Michael Morpurgo

by Maggie Fergusson

  So it was a surprise to find that teaching came naturally to him: ‘After a few minutes in the classroom, I knew this was something I could do.’ For the children, the energy and enthusiasm of a master young enough to be their brother were thrilling. And, because they liked him, Michael found himself warming to them in return.

  What he never warmed to was the staff-room. ‘It had a nasty atmosphere, full of fear,’ he says. He felt he neither belonged nor wanted to belong there: ‘I didn’t want to fit in with the dowdy old staff.’ The joint headmasters, Peter and Michael Sugden, had appointed him to teach for an academic year, but during the Easter holidays he decided he could not face another term, and handed in his notice.

  Despite mixed memories of Great Ballard, both Michael and Clare look back on this time as a sort of paradise. They had rented a tiny, thatched house, Wyndham Cottage, on the edge of a village called Rogate, and the long drive across the South Downs to school every morning was glorious. Sometimes, Clare drove Michael in her dressing gown; sometimes, ignoring the fact that he still had not passed his test, he drove himself. He felt proud to be in regular, salaried employment; proud that, in the teeth of opposition and discouragement, he and Clare had won through.

  Jeannie Hyde Parker, whose parents owned Wyndham Cottage, was twelve when Michael and Clare arrived, and used often to bicycle over to visit them. They seemed to her like a couple from a fairy tale – Michael ‘drop-dead gorgeous’, Clare ‘the most beautiful woman I had ever met’. Overcome with envy of Clare’s looks, she slipped her mother’s hand while shopping in Liphook one Saturday morning, ran to the chemist, and spent her pocket money on a bottle of black hair dye. But what struck Jeannie’s mother, Lady Leslie, even more than the youth and beauty of her new tenants was the sense of mystery that surrounded them. They were like the babes in the wood. ‘Nobody ever came to visit them. We guessed perhaps they had eloped, or had been cut off by their families.’

  This was not far from the truth. Blissfully happy though they were together, Michael and Clare were aware of living under a cloud of disappointment and disapproval from both sets of parents. Allen Lane, for one, was not expecting the marriage to last. He had told Clare outright that once her baby was born she might consider divorce. Jack, meanwhile, was reeling from a double blow. Not only had he lost control of Michael, on whom he had pinned such high hopes, but his friendship with Allen Lane had been irreparably damaged. Shortly after the wedding Lane had sent a colleague to take Jack out to lunch, and to suggest that, if he would help support Michael and Clare to the tune of £2,000 a year, Lane would do the same. Incensed that he, ‘a salaried book-trade administrator’, should be expected to match Lane, a multi-millionaire, Jack stormed out of the restaurant. ‘To hell with you both,’ he cried, ‘and to the lowest circle in hell with Allen Lane.’ Jack Morpurgo and Allen Lane never spoke again.

  On 27 January 1964, Sebastian Michael Morpurgo arrived in the darkness just before dawn. ‘He was very thin, and very quiet,’ Michael remembers, ‘and he seemed almost weightless in my arms. I felt incredibly proud.’ Kippe came down to stay at Wyndham Cottage after the birth. She lit the fire, cleaned the grate, cooked, and cuddled her grandson. She was, Clare remembers, ‘very loving’.

  In Canada, news of Sebastian’s birth reached Tony Bridge. It was nearly twenty years since his divorce, and he had remarried. The time had come, he decided, for him to meet his sons and grandson. He wrote to Kippe to say that he was travelling to England, and a tea party was arranged at Oxhey Hall. It was a tense afternoon. Kay, on being told who was coming to tea, threw a hysterical fit and had to be removed from the house. Nobody had ever explained to her that Pieter and Michael were not her full brothers, she screamed; she could not bear to think that this was true. And when Tony arrived he was, not surprisingly, almost speechless with nerves. But Michael was delighted by his visit. He was fascinated to find that he and Pieter shared mannerisms – movements of the mouth and hands – with the father who had been absent from their lives; and he was thrilled by Kay’s outburst. ‘I was aware that this was a spanner in the works as far as the “Morpurgo” family was concerned, and I liked that. This unspoken thing was now out in the open, and I remember thinking, “It’s about time.”’

