Michael Morpurgo: War Child to War Horse

Sometimes there could be about Kippe an almost reckless joyfulness. When one afternoon Pieter and Michael locked themselves into their fifth-floor bedroom while they were supposed to be resting, she shinned undaunted up a drainpipe, ignoring Jack’s protests, and climbed in through their window to rescue them. When visitors came to the house she shone. ‘As she opened the front door,’ Michael remembers, ‘it was as if she was walking on to a stage – beautifully dressed and made-up, charming, sparkling.’

But when the visitors left she tended to collapse, reaching for her cigarettes and smoking almost obsessively. And sometimes for days on end a sadness – what Pieter calls ‘a wondering’ – would settle upon her, and she became quiet and unreachable. Twice a year she would take Pieter and Michael on a bus to Twickenham to visit Tony’s parents in their neat, modest, semi-detached house in Poulett Gardens. Michael remembers the uncomfortable formality of these visits – ‘the scones, the clinking of spoons on teacups’ – and the awkwardness as the conversation turned to Tony, his grandparents bringing out photographs and press clippings to show to the boys. On the way home, and for days afterwards, Kippe was silent. Michael knew that to ask questions would upset her further, so he too remained silent, aware simply that ‘ours was a family which had at its heart a tension’.

In the wider world, too, he was becoming aware of complexity and shadows. The area around Philbeach Gardens had been heavily bombed in the Blitz, and the house next to number 84 completely destroyed. The cordoned-off bomb site was reachable via the cellar, and Michael particularly liked to play here alone. ‘It was my Wendy house, I suppose. A rather tragic Wendy house.’ Among the weeds and crumbling walls were remnants of life – bits of cutlery, a chair, an iron bedstead – evidence that in the very recent past ‘there had been this terrible trauma’ for the family that had lived there.

Michael, 1948.

School, when it came, confirmed his sense that the world could be harsh. At three, Michael was taken to a playgroup in the hall of St Cuthbert’s, Philbeach Gardens: a cosy, eccentric set-up, where the lady in charge kept order by issuing the children with linoleum ‘islands’ on which they would be asked to sit if they threatened to become unruly. At five, he moved on to the local state primary school, St Matthias, across Warwick Road. It seemed a cavernous, grim place to a small boy, with painted brick walls as in a prison or hospital, and windows so high that if a child tried to look out all he could see were small segments of sky.

There was one magical element. Beneath the school lived a community of refugee Greek Orthodox monks: long, black-robed creatures who glided soundlessly in and out of a dark chapel full of glowing lanterns. But within the school itself the children were coaxed into learning through fear. Mistakes were met with a thwack of the teacher’s ruler, either on the palm of the hand, or, more painfully, across the knuckles. Michael found himself frequently standing in the corner. Books and stories were suddenly filled with menace – ‘words were to be spelt, forming sentences and clauses, with punctuation, in neat handwriting and without blotches’. He developed a stutter, his tongue and throat clamping with terror when he was asked to read or recite to the class; and he began to cheat, squinting across to copy from brainy Belinda, who shared his double desk, and with whom he was in love.

So it came as a relief when, just after his seventh birthday, plans were made for Michael to leave St Matthias and join Pieter at his prep school in Sussex. Kippe took him on a bus to Selfridges, and he remembers the delight of being measured up, of being the centre of attention, of watching his ‘amazing’ uniform (green, red and white cap; blazer ‘like the coat of many colours’; rugby boots; shiny, black, lace-up shoes; socks; shorts; shirts and ties) piling up on the counter – ‘all for me!’ He had remained, despite everything, a happy child, ‘very positive, full of laughs, a bit of a show-off’, and the prospect of prep school was thrilling. ‘I was really looking forward to it,’ he says. ‘I had no idea what was in store.’

It can be uncomfortable when family stories believed to be true are revealed as myth. When Maggie told me the truth about my uncle Pieter’s death, it took a while to sink in. The story I’d believed for nearly seventy years had entered deeply into my imagination. I wanted to work Uncle Pieter into a story. And I set it at number 84 Philbeach Gardens.

