Michael Morpurgo: War Child to War Horse

‘No. You go next, Belinda,’ I said.

Belinda rattled through the spell and then made her wish. ‘I want to be like Florence Nightingale,’ she said quietly. ‘I want to nurse all the soldiers and sailors and pilots who were wounded in the war. I want to make them better again like she did.’

I could tell as she said it that Belinda meant every word. And that was what I had to do, I thought. I had to mean it. That way it might come true.

‘All right,’ I began, my eyes as tight shut as they would go, willing my wish to happen, ‘I want to be like my uncle Pieter. I want to be a Spitfire pilot and shoot down German planes, and then the King would give me the Victoria Cross.’

I opened my eyes to find Piet frowning at me, angrily almost, and I knew it must have upset him somehow.

‘You can’t be him. He’s dead,’ he said. ‘And I’m the one who’s named after him, not you, so you’ve got to make another wish. It’s all silly anyway. You can’t be someone you’re not. And besides, you didn’t say the “Bubble, bubble” spell, so it won’t work.’

I was about to argue with him when we heard the voice. It came from somewhere above us. We looked up. Through the smog we could see a young man sitting high up on a window ledge on the top of the ruins.

‘Your brother’s right, Michael,’ he said. ‘You can’t be someone you’re not, not your uncle Pieter, not Laurence Olivier either, not Florence Nightingale. I reckon you’ve got to be yourself.’

He climbed down and came over to us. He was wearing a light blue overcoat and a scarf. His face broke into a smile. ‘I like the hats,’ he said, crouching down beside us. ‘And you make fine witches. You did all the “Bubble, bubble” baloney really well. Almost had me believing in it myself.’

Struck dumb, the three of us just sat there, simply gaping at him.

‘All those spells,’ the stranger went on, ‘it’s a load of twaddle, y’know. Nothing but hocus-pocus. And by the way, it’s not “Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble”, it’s “Double, double toil and trouble”. I was in the play once. I’m an actor; I know. I played Banquo, got myself murdered on a late-night walk. All this wishing you do – it’s fine, and hoping is fine, too. And you’re right, you can try, you must try to make your hopes and your wishes come true. But you have to be careful what you wish for. You have to think things through. They mustn’t be just flights of fancy. Dangerous stuff, fancy. I’ve been watching you three for quite a while now, sitting and chanting your spells around your cauldron, playing your war games all around the bomb site. I know I shouldn’t have been eavesdropping, but I haven’t got much else to do these days. And when I heard you making your wishes just now, I thought I’d better speak up, tell you what I think, tell you what I know.’

We still couldn’t say a word. He was holding out his hands over the fire to warm them.

‘It really upsets me, y’know, to see you playing your war games,’ he went on. ‘And all of you just now, all of your wishes, one way or another, had something to do with war. And that worries me. I’ve been in a war. These ruins, that’s what war does. That’s bad enough, but it does more than that. Look around you.’

As he spoke, out of the smog the ruins seemed to grow and take shape and form rooves, chimneys, windows, doors. The houses rebuilt themselves before our eyes. We were still sitting over the cauldron, but now we were in the back garden of a house. There was blue sky above and butterflies chasing one another and sparrows bickering on the lawn. Nearby there were children playing in a sandpit, and a mother in a headscarf was calling out of the window for them to come in for tea. By the back door an old man, mouth wide open, lay fast asleep in a deckchair, his slippers on, an open book resting on his chest.

‘And tell your grandad to come in too,’ the mother was saying. ‘And don’t forget to wipe your feet and wash your hands.’

There was music playing on a gramophone from inside the house, and we could hear the rag-and-bone man’s horse clopping along the street: ‘Any old iron? Any old iron?’ came the cry.

As the sound of the horse’s hooves died away the children went inside, one of them stopping to shake Grandpa awake. The old man stood up, looking directly at us, but not seeing us, and there was a terrible sadness in his eyes as he looked up into the sky. The fog came swirling down again around him, and around us. He disappeared into it and the houses were suddenly ruins again. When the fog cleared, moments later, the stranger was gone too, vanished. But we heard his voice again from high up on the wall above us – only his voice. He was nowhere to be seen.

‘All of them are gone. Dead,’ he said. ‘One bombing raid, that’s all it took. Mum, grandad, the children, the rag-and-bone man and his horse too. All gone in one night. That’s what war does. You remember that.’ Those were the last words he spoke.

The three of us were still holding hands, and we soon discovered we’d all seen and heard the same thing. We had imagined nothing. We made a pact there and then that we would never tell another living soul. For weeks afterwards, Piet and I, when we were alone at home, couldn’t talk about anything else. We were forever trying to puzzle it out. And at school, the three of us stuck together in the playground as if protecting our unspoken secret. When the usual war games started up around us, we never once joined in.

It was my idea to see if we could make it happen again, bring back the ghost of the stranger – because all of us agreed by now that that’s what he must have been, a ghost. Piet and Belinda were more nervous than I was, but I persuaded them. We needed to find out who he was and why he’d come to see us.