  Canon Shirley with Michael and Clare at Sebastian’s christening, 1 April 1964.

  Less than two years before Sebastian’s birth Michael had been a schoolboy; now he was a father. He found this hard to comprehend. ‘I used to look at myself in the mirror and think, “This can’t be true. This can’t have happened. I am too young.”’ And young he seemed, even for his age, when he arrived at King’s College in October. Jane Batterham, a fellow undergraduate who was to become a lifelong friend, remembers meeting Michael for the first time in a French class. The students had been asked to introduce themselves, and, oozing public-school confidence, Michael announced, ‘Je suis Michael Morpurgo. J’étais à l’école du Roi à Canterbury.’

  ‘He was just a schoolboy,’ says Jane, ‘with a whiff of Sandhurst about him.’ He had driven metal studs into the soles of his shoes, so his footsteps echoed with a military ring as he strode down the corridors.

  There was no regular student life for Michael, no hanging out in bars or joining protests. His relationship to King’s was that of a none-too-keen businessman to his office. He took the underground to Charing Cross every morning, and walked up the Strand to the college; he headed home as soon as possible at the end of the afternoon.

  He and Clare were renting, for £5 a week, a basement and ground-floor flat in Well Road near Hampstead Heath, and on the face of it their life was enviable. ‘Basty’ was a sweet, easy-going baby, and Clare loved being a mother. She was so protective of her son that she would not allow anyone else to carry him up the stairs, and at the slightest cry in the night she shot out of bed and gathered him into her arms. Thanks to a trust set up by Allen Lane for his children, she had a regular income. To their contemporaries, Michael and Clare appeared to be very comfortably off.

  But for Michael things were less rosy than they looked. ‘The difficulties in married life are many as you know,’ Clare writes in an undated letter to Lane. ‘But where ours is so simple in a lot of ways, we do have one very big one – that Mike is living on your money.’ This, she explains, makes Michael feel ‘guilty and useless’. He had still not found his vocation, and it bothered him.

  Jane Batterham’s overriding memory of visits to Well Road is of solid, settled family life. But she remembers also that, no matter what the conversation, it tended eventually to revert to the vexed question of Michael’s future. King’s had enabled him to play for time, but it had made him no clearer about what he might do in the longer term, and, if anything, his intellectual confidence had diminished rather than grown during his time there. Philosophy baffled him. And though the English teaching brought occasional stirrings of excitement – most notably when Professor Garmondsway read the students Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, awakening in Michael for the first time in years memories of Kippe’s bedtime stories – critical analysis floored him.

  In the summer of 1967 Michael sat his finals. A few weeks later the results were posted up on the college noticeboard. He looked hopefully down the short list of Firsts, and then, with increasing dread, through the mass of Seconds. Finally, he found his name among the Thirds. When he rang to tell Clare, she was unmoved. ‘Nobody in my family had ever been to university,’ she says, ‘and my father had left school at sixteen. What did it matter?’ Checking her diary for that time, she finds she did not even mention Michael’s degree – ‘It’s all about babies.’ But Kippe and Jack were flabbergasted and appalled, and Michael was at a very low ebb indeed.

  Want of an alternative, rather than any positive desire to work with children, drove Michael back into teaching, and he thinks of the years that followed as a hopeless wilderness of floundering, disappointment and failure to settle. A summary of his employment history goes some way to telling the story:

  A
utumn 1967–Summer 1968: junior master, Westbury House, Hampshire, friendly, eccentric prep school run by ex-naval officer for sixty-odd pupils. Michael not unhappy, but bored and unchallenged.

  Autumn 1968–Easter 1970: housemaster, St Faith’s, slightly larger prep school near Cambridge.Relentless clashes with headmaster and staff – ‘a disaster’.

  Summer 1970: Westbury House again.

  Autumn 1970–Summer 1972: Milner Court, Kent, junior school for King’s Canterbury. Further clashes with staff, particularly headmaster.

  Autumn 1972: unemployed.

  Michael (second from left, staff row) at St Faith’s, summer 1969.

