This was the very first Christmas we had had the television. Given half a chance we’d have had it on all the time. But, wisely enough I suppose, Douglas had rationed us to just one programme a day over Christmas. He didn’t want the Christmas celebrations interfered with by “that thing in the corner”, as he called it. By common consent, we had chosen the Christmas Eve film on the BBC at five o’clock.
Five o’clock was a very long time coming that day, and when at last Douglas got up and turned on the television, it seemed to take for ever to warm up. Then, there it was on the screen: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. The half-mended lights were at once discarded, the decorating abandoned, as we all settled down to watch in rapt anticipation. Maybe you know the moment: Young Pip is making his way through the graveyard at dusk, mist swirling around him, an owl screeching, gravestones rearing out of the gloom, branches like ghoulish fingers whipping at him as he passes, reaching out to snatch him. He moves through the graveyard timorously, tentatively, like a frightened fawn. Every snap of a twig, every barking fox, every aarking heron, sends shivers into our very souls.
Suddenly, a face! A hideous face, a monstrous face, looms up from behind a gravestone. Magwitch, the escaped convict, ancient, craggy and crooked, with long white hair and a straggly beard. A wild man with wild eyes, the eyes of a wolf.
The cousins screamed in unison, long and loud, which broke the tension for all of us and made us laugh. All except my mother.
“Oh my God,” she breathed, grasping my arm. “That’s your father! It is. It’s him. It’s Peter.”
All the years of pretence, the whole long conspiracy of silence, were undone in that one moment. The drama on the television paled into sudden insignificance. The hush in the room was palpable.
Douglas coughed. “I think I’ll fetch some more logs,” he said. And my two half-sisters went out with him, in solidarity I think. So did Aunty Betty and the twins; and that left my mother, Terry and me alone together.
I could not take my eyes off the screen. After a while I said to Terry, “He doesn’t look much like a pixie to me.”
“Doesn’t look much like a polar bear either,” Terry replied. At Magwitch’s every appearance I tried to see through his make-up (I just hoped it was make-up!) to discover how my father really looked. It was impossible. My polar bear father, my pixie father, had become my convict father.
Until the credits came up at the end my mother never said a word. Then all she said was, “Well, the potatoes won’t peel themselves, and I’ve got the Brussels sprouts to do as well.” Christmas was a very subdued affair that year, I can tell you.
They say you can’t put a genie back in the bottle. Not true. No one in the family ever spoke of the incident afterwards – except Terry and me, of course. Everyone behaved as if it had never happened. Enough was enough. Terry and I decided it was time to broach the whole forbidden subject with our mother, in private. We waited until the furore of Christmas was over, and caught her alone in the kitchen one evening. We asked her point-blank to tell us about him, our “first” father, our “missing” father.
“I don’t want to talk about him,” she said. She wouldn’t even look at us. “All I know is that he lives somewhere in Canada now. It was another life. I was another person then. It’s not important.” We tried to press her, but that was all she would tell us.
Michael’s family
Michael’s real father, Tony, was not really a polar bear, of course. But the secrecy surrounding his existence hid him from view as effectively as the polar bear costume in the story.
In the late 1930s, divorce was very rare. Then the upheaval of the Second World War brought about changes of attitude throughout Britain, and views on marriage and divorce were part of this change. The enforced separations of war had torn families apart and there had been a startling outbreak of unhappiness, adultery and collapsing marriages. The idea that marriage was a stabilizing force in society was shaken.
In October 1943, when Michael was born, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York had spoken out against “moral laxity”, reminding Christians that promiscuity and adultery were sins that destroyed homes and visited “years of suffering” on children. By 1949, a poll found that 57 per cent “more or less approved” of divorce as a regrettable necessity.
Michael’s mother, Kippe, was a churchgoer. The refusal of the local bishop to allow her to take communion after her divorce added to her sense of guilt. None of Kippe’s family attended her second marriage to Jack in 1947. The newly married couple must have felt very isolated.
All those involved came from a generation who thought it disgraceful to “wash dirty linen in public”. This was a time when people were very aware of what other people would think. Divorce was something to be ashamed of, never to be discussed with the children and to be hidden if possible.
By the 1970s there were thousands of divorces a year in England and Wales. And today divorce is widespread and socially accepted, as are living together and having children outside marriage.
Parenting roles have also changed drastically since when Michael was a child. Fathers and stepfathers used to be seen as the source of stability, discipline, and often as the family’s main breadwinner. They were role models for hard work and good behaviour. For the war generation, fathers were not expected to be as close to their children. Few fathers attended their children’s births.
