Michael Morpurgo: War Child to War Horse

First XV at The Abbey, winter 1954. Mr Beagley stands centre back, Michael sits cross-legged, front left.

Like many of the other Abbey parents, Kippe and Jack barely ever came to visit the boys, so that even on ‘Leave-out’ Sundays the only hope of escape was to angle for an invitation from Humphrey and Peregrine Swann to join them, with their parents, for lunch at the Letherby and Christopher Hotel in East Grinstead. But success in sports, and in the choir, earned Michael visits to the cinema, and even, on one never-to-be-forgotten occasion, a trip to the opera. Mr Gladstone, the most sympathetic of the three headmasters, drove the boys in his black Humber convertible, he and his wife, Kitty, in the front, Michael and two others in the back. They purred through the summer dusk, the Downs stretching before them. The memory remains magical.

What did they wear for that outing? Such things mattered to Michael. His two most treasured possessions at the Abbey were the red ribbon he was awarded as Chief Chorister, and the green velvet cap that marked him out as Captain of Rugby. He felt most at home in a costume: ‘I liked playing a part,’ he says. ‘It meant I could forget about myself.’

For Michael, forgetting about himself was a relief, because he was always unsure of who exactly he was. On the rugby pitch, while the other boys cheered his courage, he felt afraid and oddly detached. ‘When I went in for a tackle, I did it closing my eyes because I was so scared,’ he says. ‘Part of me was there, in the scrum; but part of me was standing at the side of the pitch, watching.’

Homesickness afflicted Michael throughout his years at the Abbey, and beyond. It began to take a hold about a fortnight before the end of the holidays, when his stepaunts, Bess and Julie, fetched their sewing baskets and got busy with nametapes. Soon afterwards the brown leather trunk was hauled out, packed, and delivered to the station to travel in advance – ‘and you knew from that moment that you were on a wave that would carry you, like it or not, back to school’. Then came the last supper (always shepherd’s pie), the last night at home, and the dreaded journey.

On Victoria Station, in those days, there was a small newsreel cinema, to which Kippe would take the boys for a final treat before surrendering them to the barrel-chested rugby master, Mr Beagley. This was a boon. The cinema’s dark interior served as a kind of decompression chamber where, as Bugs Bunny or Mickey Mouse flickered on the screen, Michael could allow his ‘home’ self to slip away, and arm himself for school.

After that, it was best if Kippe left quickly. She was the focus for Michael’s homesickness, but she was also an embarrassment to him. When they married, Kippe and Jack had decided that, as Pieter and Michael could not be expected to call Jack ‘Daddy’, they should cease to call Kippe ‘Mummy’. They should address them both simply as ‘Kippe’ and ‘Jack’ – and any further children born to them should do the same. The boys at the Abbey, quick to spot chinks in one another’s emotional armour, homed in on this oddity. ‘Jack is not your real father,’ they taunted, ‘and Kippe is a weird name.’ So it was a relief, really, when she turned to walk away, wrapped in her fragile sadness, smelling of face powder. Michael could then settle into the corner of a railway carriage. To prevent himself from crying he concentrated on following raindrops down the thick windows with his finger, as the train wound out through South London, which was still pockmarked with bomb damage.

Yet, as the terms passed, Michael became aware that there were things about school that he was growing not just to tolerate but to love.

The Abbey is set on high ground, and to the south its gardens tumble gently downwards, allowing wide views over Ashdown Forest. Between the formal garden and the forest were forty acres of school grounds, and on summer evenings the boys were left to ‘play out’ here, unsupervised, until the light failed. The memory of these evenings remains vivid and glorious – ‘I was at that age when one is wide open to everything, antennae out.’ These were hours of camps and camaraderie, of whittling arrows with sheath knives and exchanging secrets.

Winter evenings had a different charm. One of the headmasters, Mr Frith, regularly invited a group of boys to come to his study after supper and sit by the fire in their pyjamas. He served orange squash and biscuits, and read aloud from the novels of Dornford Yates: thrillers which had been very popular between the wars, and in which the narrator-hero, Richard Chandos, drove about the Continent in a ‘Rolls’ tackling crime and hunting treasure. Michael loved these evenings – the warmth, the involvement in a story, the feeling of belonging. He slept well after them.

