Michael Morpurgo

by Maggie Fergusson

  Yet all might have been well if, as planned, Tony Bridge had returned home in the summer of 1945. Instead, at short notice, his Iranian posting was prolonged, and just when – as Emile Cammaerts later put it – Kippe was ‘keyed up’ to welcome him back, and ‘worn out by the preparations she had made to receive him and by a series of delays and disappointments’, Jeanne’s fiancé, Geoffrey Lindley, visited the Eyrie with an army friend, Jack Morpurgo.

  The visit took place on 27 September 1945, and that morning Michael had spoken his first full sentence. Of Kippe’s first impressions of Jack, there is no record; but nearly half a century on Jack’s memories were vivid. ‘The door opened,’ he wrote, ‘and a girl came in carrying a laden tea-tray. It was unmistakably an entrance; all conversation was silenced … All my attention was centred on that tall, slim figure, its every movement a delicious conspiracy between art and nature.’ Here was a treasure, he reflected, ‘who would outshine all else in my collection’.

  He knew that she was married, but on the train back to St Pancras that evening Jack Morpurgo comforted himself that ‘a girl as precious as Kippe had no need to waste her loveliness on the Pioneer Corps’.

  Jack Morpurgo had all the qualities that Tony Bridge hadn’t. He was good-looking, witty and glamorous. ‘Confidence I never lacked,’ he admits in his 1990 autobiography, Master of None.

  Born to working-class parents in the East End of London, thoroughly indulged by two adoring elder sisters and precociously clever, Jack had, at thirteen, won a scholarship to Christ’s Hospital, a school founded by Edward VI for poor children. From that moment on, he was relentlessly determined to better himself.

  In November 1945 Kippe caught the train up to London and she and Jack spent the evening alone together. By the end of the year they were engaged in what Jack later described as a game of ‘Let’s pretend’ – ‘but we were not children, we were in love’.

  Eventually Kippe wrote a letter to Tony, admitting her affair with Jack. On receiving it, Tony was granted compassionate leave. He made a painful progress back to England – Basra to Baghdad, Baghdad to Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv to Cairo, Cairo to Alexandria, across the Mediterranean to France, and, finally, by steamer into Newhaven. On Friday 1 February 1946 he and Kippe were reunited at the Rembrandt Hotel in Knightsbridge.

  Jack Morpurgo.

  They travelled together to Suffolk, and for a week bicycled around Blythburgh, Walberswick, Southwold, Tony hoping that, surrounded by silence and sea breezes, by tall churches, fluent countryside and early spring light, they might somehow recover what they seemed to have lost. They returned to the Eyrie, and for most of that spring they remained together. But the atmosphere was fraught and Kippe was still in touch with Jack.

  The marriage was soon over. Tony left England. He emigrated to Canada, changed his name to Tony van Bridge, and eventually found work with the theatre director Sir Tyrone Guthrie in Stratford, Ontario.

  Kippe’s parents disapproved of her relationship with Jack, and when she married him they were not present. Kippe was forced to turn from her own family to the Morpurgos. Shortly after the marriage, she and Jack moved from his flat in Notting Hill Gate to 84 Philbeach Gardens, near Earls Court. The tall, terraced house was somewhat beyond their means, so Jack’s two unmarried schoolmistress sisters, Bess and Julie, moved in with them to help pay the bills and look after the boys. A curious pair: Julie, who had been jilted when she was twenty-one, delicate and emotionally fragile; Bess big-hearted and controlling, they were to remain a part of the household for the next quarter of a century.

  (Like Pieter, Julie and Bess also make an appearance of sorts in A Medal for Leroy.)

  It was Bess who was deputed to take Pieter and Michael for a walk one afternoon, and to explain to them that Jack was now their father. A memory of their conversation remains with Michael, fragmentary but crystal-clear. ‘We were on a railway bridge. I must have said something about my father, and Bess said, “Well, you’ve got a new father now, you know.” And a train came by, and the steam came up in my face. And it just felt quite strange.’

  Michael and Pieter outside 84 Philbeach Gardens.

  At this time Michael was a robust, sunny toddler, and had a close bond with his mother. He remembers walking with her, hand-in-hand, through the smog that descended on London like a manifestation of post-war gloom. He remembers the thrill of being allowed to take charge of the ration book when they shopped together at the local International Stores, where he committed his first crime, slipping into his pocket a model Norman soldier with an orange tunic and an irresistible hinged helmet. He remembers stopping with her to talk to the weepy-eyed, skewbald milk-cart horse, Trumpeter, which used to stand shifting from foot to foot in Philbeach Gardens, munching from the sack of hay round his neck, giving off what seemed to Michael a fascinating odour of fur and sweat and dung. That interest in animals would remain a constant throughout Michael’s life, and would surface again and again in his novels.

  Pieter and Michael, 1948.

  But most vivid of all are his memories of bedtime, when Kippe would sit at the end of his bed and read to him. She read from Aesop’s Fables, and from poets such as Masefield and de la Mare, from Belloc, Lear and from Kipling’s Just So Stories. She had a way of making imaginary characters and places come alive, of conveying the music and joy and taste of language:

  Then Kolokolo Bird said, with a mournful cry, ‘Go to the banks of the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees …’

  Michael rolled the words around on his tongue like sweets. When he was three, his mother found him rocking to and fro in his bed, chanting, ‘Zanzibar! Zanzibar! Marzipan! Zanzibar!’

  Story-time over, Kippe would leave the door slightly ajar to let in a chink of light. The smell of her face powder lingered in the room.

  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 the
y 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.

  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 whethe
r 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?