The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘Once you’ve seen what war does, you don’t forget’
A decade after ‘War Horse’ became a theatrical sensation, Michael Morpurgo is taking another tale from page to stage. He tells Elizabeth Grice why stories are worth fighting for
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 is about to open 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
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