Michael Morpurgo

by Maggie Fergusson

  Ragnar Erikson offered me a bed in his house that night, but I said I was fine in the boat. I am ashamed to admit it, but after hearing his story I just didn’t want to stay there any longer. It was too easy to believe that the place – paradise that it looked – might be cursed. He did not try to persuade me. I am sure he knew instinctively what I was feeling. I told him that I had to be up early in the morning, thinking I might not see him again. But he said he would be sure to see me off. And he was as good as his word. At first light he was down on the quay. We shook hands warmly, friends for less than a day but, because he had told me his story, I felt that in a way we were friends for life. He told me to come back one day and see him again if ever I was passing. Although I said I would, I knew how unlikely it would be. But through all the things that have happened to me since, I never forgot the saga of Ragnar Erikson. It was a story that I liked to tell often to my family, to my friends.

  From the ship’s log:

  1 August 2010, midnight

  Today I came back to Arnefjord. It has been over forty years and I’ve often dreamed about it, wondering what happened to Ragnar Erikson and his dying village. This time I have brought my grandchildren too, because however often I tell them the story, they never quite seem to believe it.

  I had my binoculars out at the mouth of the little fjord and saw the village at once. It was just as it had been. Even the boat was there at the quay, with no one on it, so far as I could see. There was no smoke rising from the chimneys; when we tied up, no one came to see us. I walked up towards the village shop, the grandchildren running off into the village, happy to be ashore, skipping about like goats, finding their land legs again.

  Then, as I walked up towards the church, I saw a mother coming towards me with a pushchair.

  ‘Do you live here?’ I asked her.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, and pointed out her house. ‘Over there.’

  My granddaughter came running up to me.

  ‘I knew it, Grandpa,’ she cried, ‘I always knew it was just a story. Of course there are people living here. I’ve seen lots and lots of them.’

  And she was right. There was a toy tractor outside the back door of a newly painted house, and I could hear the sound of shrieking children coming from further away down by the seashore.

  ‘What story does she mean?’ the mother asked me.

  So I told her how I’d come here forty years before and had met Ragnar Erikson, and how he was the only one living here then.

  ‘Old Ragnar,’ she said, smiling. ‘He’s up in the churchyard now.’

  She must have seen the look on my face. ‘No, no,’ she said, ‘I don’t mean that. He’s not dead. He’s doing the flowers. We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him. Ragnar saved this village, Ragnar and the road.’

  ‘The road?’ I asked.

  ‘Fifteen years ago they built a road to the village, and suddenly it was a place people could come to and live in. But there would have been no village if Ragnar hadn’t stayed and kept it going, we all know that. There are fifteen of us living here now – six families. He’s old and does not hear so well, but he is strong enough to walk up the hill to ring the bell. It was the bell that brought us back, he says. And he still likes to go on ringing it every day. Habit, he says.’

  I went up the hill with my granddaughter, who ran on ahead of me up the steps and into the church. When she came out there was an old man with her, and he was holding her hand.

  ‘She has told me who you are,’ he said. ‘But I would have recognised you anyway. I knew you would come back, you know. You must have heard me ringing. If I remember rightly, you liked “Whiter Shade of Pale” on the Wurlitzer. And you liked a beer. Do you remember?’

  ‘I remember,’ I said. ‘I remember everything.’

  When Steven Spielberg’s War Horse opened in cinemas, critics were sharply divided. Writing in the Daily Mail, Christopher Tookey described it as ‘the most moving picture I have seen all year … a cinematic masterpiece’, and awarded it five stars. The Guardian gave it just two, and called it ‘lachrymose’, ‘buttery’ and ‘chocolate-boxy’. In America, however, there were enough rave reviews – ‘A rare and genuine movie masterpiece’ (New York Observer), ‘Heartfelt and marvellously crafted’ (Rolling Stone), ‘Heartbreaking understatement’ (New York Times) – to guarantee huge ticket sales. Outside Clearview’s Movie Theater on New York’s 62nd Street queues were snaking round the block for several days, and at the fourth showing, on Christmas evening, every seat was taken. As the film ended, the audience broke into instant and rapturous applause.

