War Horse author's horrid time in Sussex

Michael, who will be appearing at Goodwoof, an annual celebration ‘of all things dog’ at the Goodwood Estate in West Sussex, has long connections with the county stretching back to childhood, but acknowledges they are not entirely happy ones, writes Angela Wintle for The Argus's sister title, Sussex Life.

‘I have an interesting and strange connection with Sussex,’ says the former Children’s Laureate, settling in for a candid phone chat from his second home in London. ‘My first married home was in Rogate [on the West Sussex and Hampshire border], and my first teaching job was at Great Ballard School in Eartham, near Chichester. I couldn’t have wished for a more beautiful journey to work. I used to drive every morning over Goodwood, through that wonderful golf course up there, and then down into Burpham [north-east of Arundel].

‘I’ve since come to Sussex quite a lot because several adaptations of my books have been staged at Chichester Festival Theatre. Also, my father, Tony Van Bridge (Morpurgo is Michael’s adopted name), performed a one-man show about the writer GK Chesterton at the theatre in 1964. So, every time I go back there, I am walking in his footsteps.’

But there are darker Sussex recollections; memories that haunt him still and which have, to some extent, shaped his character and his writing. When he was seven, his stepfather, Jack Morpurgo, decided it would be best for his young charges, Michael and his older brother Pieter, if they were packed off to boarding school in Sussex. Inevitably, Michael became intensely homesick. He also found the regime at The Abbey in Ashurst Wood, overlooking Forest Row, deeply oppressive.

‘It was what people did in those days,’ he sighs. ‘Lower-middle-class parents aspired to send their children to a “good school”. Pieter went on somewhere else, but I was left on my own there and felt very isolated. The terms were long. The summer term, to give you an idea, lasted 14 weeks. Half term was just two days. And there were no phones. The only contact I had with my mother was a letter once a week. So, you were cut off. We all were. In a way that’s what made it bearable because we were all in the same boat.’

Michael will be at Goodwoof. Image: Conor Cleary There is something refreshingly straight and decent about Michael Morpurgo. You sense his compassion and his honesty. I have interviewed him a handful of times and I have always come away with the same impression. Perhaps it’s because he lives in deepest Devon among honest country folk. Perhaps it’s because he often meets his young readers and their innocence has rubbed off on him. Actually, I suspect those qualities have always been there. And they are there in his writing.

I need hardly reel off his achievements. Although he has written more than 130 books, his epitaph will read, ‘War Horse writer Michael Morpurgo’. The book, which filters the horror, inhumanity and cruelty of war through the experiences of its equine protagonist Joey, has sold 35m copies and was made into an award-winning play using life-sized horse puppets. Steven Spielberg even gave the book the Hollywood treatment (of which more later).

From 2003 until 2005, Michael served as the third Children’s Laureate and is also the co-founder, alongside his wife Clare, of Farms for City Children, which enables children from disadvantaged communities to experience the adventure of working on a farm in the heart of the British countryside. In 2018 he was knighted for services to literature and charity.

His books are celebrated for their ‘magical storytelling’ and his work noted for recurring themes such as the triumph of the outsider, his characters’ relationship with nature, and vivid settings – from the Cornish coast to the trenches of the First World War.

In his latest novel, Cobweb, Michael transports his young readers to the less familiar territory of the Battle of Waterloo. As with many of his novels, the story is told through the eyes of an animal, in this case a young Pembrokeshire corgi, who lives with a widowed farmer and his doting daughter Bethan. But Cobweb’s carefree youth ends when Bethan’s new stepmother sells him to a local drover and he is put to work herding sheep and cattle to London.

Cobweb’s journey east coincides with Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, and as he travels from village to village, he witnesses the celebrations. Yet he’s a shrewd observer, and when he reaches London and listens to the story of Jonno, a returning soldier blinded in the battle, Cobweb realises that war has no real victors. ‘In the end, we came home, some of us... We won, they say. They lost, we say. We all lost, I say. So, ring me no more bells.’

Michael dedicates the book to two friends who walked the Drovers’ Way Walk, 250 miles from Treginnis in Pembrokeshire (where one of his farms is based) to London, in support of Farms for City Children.

