Michael Morpurgo: War Child to War Horse

Michael Morpurgo: War Child to War Horse
Maggie Fergusson

The life of Michael Morpurgo OBE, as a biography, and autobiographical stories.Michael Morpurgo OBE is a national treasure. With books such as ‘Private Peaceful’, ‘Kensuke’s Kingdom’ and ‘The Wreck of the Zanzibar’ he has enchanted a whole generation of children, weaving stories for them in a way that is neither contrived nor condescending. His is a rare gift.In 2007, Michael’s novel ‘War Horse’ was adapted for the stage by the National Theatre. Five years on, it continues to play to packed audiences of all ages and has been turned into a blockbuster film by Steven Spielberg, propelling Morpurgo to household-name status.Michael’s own story is as strange and surprising as any he has written, and is shot through with the same thread of sadness found in almost all his work. How did this supremely unbookish boy who dreamed of becoming an army officer become a bestselling author and Children’s Laureate instead? What personal price has he paid for success? And why, amidst his triumphs, is he now haunted by regret?In a unique collaboration, Maggie Fergusson explores Michael Morpurgo’s life through seven biographical chapters, to which he responds with seven stories. The portrait that emerges is one of light and shade: the light very bright, the shade complex and often painful.

michael

morpurgo

War Child to War Horse

A biography by Maggie Fergussonwith stories by Michael Morpurgo

MAGGIE FERGUSSON

Dedication (#uacfd6f7b-2c31-531a-a2d7-3dcd63ddbf77)

For

Flora and Izzy

Contents

Cover (#u6425a07b-c84a-5f51-90b0-48fe67c98098)

Title Page (#u3c526589-c7d8-50a8-ac98-1e83b7e9c815)

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

Preface (#uacfd6f7b-2c31-531a-a2d7-3dcd63ddbf77)

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

1 Beneath the Hornbeam (#uacfd6f7b-2c31-531a-a2d7-3dcd63ddbf77)

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’.

Not that her parents went in for spoiling. Their rambling, Edwardian house, ‘The Eyrie’, near Radlett in Hertfordshire, had what seemed to Michael countless rooms, and was set in a large garden with a tennis lawn, an orchard and a dovecote. Yet money was always short. Kippe’s mother, Tita, was a large, imposing woman who gave Michael his first inklings ‘of what God might be like’. Before her marriage she had been a Shakespearean actress. She had a voice so deep and tremendous that she was on one occasion invited to read Grieg’s Bergliot over a full orchestra conducted by Sir Henry Wood, and on another given the part of Abraham in a mystery play at the Albert Hall about the sacrifice of Isaac. Her mother, Marie Brema, had been a professional opera singer, the first from England to appear at Bayreuth. She created the role of the angel in the first performance of Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius, and was once summoned to Buckingham Palace to sing for Queen Victoria. Both mother and daughter were close friends of Bernard Shaw, and when he came to write You Never Can Tell Tita was his model for the feisty and formidable Gloria (‘a mettlesome dominative character,’ in Shaw’s own description, ‘paralysed by the inexperience of her youth’). But neither Tita nor her mother had their heads turned by success. Both were fervent Christian Socialists and most of the money they made on stage was poured into Brema Looms, a workshop providing employment for crippled girls from London’s East End.

In 1906 Tita, who in her late twenties had never so much as kissed a man, had met and fallen in love with a Belgian poet, scholar and nationalist, Emile Cammaerts. There were differences between them. Emile, who had spent much of his youth in an anarchist commune, spoke very little English, and was an atheist. Tita set about tackling both problems with a forcefulness that alarmed Shaw – ‘For Heaven’s sake,’ he warned her, ‘do learn to discriminate between yourself and the Almighty’ – and she succeeded. A Brussels spinster was engaged to teach Emile English (they began their lessons by teasing out Othello, line by line) so that by the time he and Tita were married in 1908 his English was fluent. He had also converted to Christianity with a zeal that would never leave him. As there was little prospect of Tita’s pursuing her stage career in Belgium, and as she felt she must look after her mother, they settled in London, before moving, as their family grew, to Radlett.

Tall, and with a fine, monumental head that would have sat happily amidst the emperors’ busts that ring the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, Emile Cammaerts became revered in academic and literary circles both for his intellect and for his passionate devotion to Belgium. Invalided out of the First World War with a weak heart, he threw his energies instead into composing fiery, defiant, patriotic poems to encourage his compatriots. Lord Curzon translated his work; Elgar set his ‘Carillon’ (‘Sing, Belgians, Sing’) to music. He was Belgium’s Rupert Brooke. When his fourth child’s birth coincided with a significant Belgian victory over the Germans, he named her after the hamlet, De Kippe, where this had taken place.