  A month earlier, on a damp, grey, November morning, Michael and Clare, with their eldest granddaughters, Léa and Eloïse, and Jane Feaver, joined the cast and crew for a showing in London at the Odeon, Leicester Square. Clare wore a cameo brooch that once belonged to Kippe – ‘I felt she should be here with us’. Michael looked exhausted. He had seen the trailer for the film, and one or two of the scenes struck him as ‘overly sentimental’. Anxiety about this has given him several sleepless nights. As the audience took their seats, John Williams’s soundtrack sweeping through the cinema like the waves of a big sea, he was not in the mood for chatter. And two and a half hours on, as the credits began to roll and before the lights went up, he slipped quietly out. As so often when he was a schoolboy, he felt an urgent need to be alone.

  It was only later, over Dover sole at J. Sheekey’s in Covent Garden, that Michael revealed that his reactions to the film were overwhelmingly positive. The sentimentality of the trailer snippets had assumed a kind of integrity seen in context – ‘because this is not meant to be an accurate portrayal of life, but an epic story which you have to embrace as a whole’. Spielberg’s depictions of pre-war rural life in England and France might be rather rose-tinted, ‘but if you are going to descend into hell it’s important you’ve been to paradise first’. Michael loved the slowness with which the film began, the time Spielberg took immersing his audience in the Devon countryside and introducing them to the characters around whom the story will revolve. And he admired Spielberg’s ‘spontaneity and genius’ in introducing moments of levity and humour even amidst the trenches and the Flanders mud. ‘He has mined the best of the book, and the best of the play, and then brought his own ingenuity to it. It’s a triumph.’ Michael looked dazed, but very happy. ‘I wonder,’ he said to Léa and Eloïse, ‘whether it will still be around for your grandchildren.’

  Now seventy, Michael is aware that he is living his ‘last few chapters’, and he thinks ahead to a time when his story will have come to an end. His ashes, like his father’s, will be buried in two places. Half will lie in the churchyard in Iddesleigh, near Seán Rafferty and Wilf Ellis – ‘a lot of what I am is there’, he says. Half will join Kippe, Tony and Jack beneath the hornbeam. The best of him, he hopes, will live on in his stories. When asked which of these he most hopes will endure, he homes in not on particular books, but on moments within books. All of them are moments of reconciliation: the moment in Why the Whales Came when the islanders finally lay aside their suspicions of the Birdman and help him to save Bryher from the curse of Samson; the moment in Kensuke’s Kingdom when Michael realises that Kensuke, his former enemy and captor, has become his saviour; the moment in War Horse when a German and an English soldier meet in No Man’s Land and work together to free Joey from the barbed wire. ‘Reconciliation,’ Michael says, ‘is what I yearn for most.’ Kay’s recent return to the family has brought home to him ‘just how wonderful it is when people who have been divided find common cause again’.

  His relationships with his grandchildren have been a source of simple and straightforward joy. Age bestows a kind of freedom: ‘The older you get, the less you feel you need to pretend.’ Léa and Eloïse share the Fulham flat where Michael and Clare stay when they come to London. Léa, a psychology graduate, is training to be a Montessori teacher, Eloïse working towards a degree in International Relations. ‘To have known them from babies,’ Michael say
s, ‘and now to be able to see the future through them, is a wonderful thing.’

  For Léa and Eloïse, meanwhile, Michael and Clare have been a source of unfailing strength. ‘I can’t think of them separately,’ says Eloïse. ‘I think of them together, solid as a rock. We cling on to this solidity.’ Their memories of staying at Langlands as children are blissful and uncomplicated. Michael liked to show them off to the visiting children at Nethercott, who liked, in turn, to make a fuss of them. He read to them at bedtime. They loved the sense of order and routine in their grandparents’ lives. Even on holiday in Scilly, they remember, time was always tidily organised. At breakfast Michael would ask, ‘OK, what’s the programme?’, and would draw up a timetable for the day. This clear planning created a sense of security, as well as allowing for spontaneity and fun.