‘At the time, I didn’t know much about drovers,’ says Michael. ‘But there were these ways, where drovers went for hundreds of years, from the farthest corners of the land. And one of my friends, who had researched the trail, told me a beautiful story. He said in Wales, drovers used Pembrokeshire corgis. They were the great drover dogs because they were good at yapping at cows’ and sheep’s heels. And they would cover 20 miles a day, stopping at an inn each night before going on the next day.

His latest novel features Pembrokeshire corgi Cobweb ‘It took them six weeks to get to London. And then the drovers had to stay on to do the business. They didn’t want the dogs hanging about, so they would turn to their faithful dogs and say in their best Welsh, “Go home”. Remarkably, the dogs would then retrace their steps all the way back to where they had come from.’

In his novel, Michael weaves in another true-life story about a French drummer boy, who is said to have drummed and drummed in the face of relentless enemy fire, even though his comrades were falling all about him.

‘A sergeant in the Coldstream Guards recorded that he was the bravest man at Waterloo,’ says Michael. ‘We don’t know what happened to him. There’s no record. But we do know he was taken prisoner.’

In his book, Michael takes the drummer boy back to England where he is befriended by Cobweb. It’s an uplifting story about friendship and acceptance. And like so many of Michael’s war stories, it focuses on the longing for peace and reconciliation.

War is a recurring theme in Michael’s novels. Nonetheless, when his most celebrated war-time novel, War Horse, was retold on the big screen, he had misgivings. He says the rigours of pastoral life in Devon, where the book begins, were critical to the story, a message he was keen to impress on Spielberg.

‘I said I wanted the film to reflect this. The Devon countryside had to be dirty and the boots heavy, the work had to be hard and the lives short. He listened, but he had already made up his mind. He wanted to create an idyllic English landscape that Americans would recognise. But the war scenes were extraordinary.’

Michael knows a thing or two himself about life’s hardships, though in his case punishments were meted out by his Sussex schoolmasters rather than the vicissitudes of war. He writes about his experiences in The Butterfly Lion, where a teacher stands the main character, Bertie, in a corner with a book on his head. ‘That happened to me a lot. To stop myself from crying, I learnt how to make myself think about something else. Hurting myself was something else I discovered. I remember pushing my finger so hard into the plaster wall that it hurt, deliberately.’

Eventually, the despair overwhelmed him and he ran away in the rain, knowing that if he was caught he would be beaten. ‘Thankfully, I met a lady who was very nice to me. I got in her car and went back to her house. She put my wet shoes in the oven and calmed me down. She asked if I wanted her to phone home. I knew my parents, particularly my stepfather, would be upset because it would have brought shame on the family if I’d run away. So, she dropped me off in the woods so that I could slip back into the school without getting caught. I’ve never forgotten how kind she was.’

He survived, he says, because all the boys were going through the same thing. ‘If you were crying yourself to sleep, you could be sure someone else was. Well, you could hear them. We were comrades in arms in a sense. I learnt about friendship at that school. Some of those people I have stayed in contact with all my life. ‘

He doesn’t advocate suffering, loneliness and isolation as a recipe for life but acknowledges how those experiences can inform you, particularly as a writer. ‘You learn about other people if you’re treated this way.’

Michael may be haunted by his past but he’s not defined by it. He has been devotedly married to Clare, the daughter of Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin Books, for more than 60 years. Theirs is a marriage of minds. Indeed, I have never done an interview with him where he hasn’t stopped to check something with her.

It took time for Michael’s writing talents to be acknowledged. Early on, his books were often dismissed as nostalgic or irrelevant. War Horse was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize in 1982, but some of the judges thought that children weren’t interested in history; that war was the past. ‘I’d been a teacher for eight years, so I knew this wasn’t true. How else can we begin to comprehend today, or conceive of tomorrow, if we know nothing about yesterday?’

Mercifully, Michael is rightly lauded now, and remains, aged 81, very much in demand. Catch him in Sussex if you can (and bring your pooch). Tickets are selling fast.

• Michael will be giving two talks at Goodwoof on 17 May, as well as reading extracts from Cobweb and signing copies. Goodwoof runs at the Goodwood Estate in West Sussex on Saturday 17 & Sunday 18 May; goodwood.com/goodwoof. Save £5 with early bird tickets. Dogs, and children aged 12 and under, go free; 13–21-year-olds are half price.

• Cobweb by Michael Morpurgo is published in hardback by HarperCollins Children’s Books at £14.99.