Michael Morpurgo is a shameless snapper-up of unconsidered trifles. All it takes is a conversation here, a chance meeting there, a crumb dropped from history’s table and his imagination starts to work like yeast. People tell him stuff. Things happen to him. He gets lucky — and then he gets busy.
The author of “War Horse”, “Private Peaceful” and 130 other books has risen to such a peak of productivity and renown that he can afford to be flip: “I don’t do my own stories,” he tells me. “I just pinch them.”
The theme of his latest book to be made into a stage play, “The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips”, is a case in point. It came to him in a pub in Devon where he was having a morale-stiffener before a neighbour’s funeral. On the walls were old black-and-white photographs of American soldiers carrying furniture out of the village of Slapton, a name that “vaguely rang a bell”. Morpurgo asked the barman what was going on.
Operation Tiger, as it was code-named, was one of the biggest mass evacuations of the Second World War — and the most catastrophic. Seven villages, 3,000 people with all their livestock and possessions, were turned out of their homes so that the Army could use Slapton Sands as a battleground to rehearse D-Day’s Normandy landings. Four months into the exercises, early on April 28, 1944, things went horribly wrong.
A flotilla of eight landing ships on a training exercise were torpedoed by German E-boats, killing 946 American servicemen. The flotilla should have been protected by Royal Navy escorts but because of an administrative error they received no alert. The wounded and those who cared for them were sworn to secrecy under threat of imprisonment and the disaster was conveniently swept under the carpet by the authorities.
Slapton became a place of sinister echoes. Morpurgo took in all this with his usual beadiness — right down to a footnote in a local history book mentioning a family cat that had gone missing the day before the area was sealed off. The cat survived behind the perimeter wire during 10 months of bombardment from ships at sea, emerging from its wrecked house only after D-Day. It was called — yes, really — Adolphus Tips.
Already steeped in war and its consequences and with a predilection for animal stories, Morpurgo had the germ of a new novel — ostensibly about a cat but really about human dislocation, fear and the power of good deeds in a naughty world. It opened as a fantastical show at Shakespeare’s Globe with Emma Rice directing. “Life isn’t sweet all the time,” says Morpurgo, watching the Thames from the Globe’s upper bar. “One of the misunderstandings about children is that they can’t cope with difficulties. The stories you tell have to reflect the complexities of the world, though that doesn’t mean you pile the trauma on. The problem we have now, and it is serious, is that our children grow up with the trauma of the world coming into their bedrooms, through screens of all sorts and sizes.
“This story reflects so much about how we are now. Everyone was forcibly away from home — migrants, essentially. There were three million American soldiers in Britain at that time and what most people don’t know is that three quarters of them were black. They were airbrushed out of the heroic story of D-Day.”
At Slapton, he contends, the soldiers were treated with respect for perhaps the first time. “Most local people had never seen a black face. They came with no prejudice, simply curiosity. It is something that is relevant to us today.”
It appealed to Morpurgo’s sense of justice to shine his storyteller’s beam on a “political and military cock-up” that had been forgotten for far too long, damaging both those who survived and the relatives of those who died. “War is in my DNA”, he says. “My first experience of this world was of a land ravaged by war, lives ravaged by war. Of a bomb site where we played. Of a family friend, a former pilot, whose face was terribly burnt when his plane was shot down. Of the photo of my uncle Pieter, killed at 21 in the RAF. When you see what war does to flesh, what it does to streets, what it does to families, you don’t forget. I don’t think we ever grow out of what we grow up with.”
His family was fractured when his mother fell in love with another man while his father, Tony Bridge, was serving abroad. Instead of “hanging around”, Bridge emigrated to Canada, leaving the two small sons he did not know to be brought up by Jack Morpurgo — “a rather beautiful decision”, Michael once called it. In his mid-20s, Michael finally met his father and they established a close relationship “without the baggage of bringing a son up”.
Morpurgo looks like a Quentin Blake character, jaunty in a coral jacket, summer trousers and panama. He could be about to board a ship or lecture a group of students in front of the Parthenon. There is something both professorial and actorly about him. At his most evangelical — deploring the way children’s creativity is crushed by the exam system, or the folly of leaving the EU — his face glows pink and he talks very fast.
He says he actually wept when the referendum went Brexit’s way. “In the middle of my tears I thought to myself: do I belong to this country anymore?”
He accuses the Tories of gambling with the stability of the nation. “This continent that had battered itself into all sorts of horrors finally decided to find a way of living together. Trading ourselves out of difficulty seemed a pretty good idea and it worked massively well when it came to keeping the peace. Feeling as European as I do [he has a Belgian grandfather], I wanted to be part of that project.
“Europe is in terrible trouble. They have been our friends. I don’t think you desert your friends in their hour of need. We should have stayed, fought our corner, brought our wisdom to the conference table. Now we’re going to be on the outside, looking in.”
Morpurgo, 72, has spent half his life trying to broaden children’s historical awareness and inspire a love of reading. As children’s laureate, he campaigned for all secondary schoolchildren to visit the First World War battlefields — and many have. “I think the same should happen with visits to Auschwitz. We have to learn what happens when people do this war thing.”