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To my mother, Kippe

Do you remember? You used to read to us every night, every night without fail. For both of us, Piet and me, this time just before bed was an oasis of warmth and intimacy. The taste of toothpaste still reminds me of those precious minutes alone with you, our bedtime treat. We’d climb into the same bed, browsing the book together before you came, longing to hear the sound of your footfall on the stairs. Sometimes I’d fall asleep before you came but would always wake for the story. You read to us only those stories and poems that you loved, often in a hushed voice as if you were confiding in us, telling us a secret you’d never told anyone else. We still love those stories and poems to this day, over sixty years later, but in my case with one exception.

Everything else you read us I simply adored. I never wanted your story-time to end. ‘The Elephant’s Child’ from Kipling’s Just So Stories was my favourite. Piet’s was ‘The Cat that Walked by Himself’. We both knew them off by heart. And then sometimes you’d read a poem by Masefield or de la Mare. It could be ‘The Listeners’ –

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,

Knocking on the moonlit door;

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses

Of the forest’s ferny floor …

Or maybe ‘Cargoes’, with all those wonderfully mysterious and musical names: ‘Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir’. Or ‘Sea-Fever’:

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky …

I may not always remember which poet wrote which poem, but I remember the poems, every line of them; and your voice reading them. And I mustn’t forget Edward Lear’s nonsense poems, those ludicrous limericks that made us all laugh so much.

There was an Old Man with a beard,

Who said, ‘It is just as I feared! –

Two Owls and a Hen, four Larks and a Wren,

Have all built their nests in my beard!’

We all thought that the old man in question had to be your daddy, or Grad as we called him, who had a bushy white beard that smelt of pipe tobacco. I used to sit on his lap sometimes and explore the depths of his beard with my fingers, searching for any birds or birds’ nests that might be there, but they never were. When I asked Grad once why there were no birds in his beard, he told me that they had been there, but they’d all grown up now and flown the nest ‘like little birds do, like we all do in the end’.

It’s not so surprising, when I come to think about it now, that you were such a compelling reader, such a magical storyteller. Until you married for the second time you had been an actress like your own mother, like your brother, like our first father too. It was in your blood to love words, to love stories (I think maybe it’s in mine too – and Piet’s, he’s spent all his working life in theatre or television). You could make your voice sing and dance. You could be an elephant or a cat or even a crocodile – no trouble at all. You could do ghosts and pirates – Marley’s ghost in A Christmas Carol, Captain Hook in Peter Pan. You simply became them. So Piet and I lived every story, believed every character. You brought them to life for us. Our imaginations soared on the wings of your words. And that was a fine and wonderful thing – mostly.

But the trouble was that with one poem in particular you were far too good, far too frightening. You scared me half to death every time you recited it. I don’t think you realised it at first because I was adept at toughing it out. I’d feign terror, clap my hands dramatically over my ears while you were reading, make a whole big scene of being terrified, to cover up the fact that I was.

For obvious reasons you knew and loved Shakespeare. And, as I was later to discover, you were good at it on the stage too. You were Ophelia in Hamlet, Cordelia in King Lear, Rosalind in As You Like It: the reviews I read were all glowing. I found them after your death in among your papers in your desk, in an envelope marked ‘good reviews, bad ones burnt’. Anyway, the trouble was that Piet loved one particular Shakespearean ditty of yours more than all the others, and at bedtime he’d ask for it over and over again. I dreaded it every time. I knew a terrifying transformation was about to occur. You’d simply become the three witches, sitting there around the fire over your steaming cauldron, chanting your hideous witchy spell. You thought, and Piet thought – or maybe he didn’t, I’m still not sure – but certainly you thought that I was just messing about, playing at being scared as I put my hands over my ears and buried my head in the pillow. You would put on your tremulous witchy voice and that shrill cackle, and if I ever dared look up, I’d see your contorted witchy face, your fingers suddenly turned to claws, and I knew what was coming. Your screeching words would force themselves between my fingers into my ears and there was nothing I could do to keep them out. The moment I heard those first words of the witches’ spell my soul was on fire with fear:

Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble,

Fire burn, and cauldron bubble …

I could tell that Piet was frightened too. He seemed to be enjoying his fear, revelling in it. But then he was brave. He’d even join in the chorus sometimes and I’d be screaming into my pillow by now to blot out the spell, over-acting like crazy, hamming it up, anything to disguise the real terror I was feeling.