  It was while Michael was teaching near Cambridge that Mark Morpurgo’s future wife, Linda, met him for the first time. In appearance, she remembers, he was every inch the schoolmaster, dressed in a shabby, leather-patched corduroy jacket, and scruffy suede shoes. But, though he looked the part, he struck her as ‘incredibly unhappy, lost’.

  Her impressions are confirmed by a photograph of the staff and pupils of St Faith’s taken in the summer of 1969. Squeezed on to a trestle bench between two beaming female teachers, Michael stares at the camera with an expression of smouldering resentment and discontent. It is not only his youth that marks him out from the other staff. Patricia Owens, whose son Simon was taught by Michael at St Faith’s, remembers meeting him with Clare at a school function in 1969. ‘Simon had gone on and on about his amazing new teacher, Mr Morpurgo,’ she says, ‘and as soon as I saw this young, handsome man across the room, I knew it must be him.’ Clare was by his side, glamorous in a maxi leather coat and white fur hat. ‘They just didn’t fit with the rest of the staff at all.’

  Nor, despite Michael’s patched jackets and scuffed shoes, were they living the kind of life that one might expect of a young prep-school master and his wife. Handouts from the Allen Lane Children’s Trust had become progressively more generous, and, alongside fast cars, a particular weakness of his, Michael had developed a taste for furniture, paintings, foreign holidays, houses. After accepting the job at Milner Court, they had bought a rambling Georgian house, Newnham Farmhouse, near the village of Wickhambreaux. It was surrounded by fields, outbuildings and several acres of garden, in a corner of which they built a swimming pool. ‘We were living about twenty years beyond ourselves,’ Michael says.

  By this time the family had grown. In January 1967, Clare had given birth to a second son, Horatio. The following year, longing for a girl, but feeling it would be wrong to bring another child into an overpopulated world, they had adopted a seven-week-old baby, Ros, half Asian Indian, half Caucasian American. It was exciting to watch the children growing up in what Michael remembers as ‘a little Camelot of happiness’. It dawned on him only gradually that the price of financial freedom was a kind of psychological imprisonment – that ‘“things” were becoming far too important to us, and money was undermining my will to take life by the scruff of the neck and move forward’. More and more, as the school terms rolled by, he was troubled by a sense of frustration and aimlessness. His life was drifting.

  None of this was obvious to his pupils, who remember only the excitement and energy of his teaching. Forty years on, they all tell the same tale. Mr Morpurgo was inspirational; he knew how to get into the minds of children, to make them think for themselves, to believe in themselves. As, one after another, they offer their particular memories of being taught by him, a picture emerges of a man who made learning an adventure.

  Simon Owens was just seven when Michael arrived at St Faith’s, and the first thing they embarked on together was The Canterbury Tales. Michael warmed the boys to the concept of pilgrimage, and then helped them to explore what it might mean for a band of twentieth-century pilgrims – a rally driver, a coastguard, a poet. Stephen Webster, who was in Michael’s house, Firwood, remembers lessons being disrupted one evening by the sound of sawing and hammering. On Michael’s instructions, the caretaker, Jack Staden, was rigging up a sound system that ran to every room in the house. From that day on the boys were woken in the morning by music (‘it might be Mozart’s clarinet concerto, it might be the Beatles’) rather than an electric bell. At Milner Court Michael taught Guy Norrish a special ‘scissor move’ in rugby. When Norrish employed this to score the winning try against a hitherto unbeaten neighbouring prep school, Wellesley House, Michael ‘leapt incredibly high in the air’.

  Of all the schools where Michael taught Milner Court was, perhaps, the most bizarre and alarming. ‘It operated in a kind of bubble, insulated from the world,’ says Adam Finn, who was sent there in 1966. ‘It had got stuck somewhere in the Fifties.’ Michael’s arrival on the staff was explosive. Finn remembers him striding into the classroom one morning, switching on the record player, putting on some pop music and asking the boys to listen really carefully to the lyrics.

  ‘In that school,’ Finn says, ‘the only music we had ever heard was either choral or classical. You cannot imagine how odd it was for a master to be playing something like this.’

  Yet none of Michael’s former pupils remembers him as soft or even particularly warm. ‘I can be very nasty,’ he warned one class in his first lesson with them, ‘and I can be very nice. It entirely depends on you.’ He was fierce and commanding. He did not care whether the boys liked him, any more than he cared about school rules.