He was not, himself, a great reader – or at least not the kind that Jack Morpurgo would have wished him to be. The leather-bound copies of Dickens that Jack periodically put Michael’s way were unappealing to him, and to this day he has to overcome a psychological block before tackling large books, and cannot happily read for more than an hour at a stretch. But he was saved from Jack’s contempt by a series called Great Illustrated Classics – easy-to-read, large-print abridgements which, borrowed from other boys and studied in secret, enabled him to pretend that he had read not only much of Dickens, but also of Homer, Dostoevsky and Sir Walter Scott. Privately, meantime, he was developing his own taste for really good yarns, in which pictures relieved his fear of text, so that the text could create pictures in his mind. He devoured the novels of G.A. Henty, of Kipling and, above all, of Robert Louis Stevenson: ‘I was Jim Hawkins,’ he says, remembering his first reading of Treasure Island. ‘I was in that barrel of apples on the deck of the Hispaniola; I overheard the plots of mutiny.’

He was gripped, too, by the stories of real men. On the ground floor of the Abbey was a library, a dark, musty room, whose deep leather armchairs gave the atmosphere of a gentleman’s club, and whose glass-fronted bookcases reached to the ceiling. The shelves were filled, for the most part, with books that had belonged to Sir Abe Bailey; and among these were bound copies of the Illustrated London News, stretching back to the mid-nineteenth century. Michael spent hours of his free time poring over black-and-white pencil sketches of soldiers fighting and dying in the Crimea and in the Balkan Wars.

History lessons fed Michael’s appetite for heroes. He remembers marvelling at the courage of Joan of Arc, steadfast at her stake as the flames began to lick around her (he would later write a book, Sparrow, about her); at the cunning of William the Conqueror, instructing his archers to fire into the air so that Harold’s men would look up and get arrows in their eyes; at the valour of Simon de Montfort as he fell to his death at the Battle of Evesham.

Michael (left, kneeling) with siblings at an exhibition organised by the National Book League.

At home, Michael could allow his mask to slip, and his elation at the start of each school holidays was greater than any he has since experienced. Kippe and Jack had moved, in 1950, to a small village, Bradwell-juxta-Mare, on the Essex coast. With financial help from Bess and Julie they bought a large, haunted, sixteenth-century house, set in several acres of garden. In the post-war years, as domestic staff became for many a thing of the past, houses like New Hall had dropped in value. Buyers were struck less by the beauty of their architecture than by the number of windows that needed cleaning, floors sweeping, stairs running up and down. But Jack Morpurgo, socially ambitious and domestically impractical, had no such misgivings. What he saw in New Hall was a house that confirmed his transformation from East End working-class boy to English country squire.

Michael loved New Hall for other reasons. Its down-at-heel, rambling cosiness gave him a sense of belonging, and all the houses he has lived in since have been in some way attempts to recapture this. He and Pieter slept in adjoining attic bedrooms, with low sloping roofs, reached by a narrow staircase which the rest of the household rarely climbed. This was their private world, in which they made candles on a paraffin stove, read Tintin and Asterix and novels by Enid Blyton, all outlawed by Jack, and hoisted themselves out of the windows at night to sit in the leaded gully running between the roof and the house façade. The darkness was filled with the hooting of owls, the calls of wildfowl, and the mournful clanging of boat riggings a couple of miles away, beyond the salt marshes, in the Blackwater Estuary.

New Hall.

The garden, too, was a boy’s paradise, with a smooth front lawn for cricket and slip catching, and beamed stables with a sagging roof in which Pieter and Michael built a giant racetrack for their cars and played ping-pong on rainy days. To the back of the house the garden had been allowed to run wild. Dog roses climbed over two old Nissen huts that had been used as a mess by RAF fighter squadrons flying out of Bradwell airfield during the war. There was an overgrown orchard with apple, pear, plum and damson trees, and a mulberry bush from which, in the summer holidays, Pieter and Michael harvested the purple, staining fruit in boiler suits.

Pieter and Michael with younger brother Mark (son of Kippe and Jack).

Again at New Hall.