Whenever you recited that horrible ditty I could never sleep afterwards, not for hours. The darkness around me was as dark as death, and full of watching witches, their eyes glaring at me, blood-red and menacing. I’d close my eyes to shut them out, but there was no shutting them out. Whether I was awake or asleep, they’d be there, haunting me, turning my dreams to nightmares. I’d wake up sweating, checking my nose had not been turned into a beak, feeling my hands and feet just in case they’d become webbed overnight.

I asked you about witches one day in the garden, do you remember? I was sitting on my bicycle and you were hanging out the washing on the line. I asked you whether they were really true. I tried to sound unconcerned, as nonchalant as I could. I tried to make out I was just inquisitive. I was longing, of course, for you to tell me the answer I wanted to hear, which was that all witches and their potions and spells were just in stories and poems and pictures, nothing but gobbledegook. But you didn’t say that, did you? Instead you put on your witchy voice again and your witchy look and your witchy claws and chased me round the garden in and out of the sheets and pillowcases and pyjamas hanging from the line, and I cycled off screaming, and you practically split your sides you thought it was so funny.

But then I crashed my bicycle into the edge of the sandpit and was catapulted into the air. I had a soft enough landing in the sand, but I was shaken up, and now crying hysterically – the shock, I suppose – quite unable to pretend any longer. My heart was pounding with fear. You must have seen that the terror in my eyes was real, that I wasn’t playing games any more. You caught me up then and hugged me to you, and that was the best thing you could have done. You hugged the fear out of me. We laughed and sobbed it away together.

You didn’t do the ‘Bubble, bubble’ witchy ditty after that. But Piet did sometimes when he wanted to tease me. With him I knew it was always in fun, but it still frightened me even so. It gave me the shivers every time he did it, but the truth was that in time I found I was enjoying the shivers, just a little bit.

Although I wasn’t ever comfortable with folk tales if there was a witch involved, with spells and curses and the like, I half-wanted to hear them, and later I read them myself. Maybe ‘Hansel and Gretel’ was the turning-point? Through that story I found out how to deal with witches. Just as Gretel had done, I’d creep up behind them and push them in the oven and that would be that. Once I thought I could handle a witch, I could really enjoy the tingle of terror in witchy stories. I became fascinated by them, and by spells and curses in general. Why else would I have done what I did in the bomb site in that spring of 1948 when you were away in America?

So now, all these decades later, it is my turn to tell you a witchy story. It’s a story I should have told you, or rather confessed to you, a long time ago. But I could never bring myself to do it, until you were gone, until now.

Only three people in the world know this story, the three witches of Philbeach Gardens. I’ve never told anyone else because it’s a story I’ve been ashamed of ever since it happened, some sixty-odd years ago. It still upsets me when I think of what I did, what we all did, and what happened afterwards. I still can’t understand it or explain it. Maybe you can? I mean you’ve been alive and you’ve been dead, so you’ve been on both sides of the divide, haven’t you? You’d know about these things. Anyway, here’s our story, how it happened.

You remember when we all lived in London at number 84 Philbeach Gardens? And you remember the bomb site right next door to our house? I’d have been about six maybe, in my first year of proper school, at St Matthias on Warwick Road. It was an ordinary enough London County Council school, but strangely there was a chapel attached to it that we shared with Greek Orthodox priests who drifted around the place, black-bearded phantoms to us, so we kept well clear of them. Apples were the best thing about school. They were sent over from Canada for us because, just after the war, fruit was scarce. We were still on rations, weren’t we?

