Michael Morpurgo

by Maggie Fergusson

  One July evening during their first summer at Langlands, Michael and Clare had taken visiting friends for a walk down to the Torridge, Tarka the Otter’s river which runs through the fields of Parsonage Farm. The light was fading – it was becoming what Devonians call ‘dimpsey’ – when a great figure clad in river green loomed up, dragged himself in his waders out of the water, and strode towards them. Michael recognised him immediately as Ted Hughes. His voice, if not his physical presence, had been familiar for years.

  In the late Sixties, Hughes had broadcast a number of talks for a BBC Radio Schools programme, Listening and Writing. Michael had been thrilled by them. They took the form not so much of instruction as of invitation: ‘What Ted Hughes seemed to be saying was that writing is a mystery, but that we can become part of that mystery – that, if we just keep our minds and hearts open, we all can do this.’

  Standing face to face with Hughes on the riverbank, Michael found himself lost for words – fortunate, perhaps, because Hughes was fishing, and in no mood for chatter. But Hughes, too, was struck by the encounter. He had met a beautiful woman by the Torridge, he told his wife, Carol, that evening. She and her husband were doing amazing work with children from inner cities. He wanted to see more of them.

  Before long, Michael and Clare and Ted and Carol Hughes were meeting regularly for dinner, either at Langlands or at Court Green, the low-roofed, hobbity rectory that Hughes had bought with his first wife, Sylvia Plath, in 1961. Often, Seán and Peggy Rafferty made up the party. All six loved good food and wine, and for Michael and Clare the memory of these evenings continues to glow. ‘Everything about them was intense,’ says Michael. ‘Even the laughter was intense.’

  It was Ted Hughes who, shortly after their first meeting, instructed Michael to keep a diary. The excitement he felt about all he was seeing and learning as he worked with the Wards on Parsonage Farm would not last, Hughes warned – ‘So write it down! While it’s fresh!’ He dangled a carrot. If Michael kept a diary, he promised to write a poem for every month of the year. Perhaps they might make a book of it.

  And perhaps, Michael reflected, the book might be illustrated by another of their new friends, the photographer James Ravilious, whom they had met one morning in the Duke of York. A dark, handsome man, quiet and intuitive, James was the son of the great painter and wood engraver Eric Ravilious. He and his artist wife, Robin, lived in a tiny cottage in the village of Dolton, four miles from Iddesleigh, and he was employed by the Beaford Archive taking photographs to document the land and people of this pocket of north Devon as the twentieth century moved into its final decades. Bicycling from village to village, he had become so completely engrossed in his work that what was to have been a short-term commission had grown into a labour of love that was to occupy most of the rest of his life.

  Carol and Ted Hughes.

  Michael was impressed and moved by Ravilious’s work. Sympathetic, but never sentimental, his black-and-white photographs captured the humour, the love, and the hard graft that went to make up a kind of English rural life that was fast disappearing.

  All Around the Year, Michael’s diary of twelve months on Parsonage Farm, interleaved with Ted Hughes’s calendar poems and illustrated with James Ravilious’s photographs and Robin Ravilious’s line drawings, was published by John Murray in the spring of 1979. If sales were disappointing, the critical response was gratifying. Patricia Beer, in the Listener, praised ‘the welcome straightforwardness’ of Michael’s style. ‘I have the feeling,’ wrote Martin Booth in Tribune, ‘that, had Pepys been a twentieth-century farmer, he’d have done a similar book, and no better.’

  Now long out of print, All Around the Year has a special place in Michael’s heart. It was, he says, his ‘learning book’, carrying him out to a new circle of readers and reviewers, helping him to raise his sights as a writer. In Iddesleigh, and the countryside surrounding it, he had found a corner of rural England that he loved, and that he knew he could write well about. And having written about it in a diary, he found himself drawn to write about it in a novel, and to explore its past.