Around the garden ran a high wall, up to which the sea would occasionally flood. The wall was a statement in mottled brick that New Hall was the big house; that its inhabitants lived somehow apart from the rest of the village. It taught Michael his first lessons about class division, because local boys liked to scale it, lean over the top, and jeer at the ‘posh kids’ on the other side.

When the Morpurgo brothers came out of the front gates these boys sometimes formed roadblocks, or kicked their bicycles, or threw stones. None of this deterred Pieter and Michael. If they loved the world within the garden wall, they loved what lay beyond it also. Bradwell-juxta-Mare was the sort of English village that might have sprung from the pages of an Agatha Christie novel. Opposite New Hall was the home of retired Major Turpin; a little further along the road the three Miss Stubbings, spinster sisters, shared a cottage with wisteria around the door.

Between the village and the sea lay a stretch of marshland that entered deeply into Michael’s imagination – the marshland Paul Gallico captures in the opening pages of The Snow Goose: ‘one of the last wild places of England, a low, far-reaching expanse of grass and reeds and half-submerged meadowlands ending in the great saltings and mud flats and tidal pools near the restless sea’.

It is a rich landscape for a storyteller, sunk so deep in time that distinctions between the ordinary and the fabulous begin to blur. Towards the end of the third century the Romans established a fort, Othona, on the coast by Bradwell. Four hundred years on, at the invitation of the Christian King Sigbert, a Lindisfarne monk, Cedd, arrived in a small boat. Using blocks of Kentish ragstone from Othona, he built a chapel in the sea wall. St Peter-on-the-Wall remains to this day, standing square against the huge Essex sky like a symbol of simplicity, perseverance and strength. Michael loved to sit alone by St Peter’s, with the past for company. ‘The Romans had been here, and the Saxons, and the Normans. And now me.’

There is an end-of-the-world feeling about Bradwell. Visiting from London, you follow the road east until it seems to go no further. On a summer’s day, with the sun shining, the ditches frothing with cow parsley, the sea soughing across the marshes, it is easy to understand the melancholy magic the place held for Michael.

Occasionally at Bradwell, Kippe showed flashes of her old quicksilver spirit. On 1 June 1953, on the occasion of the Queen’s coronation, she draped herself in a Union Jack and climbed on to the roof of New Hall. The rain that was to drench the cheering crowds in London the following day was already falling steadily on Bradwell, and she stumbled and slipped as she picked her way across the wet slates. But she ignored Jack’s begging her to come down, until she had her flag fixed and flying from a chimney stack.

Yet, like Bertie’s mother in The Butterfly Lion, Kippe’s ‘good days’ seemed outnumbered, to Michael, by days on which she was ‘listless and sad’. More often than not she was physically exhausted. ‘On minor, practical matters,’ Jack had warned in a letter written during their courtship, ‘I am dogmatic in my belief in the leadership of the male.’ In practice this meant that, even when he was at home, Jack shut himself in his book-infested study, swathed in cigarette smoke, while Kippe managed the garden, the house, the shopping and cooking, and the four children. Having never involved himself in any of these tasks, Jack had no appreciation of the time and thought they demanded. Insofar as he noticed it at all, Kippe’s exhaustion baffled and irritated him.

In 1945 Jack had joined the editorial staff of Penguin Books, and had soon after been appointed chief history editor. But no amount of promotion seemed to satisfy him.

Jack’s restlessness and strivings were fuelled by insecurity. He longed to blot out not only his East End, working-class roots but also the deeper past of the Morpurgo family. Asked about his unusual surname, he would say that it was Italian. He rejected absolutely any suggestion that it was Jewish. In fact, as he must surely have known, his own parents had married in a synagogue. Originally from Marburg in Germany (Morpurgo is the Italianised ‘Marburger’), the Morpurgo family had moved into Istria and Dalmatia in the nineteenth century and had become one of the most eminent Jewish dynasties in Trieste and Split. While Jack was busy establishing himself as an English squire, his continental kinsmen were mourning the deaths of hundreds of Morpurgos in the Holocaust. On 30 September 1942 alone, three generations of one Morpurgo family – Aaron, Alida, Clara, Mordechai and Raphael – had been sent to their deaths in Auschwitz.