Much of the secrecy about Michael’s birth father was due to the desire of Jack and Kippe Morpurgo for Jack to be viewed as the “real” father of the family, but there were also the social factors. The disgrace of divorce was emphasized within the extended family when Kippe’s father, the Belgian poet and writer, Emile Cammaerts, published a treatise on marriage. Adultery was a “sin”; second marriages were a “sham”, and put a child’s soul in danger. Emile and his wife Tita were children of broken marriages and both had an almost pathological horror of divorce.
The Cammaerts and the Morpurgo families had more similarities than they realized in the other secrets they kept. Emile Cammaerts had been an ardent Belgian Nationalist and atheist, and had spent time in an anarchist commune. He converted to Christianity and took on many of the outward trappings of the English establishment. Jack Morpurgo, in his autobiography, claimed that his father “like his ancestors for several generations, was Cockney-born”. His father was, in fact, Dutch, and, like Jack’s mother, from Amsterdam. Like Kippe’s father, he too took on the mantle of the bowler-hatted English city gent, joined the Anglican church and did all he could to help his son become an “insider” in English society.
It seems that Jack Morpurgo was taught to hide the past until secrecy became habitual. The huge secret was that the family was Jewish; Jack’s parents had been married in a synagogue. Those cousins and distant relations who stayed behind in Amsterdam mostly perished in the concentration camps of the Second World War, but they were never referred to. The next generation was unaware of their Jewish origins, long after the prevalent anti-Semitism of Jack’s youth had waned. Worldwide, many Jews did everything they could to conceal Jewish origins in the early years of the twentieth century.
Maybe Tony became just another secret in a family used to keeping secrets. Michael says that he “was never spoken of, was airbrushed out. He became a phantom father”.
Acknowledgements
Photo credits: Joey painting © Ali Bannister; horse photograph © Brian Robert Marshall. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic Licence. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA; photograph of Chelsea pensioners © 2015 McDowall Photography; photograph of Shot at Dawn Memorial by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images; Kaspar photograph courtesy of The Savoy Hotel; elephant photograph courtesy of Belfast Zoo; toy dog photograph © Imperial War Museums (EPH 6354); Lusitania poster © Imperial War Museums (Art.IWM PST 13654)
&n
bsp; Extracts taken from the following books by Michael Morpurgo:
War Horse, first published 1982 by Kaye and Ward Ltd
Why the Whales Came, first published 1985 by William Heinemann Ltd
The Wreck of the Zanzibar, first published 1995 by William Heinemann Ltd
My Friend Walter, first published 1988 by William Heinemann Ltd
Waiting for Anya, first published 1990 by William Heinemann Ltd
The Dancing Bear, first published 1994 by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
The Butterfly Lion, first published 1996 by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
Kensuke’s Kingdom, first published 1999 by William Heinemann Ltd
Billy the Kid, first published 2000 by Pavilion Books Ltd
Private Peaceful, first published 2003 by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips, first published 2005 by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
I Believe in Unicorns, first published 2004 as a short story in The Times; longer version published 2005 by Walker Books Ltd
Alone on a Wide Wide Sea, first published 2006 by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
Kaspar: Prince of Cats, first published 2008 by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
The Mozart Question, first published 2006 in Singing for Mrs Pettigrew: A Story-maker’s Journey by Walker Books Ltd; published 2007 by Walker Books Ltd
Running Wild, first published 2009 by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
An Elephant in the Garden, first published 2010 by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
Shadow, first published 2010 by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
Little Manfred, first published 2011 by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
Out of the Ashes, first published 2001 by Macmillan’s Children’s Books Ltd
Listen to the Moon, first published 2014 by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
My Father Is a Polar Bear, first published 2000 in From Hereabout Hill by Egmont UK Ltd; published 2015 by Walker Books Ltd
With thanks to Seven Stories for materials from the Morpurgo archive.
Books by the same author
The Giant’s Necklace
Didn’t We Have a Lovely Time!
Half a Man
Homecoming
I Believe in Unicorns
The Kites are Flying!
Meeting Cézanne
The Mozart Question
My Father Is a Polar Bear
This Morning I Met a Whale
Beowulf
Hansel and Gretel
The Pied Piper of Hamelin
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Essays and stories
Singing for Mrs Pettigrew: A Story-maker’s Journey
First published 2016 by Walker Books Ltd
87 Vauxhall Walk, London SE11 5HJ
Text © 2016 Michael Morpurgo, Clare Morpurgo and Mark Morpurgo
Illustrations © 2016 Michael Foreman
The right of Michael Morpurgo, Clare Morpurgo, Mark Morpurgo and Michael Foreman to be identified as the authors and illustrator respectively of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, taping and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data:
a catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-4063-7082-9 (ePub)
www.walker.co.uk
Michael Morpurgo, Such Stuff: A Story-Maker's Inspiration
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