  Clare and Michael with four of their granddaughters, 2005. Left to right: Lucie, Eloïse, Léa and Alice.

  Both girls feel grateful to their grandparents ‘for taking us seriously since we were very young’. At thirteen, Eloïse went to stay with Michael and Clare during ‘a shaky patch’. They encouraged her to talk – ‘they have always allowed us a lot of space to be ourselves’ – and Michael gave her one of his orange exercise-books in which to write down her thoughts. But at a certain point each day, she remembers, he would insist that they put on their gumboots and coats. ‘We’d zip our coats up to our chins, and go and roll down hills together, through cowpats and everything. We’d always be giggling after that.’

  In some ways it is now Léa and Eloïse who look after their grandparents. They call Michael and Clare ‘the students’ because of their hectic lives; they tidy up after them in the flat; they worry when Michael pushes himself too hard, gets too exhausted. ‘Sometimes he’s so stressed,’ says Léa, ‘that you think he must stop. But the next moment, he’s feeding off it, loving it.’ One of the things that impresses her most about her grandfather is the generosity with which he has responded to fame: ‘It’s not the grand moments and the meetings with glamorous people that light him up,’ she says. ‘It’s the feeling he’s enhancing ordinary lives.’ So it is moving, in a separate conversation, to hear Michael reflect on what piece of wisdom he would most like to hand on to his grandchildren. ‘I suppose,’ he says, after an unusually long pause for thought, ‘it would have to be this. That joy is to be found not in receiving, but in giving – the giving of yourself.’

  Michael’s greatest dread, as he grows older, is that he should find himself locked into an illness that leaves him unable to communicate. But, while health is on his side, the list of things he hopes still to achieve is almost endless. He would like to help Farms for City Children open a fourth centre, this time in Scotland, ‘in Stevenson country – that landscape of castles, rivers, lochs and sea that I first fell in love with reading Kidnapped’. His belief in the importance of the charity has, if anything, grown over the years. ‘I really do think that one day can change a whole life – whether you are standing by a river looking at a heron, or watching a buzzard soaring over a hillside, or learning about friendship away from home for the first time.’

  He is brimming with ideas for new books. Recently he and Clare spent a fortnight in Orkney. On the windswept island of Lamb Holm, they visited the tiny chapel which Italian prisoners of war, working on the construction of the Churchill Barriers in the early 1940s, built to help ease their homesickness. He would like to write a story about these little-known heroes – about how they made a tabernacle from timber salvaged from a wreck and pooled their cigarette money to buy curtains for the sanctuary. And he would like to write ‘a book about the great people who have really moved mankind on, from Jesus to Mandela’. He nurses a quiet ambition that he might one day write ‘a small, iconic book like The Tiger Who Came to Tea’. No amount of effort or hard work can make this happen. ‘Sparks of genius like that come from spontaneity, not design. So I’m trying to banish it from my thoughts.’

  He hopes he will always ‘keep talking to children, trying to help them to think and ask questions and deal with doubt; to unravel the complexities of the world with understanding rather than prejudice’. But he suspects that in the years ahead he may well spend less time writing for children, and more performing and adapting his stories for the stage.

