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michael
morpurgo
War Child to War Horse
A biography by Maggie Fergussonwith stories by Michael Morpurgo
MAGGIE FERGUSSON
For
Flora and Izzy
Contents
Dedication
Preface
1: Beneath the Hornbeam
‘Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble’
2: Spotless Officer Number One
‘A Fine Night, and All’s Well’
3: Situation Critical
‘Littleton 12–Wickhamstead 0’
4: A Winning Formula
‘Didn’t We Have a Lovely Time?’
5: The Heat o’ the Sun
‘A Bit of a Daredevil’
6: Better Answer – Might be Spielberg
‘The Saga of Ragnar Erikson’
7: Still Seeking
‘A Proper Family’
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Publisher
Buried in most of us is a desire to communicate with children on their own level. A child falls and scrapes his knee; we drop down to meet him eye to eye. This is the level on which Michael Morpurgo weaves his stories, sharing his thoughts with children in a way that they know is neither contrived nor condescending. Books such as Kensuke’s Kingdom, Private Peaceful, War Horse and Shadow have become contemporary classics, establishing Michael as a kind of Pied Piper for a whole generation. His is a rare gift.
But Michael Morpurgo is very much more than a bestselling children’s author. When his wife, Clare, was getting to know him nearly fifty years ago, she marvelled, in a letter, at his ‘six selfs’. He is many people in one. He remains, in part, a boy of about ten, writing ‘for the child inside myself that I still partly am’. He is a soldier, who won a scholarship to Sandhurst and might now be General Morpurgo had not providence and love combined gently to alter his course. He is a primary-school teacher, whose energy and charisma thrilled his pupils and maddened his colleagues in the staff-room. He is an entrepreneur, whose charity, Farms for City Children, has given more than 100,000 inner-city schoolchildren a taste of what it is like to live and work on a farm. He is a performer, who feels happiest on stage where he is able to forget himself as part of a cast. And he has, recently, become a crusader and statesman, using his fame as a soap-box from which to roar when he encounters injustice.
No wonder Michael’s publishers have repeatedly urged him to write a memoir; but the one story he feels unable to tell is his own, though he is happy for it to be told. When he first proposed that I might write about his life, he was speaking on his mobile from Devon with such a big wind blowing in the background that it was hard to understand what he was saying. Once I had understood, I felt excited but uncertain. How clearly can one hope to see the shape of a life still being lived? And would it not be a mistake to write a book about Michael Morpurgo that had nothing to offer the children who love his work so much? So we struck a deal. I would write seven chapters about Michael’s life; he would read them, reflect on the memories and feelings they stirred in him, and respond to each chapter with a story.
For the past two years, whenever Michael has been in London, I have bicycled from my home in Hammersmith to his riverside flat in Fulham and spent time there getting to know his ‘six selfs’ better. Looking out over the Thames, the tides rising and falling, seagulls crying, we have talked at length about his triumphs, about the struggles he has faced, and about the price he has paid for success. We have explored areas of his life that have remained obscure, perhaps, even to him. What has emerged is a story of light and shade: the light very bright, the shade uncomfortable and sometimes painful. Both light and shade are reflected not only in the chapters I have written, but in Michael’s corresponding stories, some of which have required great courage in the making.
One day Michael Morpurgo must pass, in the words of the old saga-writers, ‘out of the story’. Then the moment will come for somebody to lay another picture on top of this one, and to write a full biography. Here, meantime, is an attempt to catch an extraordinary man on the wing, while he is still in full flight.
MAGGIE FERGUSSON
In a corner of Michael Morpurgo’s Devon garden, the ashes of three people share a final resting-place. The sitting room of his low, thatched cottage looks out on the spot where they lie. He passes it every morning on the way to the summer house where he writes. Above it, a hornbeam tree flourishes with such elegance and grace that you might imagine the ashes beneath must be mingled in invigorating harmony. But you’d be wrong. In life, these three people – Michael’s mother, father and stepfather – caused one another untold pain, giving Michael an early education in what he describes as ‘the frailty of happiness’. If you want to understand the thread of grief that runs through almost all his work, you should start here, beneath the hornbeam.
The first ashes to be scattered, on a cold, bright, blossomy day in the spring of 1993, were those of Michael’s mother, Catherine, known from birth by her third name, Kippe (pronounced ‘Kipper’). At her memorial service the congregation had sung the Nunc Dimittis,
Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace …
and they had sung it with full hearts, because for most of Kippe’s life peace had been a stranger to her. She died an alcoholic, pitifully thin, stalked by depression, and convinced, Michael says, ‘that she had failed in the eyes of God’.
How could her life have become so bitter? If Kippe had been a child in a story one might have said that, on her birth in the spring of 1918, the fairies had been generous at her cradle. The fourth of six children, she was beautiful – fair, with a tip-tilted nose and blue-green eyes – and her looks were coveted by her three sisters, who were plainer and more sturdily built. Her father called her his ‘Little White Bird’, echoing J. M. Barrie’s fantasy of infant loveliness and innocence; and, complementing her face, she had a voice that would draw people to her for the rest of her life. Her younger and only surviving sibling, Jeanne, describes it as a ‘brown velvet’ voice, and in a recording made when Kippe was nearing old age it remains melodious, languid and gently seductive – the voice that lured Michael, unbookish boy though he was, into the wonders of words and stories.
Children outside the family were mesmerised by Kippe. Jeanne remembers, more than once, inviting friends home for tea, only to have them admit that what they really desired was to spend time near Kippe. They were fascinated not simply by her looks and voice but by her passionate nature. While other little girls played Mummies and Daddies, what Kippe wanted, from an early age, was to play ‘Lovers’ – and ‘what Kippe wanted, Kippe got’.