  In the attic at Nethercott one afternoon, rummaging through a tea chest of Allen Lane’s belongings, Michael found four framed paintings of cavalry horses in the First World War. By the artist F.W. Reed, they transported him straight back to the Abbey, and to its bound volumes of the Illustrated London News. In one of them, British horses were shown charging up a snowy slope towards the German line, and becoming entangled in barbed wire. Without knowing quite why, Michael dusted it down, brought it home to Langlands, and propped it up in his study.

  The painting began to preoccupy him. He had never much liked horses – ‘I’d always thought of them as beautiful, but stupid’ – but soon after moving to Devon Clare had bought a Haflinger mare, Hebe. Hebe was loved by the Morpurgo children, by the children visiting Nethercott, and, eventually, by Michael too. His affection for her made Reed’s painting very real to him, and prompted him one morning to telephone the Imperial War Museum to ask how many British horses had died in the First World War. The answer was that, of roughly a million sent out to France, only about 65,000 had returned home. The rest had either died in battle or been sold off to French butchers.

  Then, sitting by the fire in the Duke of York one evening, Michael fell into conversation with Wilf Ellis, owner of the bric-a-brac shop that Clare had loved as a child. He asked which regiment Wilf had served in in the First World War. ‘The Norfolk Regiment,’ came the reply. Ellis invited Michael to his cottage, where he showed him some of the mementoes he had brought back from the Western Front – his trenching tool, a button, some medals.

  Michael felt moved to find out more. Close to Langlands lived Captain Budgett, former owner of Nethercott House. Budgett had also fought on the Western Front, in the Berkshire Yeomanry, and he described to Michael how, because it was taboo to express emotion to fellow soldiers, he had walked up and down the horse lines at night, sharing his hopes and fears with the horses. He felt sure that they had, in their own way, understood.

  As he listened to Captain Budgett, the outline of a story began to form in Michael’s mind. It centred on a Devon farm horse sold to a British cavalry regiment and shipped over to France in 1914. The horse would be captured in a cavalry charge, and then used by the Germans to pull ambulances and guns, and it would winter on a French farm. It would get to know and love both German and French soldiers, and endure with them the horror, pity and futility of war. In his mind, Michael christened the horse Joey, after a foal born to Hebe. Joey, he decided, would tell his own story.

  But here was the problem. If readers were to be lured into believing a story told by a horse, Michael himself needed to feel convinced that there could be real empathy between horses and humans. Captain Budgett’s reminiscences had suggested that there could; but it was a nine-year-old boy who finally persuaded him.

  In the autumn of 1980 a group of children from Pegasus School on the Castle Vale estate came to stay at Nethercott. Among them was a boy with a severe stammer. He was withdrawn and almost silent and, on his teacher’s firm instructions, Michael avoided asking him questions or engaging him in conversation. ‘Force him to speak,’ the teacher had warned, ‘and he will do a runner.’

  Towards the end of the week, walking up to Nethercott one evening, Michael noticed a light on in Hebe’s stable. The boy was leaning on the stable door in his slippers, stroking Hebe’s nose and speaking to her without any hint of a stammer. Hebe, in response, was standing still, ears pricked forward. ‘She may not have understood the words,’ Michael says, ‘but I felt sure that she understood that this boy was a friend, and was in need.’ It was the final spur he needed to get to work on War Horse.

  Some books, Michael finds, seem almost to write themselves; others prove more troublesome. This one was difficult, and Michael was preoccupied and low. Ted Hughes, in an effort to cheer him along, arrived one moonless night to take him eel fishing. They hooked five fat eels from the Torridge; but M
ichael’s spirits did not lift.

  Having been rejected by a number of publishers, War Horse was finally published by Kaye & Ward in the spring of 1982. The reviews were mixed. Despite this, Rosemary Debnam at Kaye & Ward was quietly confident that the novel was outstanding, and her confidence seemed justified when news came through that War Horse had been shortlisted for the Whitbread Children’s Book Award.