Usually Piet would walk me to school, but if there was one of those pea-souper smogs, you’d take us and come and fetch us – for safety’s sake, I suppose. I loved that, to see you waiting for us outside the school gates in the fog. But then, when we got home, you’d go and spoil it; you’d make us drink hot Bovril for tea to warm us up. You can’t imagine how much I hated Bovril.

But Bovril aside, that was always the best time of the day, after school. What you won’t remember, what you don’t know, is what Piet and I and Belinda got up to down in the basement, when you weren’t there. You remember Belinda from across the road? The three musketeers, you always called us. But we weren’t the three musketeers at all, not for long anyway, not after what we found down in the basement that day.

You didn’t like us to go down to the basement on our own because the wooden steps were too steep and they were rotten as well in places. That’s why you kept the door locked. There was all sorts of stuff down there, anything you didn’t want in the house or there wasn’t room for. You kept suitcases there, among other things. We knew they were down there because we’d helped fetch them up with you before we went off on holiday to Bournemouth, the first holiday I ever went on, the first time I saw the sea.

We noticed then where you kept the key, up on the ledge above the door. I couldn’t reach it, even standing on a chair, but Piet could. So that’s how we got in there without you or anyone knowing. We just waited until the coast was clear, got the key, and down we went. The place was stuffed full of trunks and tea chests, iron bedsteads and mattresses, boxes of old clothes – wonderful for dressing up – and papers and broken picture frames. It was a real Aladdin’s cave, full of treasures waiting to be discovered. But it was musty and dusty down there and full of cobwebs, and more than once when I came down the steps I saw rats scuttling away into dark corners. At least the light worked – only dimly. But it did mean that it wasn’t as scary as it might otherwise have been.

There was a small fireplace in the basement: at one time someone had used it, because the whole place reeked of soot and smoke. There was a heap of ashes in the grate, and the feathery skeleton of a jackdaw or a crow lying on top, wings outstretched – it must have fallen down the chimney. There was a Belfast sink in the corner with a tap, always dripping away the seconds.

One trunk in particular fascinated us because it was covered in labels, and on every one of them a picture of a ship – one was called the Mauretania, another the Queen Elizabeth. Who knew what treasures it contained? But what excited us most about the trunk was that it was locked. We had to imagine what was in there, and our imaginings led us naturally to pirates – treasure chests and pirates go together, don’t they. So that was partly, I suppose, why I came to think of that dark and dingy basement as a pirate’s lair. The iron hooks hanging from the ceiling only served to confirm it. When we first saw the hooks, Piet and I knew at once that this place had to be Captain Hook’s treasure cave. This was where Captain Hook from Peter Pan kept all his treasure and his spare hooks for his arm, in case he lost one in a fight, we thought.

Once we’d found that key, Piet and Belinda and I would be down in the basement whenever we could, mostly after school, mostly when you went away or whenever you were out and left us with Aunty B and Aunty J, our live-in babysitters. We got up to all sorts of tricks with them, which was wicked of us, I know that now. We only got away with it because they adored us. The best trick of all was to disappear down to the basement and then come up again after hiding away for a while to find them all of a fluster and running around the house like headless chickens looking for us. Poor Aunty B. Poor Aunty J. But I have to say it was fun, being so horrible.

In spite of the hours we spent down there, we didn’t come across the witches’ cauldron for some time. It was hardly surprising – there was just so much fascinating stuff to sift through and explore. The tea chests were stuffed with old photos and papers and newspaper cuttings, which Belinda would read out to us because she was the best reader. We found an entire treasure trove of family heirlooms, each one wrapped up in newspaper – pewter cups, china plates and ornaments, vases. But as soon as we found the witches’ cauldron, nothing else mattered to us.

Piet discovered it under a pile of coal sacks in a dark, dank corner. It was heavy, black and pot-bellied, with handles, and stood on three clawed feet.

‘Look,’ Piet whispered – we always talked in whispers down in the basement. ‘It’s a witches’ cauldron. Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble.’

‘We could do spells and things,’ Belinda said.

I was up those stairs like a bat out of hell. It was at least a week before they could persuade me to go down to that basement again, and then it was only because of Belinda, because I didn’t want to look like a scaredy-cat in front of her.