We decided it would be sensible to wait for the next smog and light the fire under the cauldron just as we had before. But the smog never came, and in the end we lost patience. We would try bringing him back without the cauldron. After all he’d said it himself: the witches’ spell was a lot of baloney.

Two or three times we sat there in the bomb site holding hands, the three of us willing him to come back, or at least to speak to us. Each time, nothing. We had no choice in the end but to risk it, to try the cauldron way again – it had worked before. And if we built the fire in the late evening, quite close to the hole in the wall, no one would see the flames from the street, nor the smoke in the gathering dark.

So one evening, that’s exactly what we did. We used the last of the letters from the trunk, along with bits of twigs we’d found in the bomb site, and lit our fire under the cauldron. A few creepy-crawly creatures – spiders and beetles – had found their way into the cauldron on their own. Because they’d almost volunteered to be boiled, we didn’t feel quite so bad about it. There we sat in the half-dark, holding hands, eyes closed and reciting ‘Double, double toil and trouble’, with the right words this time, and in unison, over and over again, wishing, hoping, willing the stranger to reappear.

But no voice spoke to us. No one came, nothing happened. We tried again and again. But it just 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.

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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, there is the text of a speech given to the boys by a visiting headmaster at their summer prize-giving. Those who have won cups must win more next year, he insists. Those who have not must work harder. And those at the bottom of their classes should resolve to be ‘at least halfway up’ by the time he visits again.

Academic success mattered. Measured in ‘pluses’ and ‘minuses’, ‘unders’ and ‘overs’, the performance of every boy was calculated weekly and read out to the whole school on a Sunday evening. Those who did well became ‘Centurions’. Those who did badly were punished. At worst, this meant a journey up the red-carpeted stairway, ‘the Bloody Steps’, to the study of fat-fingered Mr Crump, one of the three headmasters, for a caning. Canings took place amidst a collection of African tribal artefacts and hunting trophies left by the Abbey’s previous owner, gambler and mining millionaire Sir Abe Bailey: ‘Swish. Then “Ow, sir!” You had to shake Crump’s hand when it was finished.’

Michael had his fair share of punishment. Pigeonholed from the start as not especially bright – ‘Very much below the standard of the form,’ his Maths master noted at the end of his first term – he remained, throughout his time at the Abbey, somewhere around the middle to bottom of his year. He was not helped by his stutter, which grew steadily worse, tripping him up on his ‘c’s and ‘f’s and ‘w’s. If there was a poem to learn, or a string of history dates, he would lie in the early hours of the morning contriving ways of sliding over these troublesome consonants. This did not always work, and when it failed he was teased. Then he would blush, and then he would be teased again: ‘You’re going red, Morpurgo …’ Anxiety brought on chronic eczema – cracking, weeping knee and arm joints, which Matron daubed with ointment at bedtime, before feeding Michael one tablespoonful of Radio Malt, to build him up.

He might have cut a pathetic figure had not the ‘other’ Michael Morpurgo, the waggish, confident performer he has always been able to summon, come to his rescue. Perhaps it was his theatrical genes that enabled him to drop a visor of confidence over his vulnerability. At home, anyway, family and friends were enchanted by his ‘intelligence and humour and charm’.

Very quickly, the same was true at school. Once it was clear that he was not going to shine academically, he found other areas in which he could come out on top. In the Abbey magazine the achievements of ‘Morpurgo ii’ are lauded on almost every page. He is Chapel Warden and Chief Chorister. He is the only boy wheeled out to play a violin solo, ‘Highland Heather’, in the Christmas carol concert. He is in the tennis team, and he is Captain of Cricket.

Captain Michael, centre of middle row.

Michael playing cricket.

He carries off the cups for Batting, Choir and Personal Merit. Above all, he is a hero on the rugby pitch. Reports of matches against neighbouring schools are peppered with descriptions of his triumphs: ‘From a quick heel, Morpurgo scored a good try’; ‘Morpurgo’s covering and tackling were excellent’; ‘Morpurgo found his swerve would not work on the slippery surface’ but ‘did some good defensive kicking’ instead. Bookish he might not be, but the magazine editor is confident that ‘a great Rugger future’ lies before him.

His sporting triumphs brought multiple benefits. They had a calming effect on Jack, numbing him to Michael’s mediocre academic reports: ‘Far too inclined to flounder about in a sea of ink and inaccuracies’ (Maths); ‘His mapwork is untidy’ (Geography); ‘I do not understand him’ (French); ‘An exasperating boy’ (English); ‘Rather excitable and harum-scarum’ (Headmaster). And they impressed the other boys, among whom Michael both relished and mistrusted his reputation as a ‘clubbable and charismatic’ hero. But, perhaps most importantly of all, they were rewarded with treats – rare, delicious opportunities to break the bounds of the Abbey and taste the wider world.