He is quite cheery about Facebook and texting but despairs of exam-driven education where reading is merely a tool to master punctuation and spelling. “Teachers feel exam pressure like a devil sitting on their shoulder. The school feels it. The minister for education feels it. It becomes this great political thing instead of the most wonderful gift you can pass on to a child: the love of poetry, words, the music in words.”
Though children’s book sales are soaring, he worries that children who do not have books at home are not being reached. “It’s strange that in the land of Shakespeare and Philip Pullman there isn’t a notion that reading is part of our whole culture. We are divided the haves and have nots when it comes to literature. This is where it’s all going wrong.”
After leaving the King’s School, Canterbury at 18, Morpurgo enlisted at Sandhurst — probably, he thinks, a way of testing himself in the same fire as his uncles. It is barely believable that this soft-centred man became a soldier. “Going into the army was not a foolish decision,” he insists. “I would never have written ‘War Horse’ without that experience. I learnt about comradeship, about enduring hardship. I had the arrogance of a young public schoolboy knocked out of me by sergeant majors. I learnt that I was just a regular guy. That was salutary.”
After a year, he dropped out to marry Clare, took a degree in English and French at King’s College London (he was awarded a third, so there’s hope for us all) and trained to be a teacher. They have three children but it was Clare, he admits, who did most of the story-reading. “I think my children got a raw deal because I was very focused on work and, like a lot of dads, I didn’t spend enough time doing that.”
Both sets of parents had disapproved of the marriage. Morpurgo was just 19, an officer cadet of uncertain prospects. Clare, 20, was the daughter of Sir Allen Lane, founder of Penguin Books. “What was their beautiful daughter, who could have married anyone she wished, doing with this ne’er-do-well? I don’t blame them. But they were cruel for a little longer than they need have been.”
All his young life he had sought approval. “Suddenly the world thought I was not a very worthwhile person. I found it very difficult to cope with.” They had a gloomy shotgun wedding in a register office in 1963 — an event beautifully eclipsed when they “married” again on their 50th anniversary, all by themselves, in a church on Bryher in the Isles of Scilly. They locked the door, went to the lectern and each read a passage from the Bible. “Then we had a bit of a hug and that was the wedding.”
In 1975, the couple (who were both teachers by then) bought a farm and some land near the village of Iddesleigh in Devon with Clare’s inheritance. They’d become disillusioned by the limitations of the classroom and set up a charity to give inner-city children an experience of farm life. About 100,000 children have spent a life-changing week at the charity’s three working farms, in Devon, Gloucestershire and Wales, and Morpurgo often says this is his best story. To celebrate 40 years of Farms for City Children, they “bought” the New London Theatre in the West End for a performance of “War Horse”, the puppet production that made Morpurgo the celebrity he now is, so that 1,000 children who had never been to the theatre could begin to know its alchemy.
It is part of literary legend that “War Horse”, Morpurgo’s sixth book, was more or less ignored when it appeared in 1982. The hardback sold about 1,000 copies and he was crestfallen not to win the Whitbread prize for which it had been shortlisted. Only the consolation of his friend Ted Hughes, who lived near him in Devon, kept him going. “Prizes are not worth the paper they’re written on,” the poet told him. “You wrote a fine book and you’ll write a finer one.”
Twenty-one years later, his story of Joey the war horse was turned into the most successful production in the National Theatre’s history — all because the mother of an associate director had heard him talk about it on “Desert Island Discs”. It has played to eight million people worldwide. A slight chill descends when we turn to Steven Spielberg’s 2012 film of “War Horse”, shot under the big skies of Dartmoor rather than near Iddesleigh as Morpurgo had hoped.
“I think Spielberg had this idea that it was going to be a John Ford epic but the English landscape doesn’t lend itself to that. It’s much more intimate: small valleys, little hills. We could easily have found old rugged farmhouses, instead of which they built one in the middle of Dartmoor, a really bad imitation of the kind of farmhouse that never was.”
Though the war scenes were “brilliantly done”, Morpurgo was disappointed at the film’s lack of agricultural authenticity. The books he offered on the culture and background of the area in the early 20th century were ignored. Did he feel he had lost control of his work? “I didn’t have any control at all. They were just nice to me. They gave me a part in one of the market scenes.”
Yet Morpurgo is much too wise a bird to complain. “I was honoured that it happened. And here’s the thing: before the film there were six translations of ‘War Horse’. Now there are 46.”
He’s having the time of his life, helping bring his stories to theatres as part of a team. “I feel full of energy and full of ideas,” he says. “My ambition is to live quite a lot longer and go on doing that. It’s nice to have got to an age where you’re not worried about what people think. I sort of don’t care anymore — and I don’t mean that in a nasty way. I’m freed up completely. I like the feeling that we’re all in this together. If we make a mess of it, we make a mess of it. But when it works and you’ve got a thousand people simply lapping up what’s happening on stage.” He smiles a catlike smile and the theatre people come to take him away to rehearsals.
–The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2016
“946: The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips” is at Shakespeare’s Globe, London, until September 11.