The Holocaust was avoided in conversation, both at home and at school. The boys were encouraged to dwell instead on the glory of the war and the courage of the British troops. They worked out the horror for themselves. Yet pupils at the Abbey were aware that the price of courage was often psychological damage and physical disfigurement. Down the road from the school, in the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead, the pioneering New Zealand plastic surgeon Sir Archibald McIndoe was devoting his life to rebuilding the minds and bodies of burned airmen. One of these, a Spitfire pilot named Eric Pearce, was a friend of Jack Morpurgo. His face, his hands and his ears had been so badly burned that, despite urgent warnings from Kippe ahead of his visits, Michael found it impossible not to stare at him. ‘He was a living monster. He had no eyebrows. All his skin was tightly drawn and white. And yet I was impressed by him as someone who had suffered, like Jesus.’

Another family friend had emerged from the war more profoundly, though less obviously, scarred. Edna Macleod’s husband, Ian, known as ‘Mac’, was essentially a gentle, generous, humorous man – a welcome foil, when he visited Bradwell, to Jack’s controlling egoism. But, as part of his service in the Royal Army Medical Corps, he had been one of the first to enter the concentration camp Bergen Belsen in the spring of 1945. For the rest of his life he suffered nightmares about the stench and sights and sounds that met the liberating forces: the cries, from those still able to cry; the tens of thousands of heaped corpses. ‘He said they were mountains high, those poor, gassed Jews,’ Edna remembers. ‘Here and there a few were just breathing. He touched their lips with water.’

These early experiences gave Michael a strong sense of war’s futility, the way it wasted human lives. Eric Pearce and Ian Macleod were heroes; they had fought the good fight. Yet their reward was not glory, but brokenness. They presented Michael with a paradox that, even now, he struggles to comprehend. One of the ways in which he has tried is by telling stories. Many of his books, from War Horse to Private Peaceful, have highlighted this pitiful and shameful aspect of conflict.

But the notion of glory remained seductive. In 1956 he was taken to the cinema to see Reach for the Sky, based on the true story of Douglas Bader who, despite having lost both his legs in a flying accident before the war, was called back into the RAF, fought in the Battle of Britain, and was imprisoned in Colditz, where his attempts to escape were so cunning and determined that his captors threatened to confiscate his prosthetic legs. It was a film calculated to fill small boys with dreams of heroism. Bader, as played by Kenneth More, is buoyant in the face of adversity, a man able to inspire those around him without ever raising his voice or pulling rank; to infect others with resolution and hope in the midst of disaster. ‘This is a story of courage,’ the narrator intones as the credits roll. ‘It has no end, because courage has no end.’

Michael Morpurgo shared some of Bader’s qualities. At the end of his second term at the Abbey, when he was just eight, his headmaster’s report noted that he was ‘very much the leader of the younger generation of the school’. His contemporaries looked to him for guidance and found him ‘charismatic’. In his final report, in the summer of 1957, Mr Gladstone wrote confidently that, ‘although not a scholar’, Michael possessed ‘qualities that will ensure success’.

Pieter had by now moved on to Abbotsholme, a ‘progressive’ school in rural Derbyshire, where the headmaster, an old Christ’s Hospital boy, had struck a deal with Jack over fees. For Michael, Jack set his sights higher. The reputation of The King’s School, Canterbury, re-founded by Henry VIII in 1541, and with origins stretching back thirteen and a half centuries, had slumped somewhat between the two world wars. But, since the appointment of Canon ‘Fred’ Shirley as headmaster in 1935, pupil numbers had risen steadily as the school built up a reputation for academic, musical and sporting excellence. Shirley was a maverick and an enigma – to some a saint, to others a sadist. In a volume of recollections written after his death, one old boy offers what reads like a posthumous love letter, while another paints a pen portrait of a monster and madman, who stood behind him brandishing an open penknife during rehearsals for a Shakespeare play, threatening to stab him if he did not speak clearly. Shirley’s only daughter sums him up in a string of contradictory adjectives – ‘devout, doubting, an ardent left-winger, a thorough snob, loving, self-centred, compassionate, hurtful’. But fans and critics alike endorse Shirley’s Times obituary, which described him as ‘one of the most talked about headmasters in modern Britain’, and ‘one of the most successful’.