  Next to St Faith’s, and separated from it by a high wall, was an old people’s home, Meadowcroft, with a large garden. One of the ways that the boys liked to prove their courage was to creep out of their dormitories at night, climb over the Meadowcroft wall, and go for what they called ‘a midnight walk’. This, needless to say, was strictly forbidden, and the standard punishment was a beating. But for the boys in Firwood Michael introduced a new rule. ‘I don’t mind if you go for a midnight walk,’ he told them. ‘But, if you do, you must write a poem about it.’

  His belief in the value of creative writing had begun to take root in his first term at St Faith’s, when he had been invited to edit the school magazine. He was amazed by the poems and stories the children offered him for publication, by their ‘wonderfully fresh take on the world’. Yet, rather than encourage this, it seemed to him that the thrust of most of the teaching in the school was to browbeat the children into uniformity, so that they could jump through the hoops required by public-school entrance exams. ‘Their individual genius,’ he says, ‘was being throttled.’ Encouraging them to write, to find their own voices, was one way to reverse this process.

  His own memories of creative writing were not happy. At St Matthias the class had been asked one day to write about ‘A Funfair’. Michael had never been to a funfair, and a cold paralysis crept over him as he watched his classmates bend over their desks and begin to scribble. At the Abbey stories were written against the clock, and the titles set were impossibly large and vague – ‘Autumn’, ‘Fear’. Without anything precise to work on, Michael’s mind had become a baffled void. Mindful of this, he tried to show his pupils paintings, or take them to look at a stream or a tree before they began to write. And, while they wrote, he wrote too, and found that he enjoyed it.

  He was by no means alone, of course, in believing in the benefits of ‘free expression’. All over the country, anthologies of children’s work were being published and competitions for younger writers established. Michael encouraged his pupils to enter these, and took groups of them up to London to have their work recorded for the BBC radio programme Living Language. And he accepted a commission from the National Book League (Jack Morpurgo had by this time moved on) to collect and edit an anthology of writing by seven- to fifteen-year-olds from ‘a broad social background’.

  ‘Children’s Words’ was published as a special issue of the NBL’s periodical Books (Winter 1971). It opens with a fiery introduction from Michael himself, attacking politicians for exploiting education for their own ends; championing children and their ‘freshness of approach’. It was the first time his name had appeared in print, and it sowed
in his mind a seed of hope that there might be a life for him beyond the school gates.

  He needed this hope, because at Milner Court his hatred of the teaching profession was becoming overwhelming. It was, says Adam Finn, a school ‘governed by fear’. The headmaster, the Reverend John Edmunds, relentlessly humiliated pupils in lessons. Finn remembers with particular distaste Edmunds’s habit of putting his face up very close to a boy’s, and then hammering his fist on their desk. When anger got the better of him, he became violent, and chalk and blackboard rubbers flew.

  The staff, on the whole, took their cue from Edmunds, and it was clear to Adam Finn even as a schoolboy that Michael was ‘completely out of place’. It was not just the teaching methods of this young, rather flash, sports-car-driving master that set him apart, but the fearlessness with which he delivered his views and criticisms in the staff-room. As Robin Edmonds, who taught with Michael, puts it, he was ‘not always most tactful’ – and Michael himself admits that he was ‘probably horribly arrogant’. The other masters were completely dependent on their jobs; but Michael had Clare’s money to fall back on and could afford to be awkward. As the staff grew increasingly wary of him, he became, Finn remembers, ‘more and more stratospherically popular’ among the boys. It was a dangerous combination.

  One afternoon in the summer term of 1972 Michael was told that, in a fit of anger, the headmaster had thrashed one of his pupils with a dog chain. Michael reported the incident to the school governors; but the governors, and even the parents of the boy concerned, closed ranks. Edmunds’s actions had been justified, they insisted, and Michael’s disloyalty was not. He was given notice to leave the school. Enraged, he took the matter to the Association of Assistant Masters, and his dismissal was revoked. He then resigned. At Speech Day, on 18 July, Michael made a point of sitting not on the dais with the rest of the staff, but among the boys.