  On the evening of the prize-giving, a black limousine was laid on to whisk Michael and Clare from Paddington Station to the ceremony at the Whitbread headquarters in the City, where proceedings were filmed by Channel 4. Cameras whirred; excitement ran high. Michael had been assured that he was the favourite for the children’s award. So when Roald Dahl, head of the judges, rose to give his speech and announced that the award was in fact to be presented to W.J. Corbett for The Song of Pentecost, it came as a crushing disappointment. After stepping down from the podium, Dahl sought Michael out. Next time, he counselled, stick to the present: ‘Children don’t like books about history.’

  Like Cinderella’s carriage, the limousine had disappeared by the end of the evening. Michael and Clare returned to Paddington by tube, caught the night train home, and by seven o’clock the following morning were getting ready to set off for work at Nethercott. Then the telephone rang. It was Ted Hughes, suggesting that he and Michael go out and spend the day together. They did a bit of fishing, then poked about in bookshops and antique shops in Bideford – ‘Ted loved pottering’. The Whitbread was not mentioned until, over tea in a café, Ted leaned forwards. He and Carol had watched the award ceremony on television. Michael must understand that these things did not matter: they were all a lot of nonsense. ‘You wrote a fine book,’ he said. ‘And you’ll write a finer one.’

  At Nethercott, working so closely alongside the teachers, Clare and I got to know them pretty well. Some, like Joy Palmer, have remained lifelong friends. Of all the strange and wonderful things we witnessed together, the sight of that little boy from Castle Vale talking to Hebe over her stable door remains, for me, the most extraordinary. I have re-imagined it here.

  I have been teaching for over twenty years now, mostly around Hoxton, in North London. After all that time I am no longer at all sentimental about children. I don’t think you could be. Twenty years at the chalk face of education gives you a big dose of reality.

  I was sentimental to start with, I’m sure. I am still an idealist, though not as zealous perhaps as I used to be, but the fire’s still there. You could say that I have given my life to it – I’ve never had children of my own. I’m headmistress at the school now and I believe more than ever we should be creating the best of all possible worlds for our children, giving every one of them the best possible chance to thrive. That’s why every year for at least the past ten years I’ve been taking the children down to a farm in Devon, a place called Nethercott.

  It takes six long hours by coach from London and there, in a large Victorian manor house with views over to distant Dartmoor, we all live together, all forty of us, teachers and children. We eat three good hot meals a day, sing songs and tell stories around the fire at night, and we sleep like logs. By day we work. And that’s the joy of it, to see the children working hard and purposefully out on the farm, feeding calves, moving sheep, grooming Hebe the Haflinger horse who everyone loves, mucking out stables and sheds, collecting eggs and logs, and apples too. The children do it all, and they love it – mostly, anyway. They work alongside real farmers, get to feel like real farmers, know that everything they are doing is useful and important to the farm, that they and their work are appreciated.

  Every year we come back to school and the whole place is buzzing. In the playground and in the staff-room all the different stories of our week down on the farm are told again and again. The magic moments – a calf being born, the glimpse of a fox or a deer in Bluebell Wood; the little disasters – Mandy’s welly sucked off in the mud, Jemal being chased by the goose. The children write a lot about it, paint pictures of it, and I know they dream about it too, as I do.

  But something so extraordinary happened on one of these visits that I too felt compelled to write it down, just as it happened, so that I should never forget it – and because I know that in years to come, as memory fades, it is going to be difficult to believe. I’ve always found miracles hard to believe, and this really was a kind of miracle.

  The boys and girls at our school, St Francis, come from every corner of the earth, so we are quite used to children who can speak little or no English. But until Ho arrived we never had a child who didn’t speak at all – he’d have been about seven when he joined us. In the three years he’d been with us he had never uttered a word. As a result he had few friends, and spent much of his time on his own. We would see him sitting by himself reading. He read and he wrote in correct and fluent English, more fluent than many of his classmates who’d been born just down the street. He excelled in maths too, but never put his hand up in class, was never able to volunteer an answer or ask a question. He just put it all down on paper, and it was usually right. None of us ever saw him smile at school, not once. His expression seemed set in stone, fixed in a permanent frown.