Shirley was a friend of Jack’s, and the two men agreed that Michael should sit the scholarship examination. ‘Everyone knew perfectly well that I was not scholarship material,’ Michael remembers. ‘I sat the first Greek exam in the lab at King’s, and I knew I was doing really badly. As I was starting on the second, the headmaster’s secretary, Miss Milward, called out my name. She marched me into her office and said that, because I’d only scored 2 per cent in the first exam, there was no point my sitting another Greek paper, and I was to do an intelligence test instead.’ A few weeks later, on 17 June 1957, Shirley wrote to Michael: ‘I have nominated you to a Lord Plender Scholarship – not at all on account of your marks in the exams! – but because I can give one of them for what is called “leadership quality” – so father gets the money value, and you can have your name up on the Abbey Honours Board; but it isn’t a King’s scholarship, so you won’t be able to wear a gown!’ The scholarship meant £100 off the fees – then £350 per annum – and was never officially entered into the school records.

Travellers to Canterbury today are greeted by a railway poster welcoming them to ‘a city where the present keeps step with the past’. In fact, once you have moved through the wooden postern from the city into King’s Mint Yard, it is easy to feel you have left the present behind, and have entered instead a world of cloisters, arches and twisting stone stairways. Lawns and passages have Arthurian names – the Green Court, the Dark Entry – and Tudor buildings jostle with medieval. Michael’s house was Galpin’s, Norman in origin. It was bordered on one side by the old pilgrims’ lodgings and on the other by the thick, flint city walls round which a night-watchman walked in the dark. He came right past Michael’s dormitory window, intoning ‘Twelve o’clock, fine night and all’s well’ as the great cathedral bell chimed midnight.

Canterbury Cathedral, soaring into the sky in Romanesque magnificence, seems to keep the school tucked beneath its wing. The public generally enters it by the massive Christ Church Gate, but the pupils of King’s slip in through a side door, which opens straight into what they call ‘the martyrdom’, where Thomas Becket was murdered in 1170. ‘There is a cathedral in the school grounds,’ a new boy once wrote home to his parents – King’s pupils feel that Canterbury Cathedral is theirs. Standing in the nave on a Sunday morning, staring up into the fan vaulting, with the organ thundering and the voices of 650 boys singing ‘All People that on Earth Do Dwell’, remains for Michael ‘one of the most extraordinary experiences on God’s earth’. And even more moving were the early-morning Communion services held in the candle-lit dimity of the cathedral undercroft, in the Chapel of Our Lady, next to Thomas Becket’s original tomb.

Michael at King’s School, Canterbury, 1959.

The influence of this devout environment is obvious in a diary Michael kept during the spring and summer terms of 1960, when he was seventeen. Day by day, he noted his sporting achievements, adding occasional jaunty reflections on events in the wider world: Saturday 27 February, ‘Princess Margaret is engaged to a photographer chap – Jones. ’Bout time too.’ But he rounded off almost every entry with an anxious, beseeching prayer, ‘God, Please aid me to do my best this term, and to enjoy myself, if it be your will. Please.’

Academically, his performance remained mediocre. On arrival at King’s he had been put in the B-stream, where he remained. Maths was particularly problematic. ‘He is not quick to learn,’ wrote the Maths master at the end of his first term, and his reports thereafter are beset with warnings that Michael might fail his O level – as indeed, on first go, he did. Even in English, and in creative writing, he showed little promise. In the composition section of the English Language O level, which he sat in the summer of 1959, he only just scraped through, with 56 per cent.

And yet, as his King’s friend Peter Campbell remembers, ‘he shone personally. He had an authority about him. He didn’t need to be part of the group.’ This is captured, for Campbell, in a photograph of the Rugby XV taken in his and Michael’s last year at the school. Fourteen of the fifteen – Campbell among them – are clearly part of a team; but Michael stands on the edge, chin defiantly in the air, staring outwards. This independence made him likeable and impressive both to his peers and to the staff. ‘He never makes a fuss, and so far as I know he never causes a harsh word or gets one,’ his housemaster, Richard Roberts, wrote at the end of his first term. ‘He has done well to qualify for promotion in the Corps so young.’