. I was a schoolteacher, but not at all sure I wanted to go on being one.

  ‘But why did you come here?’ he asked me. ‘Why Norway?’

  So I told him how, when I was a boy, I had been obsessed by the Vikings; I’d loved the ancient legends of Beowulf and Grendel. I’d even learned to read the runes. It had been a lifelong ambition of mine to come to Norway one day. But arriving here in this particular fjord, I explained, had been an accident. I was just looking for a good sheltered place to tie up for the night.

  ‘I’m glad you came,’ he said after a while. ‘As I said, no one comes here much these days. But they will, they will.’

  ‘Who will?’ I asked him, rather abruptly and without thinking. At once I regretted it, for I could see he was frowning at me, looking at me quite hard. I feared I might have offended him.

  ‘Whoever it is, they will be my family and my friends, that’s all I know,’ he said. ‘They will live in the houses, where they all once lived, where their souls still live.’

  I could tell from the tone of his voice that there was more to tell and that he might tell it, if I was patient and did not press him. So I kept quiet, and waited. I’m so pleased I did. When at last he began again, he told me the whole story, about the empty village, about the other boat, the unlucky boat.

  ‘I think perhaps you would like to know why I’m all alone in this place?’ he said, looking directly at me. It felt as if he was having to screw up all his courage before he could go on.

  ‘I should have gone to her wedding myself,’ he said, ‘with everyone else in the village, but I did not want to. It was only in Flam, down the fjord just north of here, not that far. The thing was that, ever since I was a little boy, the bride had been my sweetheart, the love of my life, but I was always too timid to tell her. I looked for her every time I went to Flam to collect supplies, met her whenever I could, went swimming with her, picking berries, mou
ntain climbing, but I never told her how I felt. Now she was marrying someone else. I didn’t want to be there, that’s all. So my father skippered my boat that day instead of me. There were fourteen people in the boat – everyone from the village except for me and two very old spinster sisters. They did everything together, those two. One of them was too sick to go, so the other insisted on staying behind to look after her. I watched the boat going off into the morning mist. I never saw it again, nor anyone on board.

  ‘To this day, no one really knows what happened. But we do know that early in the evening, after the wedding was over, there was a rockslide, a huge avalanche which swept down the mountainside into the fjord and set up a great tidal wave. People from miles around heard the roaring of it. No one saw the boat go down. But that’s what must have happened.

  ‘For a few years the two old sisters and I kept the village going. When they died, within days of one another, I buried them in the churchyard. After that I was alone. To start with, very often, I thought of leaving. But someone had to tend the graves, I thought, someone had to ring the church bell. So I stayed. I fished, I kept a few sheep in those days. I wasn’t quite alone. I had my horse.

  ‘I discovered there is one thing you have to do when you are on your own, and that is to keep busy. So every day I work on the houses, opening windows in the summers to air rooms, lighting fires in the winters to warm them through, painting windows and doors, fixing where I can, what I can, just keeping them ready for the day they return. There’s always something. I know it’s looking more and more untidy as the years go by, but I do my best. I have to. They’re living here still, my family and friends. I can feel them all about me. They’re waiting and I’m waiting, for the others to come and join them.’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand,’ I told him.

  ‘I don’t blame you, young man,’ he said, laughing a little. ‘I’m not off my head, not quite. Honestly I’m not. I know the dead cannot come back. But I do know their spirits live on, and I do know that one day, if I do not leave, if I keep ringing the bell, if I keep the houses dry, then people will find this place, will come and live here. In the villages nearby, they are still frightened of the place. They think it is cursed somehow. But they are wrong about that. It was the boat that was cursed, I tell them, not the village. Anyway, they do not come. Most of them are so frightened they won’t even come to visit me. They say it is a dying village and will soon be dead. But it is not, and it will not be, not so long as I stay. One day, people will come, and then the village will be alive once more. I know this for sure.’