  On his first visit to Ypres, Michael met a trio of ‘a cappella’ English singers, Coope, Boyes and Simpson. He loved their music – a mixture of folk songs, hymns and carols – and kept in touch with them. After Private Peaceful was published he suggested that they work together on a concert version of the story – readings by Michael interwoven with songs. Since then, they have added to their repertoire two more of Michael’s stories, On Angel Wings and The Best Christmas Present in the World, for performances of which Michael shares his readings with an actress – Jenny Agutter, Joanna Lumley, Virginia McKenna or Juliet Stevenson. They have performed them all over the country, at festivals, and in village churches, cathedrals and the National Theatre. With the songwriter John Tams, too, Michael has developed a concert version of War Horse, and with the London Symphony Orchestra an adaptation of The Mozart Question. The composer Colin Matthews is now working on a score to accompany Michael’s retelling of The Pied Piper, which Michael will perform with the London Symphony Orchestra in the Royal Festival Hall. ‘When I’m on that stage, speaking my words,’ he says, ‘I lose all sense of time. I love that. I feel it’s what I should be doing.’

  The more he speaks to enormous audiences, however, the more aware Michael becomes of the importance of keeping up what Thomas Hardy called ‘the old associations’, of remaining in touch with his roots. ‘As you get older, you can very easily begin to feel that you are losing your connection to the world, that you are becoming isolated from some of the people who mean most to you. Connection with people and places is what makes a writer feel alive.’ In the autumn of 2011, an unusual ceremony in Iddesleigh village hall brought home to him that this was the place, and the community, where he really belonged.

  In an Author’s Note at the beginning of War Horse Michael describes ‘a small dusty painting of a horse’ that hangs in the village hall.

  To many who glance up at it casually … it is merely a tarnished old oil painting of some unknown horse by a competent but anonymous artist. To them the picture is so familiar that it commands little attention. But those who look more closely will see, written in fading black copperplate writing across the bottom of the bronze frame: ‘Joey. Painted by Captain James Nicholls, autumn 1914.’

  The painting, like the story that followed, was imaginary. But on 30 November 2011 a ‘real’ painting of ‘Joey by Captain James Nicholls’ was unveiled by one of the village children. Local ladies laid on tea and scones, and ahead of the ceremony somebody climbed up and set the clock above the village hall to one minute past ten, as it is at the start of the book. A fictional story became part of the real story of the village from which it had sprung. Of all the excitement and celebrations that War Horse has inspired in the last few years, Michael says, ‘that was the high spot’.

  Both Michael and Clare are certain now that they will never move from Iddesleigh. But, as Clare says, ‘neither of us is ready to sit by the fire in our slippers yet’. A few years ago Michael read Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck’s account of a road trip he made around America with his dog in 1960. Setting off from Long Island in a converted camper van, Steinbeck drove to Maine, on to California, through Texas, up through the Deep South and back to New York. Michael would like to make a similar journey with Clare, stopping in small towns along the way and telling stories. ‘It would be like living in a road movie,’ he says, ‘an invitation to engage with the unexpected.’ It would also be a chance to spend a good stretch of time alone with Clare.

  In the summer of 2013, it was fifty years since Michael and Clare were married at Kensington Register Office. Michael had long dreamed of marking the occasion by marrying Clare in church – “I wanted, finally, to have a good wedding,’ he says
, ‘but Clare wouldn’t stand for any ballyhoo.’ So they came to a compromise. One evening they visited the little church on Bryher. They read to each other from St Paul’s letter to the Corinthians – ‘Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy … love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things’. They were surrounded by ‘silence, and the cries of sea gulls’. There were no family or friends present, and no priest. Just the two of them.’

  Michael’s own religious beliefs remain uncertain. When his aunt Jeanne wrote a biography of her father, she called it Seeking and Finding – an apt title, because Emile Cammaerts was very sure of what he believed and of what he had ‘found’. ‘But I am still seeking,’ says Michael. ‘And I think I always will be.’ There are moments, joining the Sunday congregation in the little church on Bryher for example, when he recognises ‘a truth that I cannot deny’. He sees then that religion can be a force for great good, binding communities together. But all too often this binding together slides into exclusivity – ‘shutting people out and judging them, and that’s dangerous’. The memory of the misery visited on Kippe by the Bradwell vicar who refused her Holy Communion as a divorcee remains painful for Michael and, as he dwells on it, doubts about the established Church pour out with fierce simplicity and eloquence.