  We had all given up trying to get him to talk. Any effort to do so had only one effect – he’d simply run off, out into the playground, or all the way home if he could. The educational psychologist, who had not got a word out of him either, told us it was best simply to let him be, and do whatever we could to encourage him, to give him confidence, but without making demands on him to speak. He wasn’t sure whether Ho was choosing not to speak, or whether he simply couldn’t.

  All we knew about him was that ever since he’d arrived in England he’d been living with his adoptive parents. In all that time he hadn’t spoken to them either, not a word. We knew from them that Ho was one of the Boat People, that as the war in Vietnam was coming to an end he had managed to escape somehow. There were a lot of Boat People coming to England in those days, mostly via refugee camps in Hong Kong, which was still British then. Other than that, he was a mystery to us all.

  When we arrived at the farm I asked Michael – he was the farm school manager at Nethercott and, after all these years, an old friend – to be a little bit careful how he treated Ho, to go easy on him. Michael could be blunt with the children, pointing at them, firing direct questions in a way that demanded answers. Michael was fine about it. The truth was that everyone down there on the farm was fascinated by this silent little boy from Vietnam, mostly because they’d all heard about the suffering of the Vietnamese Boat People and this was the first time they’d ever met one of them.

  Ho had an aura of stillness about him that set him apart. Even sweeping down the parlour after milking, he would be working alone, intent on the task in hand – methodically, seriously, never satisfied until the job was done perfectly.

  He particularly loved to touch the animals, I remember that. Looking wasn’t enough. He showed no fear as he eased his hand under a sitting hen to find a new-laid egg. When she pecked at him he didn’t mind. He just stroked her, calmed her down. Moving the cows out after milking he showed no sign of fear, as many of the other children did. He stomped about in his wellies, clapping his hands at them, driving them on as if he’d been doing it all his life. He seemed to have an easiness around the animals, an affinity with the cows in particular, I noticed. I could see that he was totally immersed in this new life in the country, loving every moment of every day. The shadow that seemed to hang over him back at school was lifting; the frown had gone.

  On the Sunday afternoon walk along the River Okement I felt him tugging suddenly at my arm and pointing. I looked up just in time to see the flashing brilliance of a kingfisher flying straight as an arrow down the middle of the river. He and I were the only ones to see it. He so nearly smiled then. There was a new light in his eyes that I had not seen before. He was so observant and fascinated, so confident around the animals, I began to wonder about his past – maybe he’d been a coun
try boy back in Vietnam when he was little. I longed to ask him, particularly when he came running up to walk alongside me again. I felt his cold hand creep into mine. That had certainly never happened before. I squeezed it gently and he squeezed back. It was every bit as good as talking, I thought.

  At some point during our week-long visit, Michael comes up in the evening to read a story to the children. He’s a bit of a writer, as well as a performer. He likes to test his stories out on the children, and we like listening to them too. He never seems to get offended if someone nods off – and they’re so tired, they often do. We have all the children washed and ready in their dressing gowns (not easy, I can tell you, when there are nearly forty of them!), hand round mugs of steaming hot chocolate, and gather them in the sitting room round the fire for Michael’s story.

  On this particular evening, the children were noisy and all over the place, high with excitement. They were often like that when it was windy outside, and there’d been a gale blowing all day. It was a bit like rounding up cats. We thought we’d just about managed it, and were doing a final count of heads, when I noticed that Ho was missing. Had anyone seen him? No. The teachers and I searched for him all over the house. No one could find him anywhere. Long minutes passed and still no sign of Ho. I was becoming more than a little worried. It occurred to me that someone might have upset him, causing Ho to run off, just as he had a few times back at school. Out there in the dark he could have got himself lost and frightened all too easily. He had been in his dressing gown and slippers the last time anyone saw him, that much we had established. But it was a very cold night outside. I was trying to control my panic when Michael walked in, manuscript in hand.

  ‘I need to speak to you,’ he said. ‘It’s Ho.’ My heart missed a beat. I followed him out of the room.