didn’t work.
‘Maybe we imagined it all,’ Belinda said. But she knew, we all knew that we hadn’t. It must have been almost bedtime when we heard Aunty B and Aunty J calling for us up and down the street, and we had to give up. When we appeared, we made up a story about having been at choir practice in the church hall, which they seemed to believe (they always believed whatever we told them). Belinda went off home and that was that. Or so we thought.
That night Piet and I were shaken out of sleep by Aunty B and Aunty J. They were frantic, sobbing as they dragged us down the smoke-filled stairs and out into the cold night air. There we stood, shivering on the pavement. I was only half-awake and didn’t understand what was going on until we heard the bells of the fire engine. Our house was on fire! We watched in fascination and horror as the hoses were wound out and the firemen went running into our house. They broke down the fence in the bomb site.
There were dozens of people in the street by now, all in dressing gowns. Belinda’s mother, in her curlers, gave Aunty B and Aunty J tots of whisky to calm them down. As for Belinda and Piet and me, we stood together, watching the drama unfold, all of us knowing full well, of course, how the fire had started.
The fire officer was talking to Aunty B and Aunty J. ‘It looks like some idiot, some old tramp maybe, has gone in that bomb site and started a fire to keep himself warm.’ He shook his head. ‘Though what an old witches’ cauldron is doing down there, God only knows. We’ve managed to confine the fire to your basement, but it’s totally burned out in there, gutted. There’s only smoke damage in the house itself, though we’ve had to use a lot of water to get the fire under control, so it’s a bit of a mess, I’m afraid. Still, we must be thankful for small mercies’ – he ruffled my hair – ‘these little mercies I’m talking about. You got them to safety and that’s all that really matters, isn’t it, when all’s said and done?’
The three of us didn’t dare look at one another, or at anyone else, in case the guilt showed in our eyes. We went to sleep in Belinda’s house that night, and stayed there for a week or more while Aunty B and Aunty J got the house cleared up for your return. I remember them breaking the news of the fire to you on the doorstep and how you tried to comfort them as, tearfully, they relived every moment of it. You kept hugging them, telling them how wonderful they had been to save Pieter and me, and in the end that seemed to make them feel better.
But Piet and I didn’t feel better. We haven’t felt better about it all our lives, and to be honest, telling you about it now hasn’t helped as much as I hoped it might. Hiding this terrible secret from you, for as long as we have, has been at least as bad as the guilt we felt on the night it happened. It seems confession is not enough.
The trouble is there’s another secret we never told you. It’s not as bad as the burning of your love-letters and your wedding photo, or setting fire to the house, but it was a secret we couldn’t tell, because if we had told it, all the others would have come out too.
The Christmas after the fire Gran came to stay, if you remember. She gave you a present. You opened it and showed it to us, probably with tears in your eyes – you always had tears in your eyes when you spoke about him.
‘Look, boys, what Gran has given us,’ you said. ‘It’s a photo of your uncle Pieter in his RAF uniform. Doesn’t he look fine?’
You passed it to Piet and me. It was the first time we’d ever seen a photo of him. Looking up at us, out of the silver frame, without any question, was the face of the stranger we had met in the bomb site that foggy day. We knew it at once.
That is the secret I feel saddest about now, because it might have been a great comfort to you if we’d had the courage to tell you.
Some time after you died, far from any of us, out in America, in Washington, I happened to find myself near St Eval in Cornwall at the RAF station where I’d been told Uncle Pieter’s plane had crashed in 1941. I stood there on what was left of the runway and told him at last that I knew it had been him who came to see us in the bomb site all those years before. He didn’t speak, I didn’t see him – but he was there, I am sure of it. And you were there too, Mum, I’m sure of that as well. It was a spring day. The hawthorns were white in the hedges, the daffodils blowing in the wind, and the blackbirds calling to one another over the fields.
Saturday 19 December 2009; the Dragon School, Oxford. The playing fields are white with frost, but the Lynam Hall is a hive of warmth and colour as parents and children cram in to hear Michael Morpurgo open the Dragon Christmas Sale. As he strides on to the stage, draped in a long, multicoloured, Dr Who scarf, he is running on empty. The last week alone has taken him to two bookshop signings in London, and stage productions of The Best Christmas Present in the World in Bristol and On Angel Wings in Winchester. Exhaustion shows when it comes to taking questions. ‘By the way,’ he tells a little girl in a lime-green top, after answering her question about where his stories come from, ‘the colour of your shirt is appalling.’ She blushes to the roots of her hair.
In talking to groups of children Michael adopts what the illustrator Emma Chichester Clark calls his ‘angry headmaster mode’, projecting a persona that is knockabout, bumptious and ‘seemingly’, he admits, ‘rather over-confident’. But the man you discover when you spend time with Michael at his home in Devon is quite different: thoughtful, unsure of his gifts, frightened of the blank page, and prone to melancholy. This ‘schizophrenia’ (his word) bothers him. ‘I’m comfortable in both parts,’ he confesses, ‘but I’m uncomfortable with the fact that I seem to need two parts. And I am certainly uncomfortable with the effect that this has on the people I love.’ He is referring to his wife and children, but they come later in the story, years after the seeds of his ‘schizophrenia’ were sown at The Abbey, near East Grinstead in Sussex.
In the second half of the last century, Sussex and Kent were honeycombed with prep schools. Middle-class boys were squirrelled away in them in such large numbers that, arriving at Victoria Station at the end of the holidays, they were obliged to join a scrum of children squeezing around a blackboard to get directions to the railway carriages specially reserved for the Abbey, Ashdown House, Brambletye, Fonthill Lodge, Hazelwood, Hillsbrow …
Many of these schools are still going strong, but the Abbey long since fell victim to financial mismanagement, closed its doors to pupils, and was sold to a property developer and converted into flats. Yet from the outside the house looks exactly the same today as the one to which Michael returns often in his dreams: an ugly, late-Victorian, mock-baronial pile; a jumble of turrets and mullioned windows and brick excrescences. A weather-vane pokes up, slightly cockeyed, amidst a coppice of top-heavy chimneys, and there is a bleak stone inscription – PERSEVERANTIA – above an ivy-clad front door. The buildings around the main house are now suburban dwellings, but their names hint at the past – one is called ‘Gymnasium’, another ‘The Old Laundry’ – and walking through the overgrown gardens that surround them is like stepping into the pages of Michael’s books. There is the stream, swelled in Michael’s imagination to a river, across which the ‘toffs’ and the ‘oiks’ fought their battles in The War of Jenkins’ Ear; and the woods in which a blond boy called Christopher made a chapel with a log altar and a straw floor, and persuaded his contemporaries that he was Jesus come again. And at the bottom of the school park is the fence over which Michael – later Bertie in The Butterfly Lion – climbed, overcome with homesickness, in a bid to run away from school.
Visiting the Abbey on a drizzly afternoon in late winter, one feels that the dripping rhododendrons are haunted by the homesickness which Michael suffered from the moment he arrived. It was worst at night. There was something about the moment that Matron, strict but kind, called ‘Lights Out!’ that made him yearn for his mother. And though darkness was a relief, allowing the tears to roll down his cheeks unseen, sleep did not come easily. Beyond the dormitory window was a clock tower that chimed the quarters, ‘slicing up the night’; and the night was dominated by anxiety about the following day.
In a tatty copy of the Abbey school magazine from 1957, after a ‘hail and farewell’