Singing for Mrs Pettigrew: A Story Maker's Journey

  I had never been any good at reading out loud. I would always stutter over my consonants, worry over long words. But now, sitting on the magic unicorn, I heard my voice strong and loud. It was like singing a song. The words danced on the air and everyone listened. That same day I took home my first book from the library, Aesop’s Fables, because the unicorn lady had read them to us and I’d loved them. I read them aloud to my mother that night, the first time I’d ever read to her, and I could see she was amazed. I loved amazing my mother.

  Then one summer morning, early, war came to our valley and shattered our lives. Before that morning I knew little of war. I knew some of the men had gone to fight, but I wasn’t sure what for. I had seen on television tanks shooting at houses and soldiers with guns running through the trees, but my mother always told me it was far away and I wasn’t to worry.

  I remember the moment. I was outside. My mother had sent me out to open up the hens and feed them, when I looked up and saw a single plane come flying in low over the town. I watched as it circled once and came again. That was when the bombs began to fall, far away at first, then closer, closer. We were all running then, running up into the woods. I was too frightened to cry. My father cried. I’d never seen him cry before, but it was from anger as much as fear.

  Hidden high in the woods we could see the tanks and the soldiers all over the town, blasting and shooting as they went. A few hours later, after they had gone, we could hardly see the town any more for the smoke. We waited until we were quite sure they had all gone, and then we ran back home. We were luckier than many. Our house had not been damaged. It was soon obvious that the centre of town had been hardest hit. Everyone seemed to be making their way there. I ran on ahead hoping and praying that the library had not been bombed, that the unicorn lady and the unicorn were safe.

  As I came into the square I saw smoke rising from the roof of the library and flames licking out of the upper windows. We all saw the unicorn lady at the same moment. She was coming out of the library carrying the unicorn, staggering under its weight. I ran up the steps to help her. She smiled me her thanks as I took my share of the weight. Her eyes were red from the smoke. Between us we set the unicorn down at the foot of the steps, and she sat down exhausted, racked with a fit of coughing. My mother fetched her a glass of water. It must have helped because the coughing stopped, and all at once she was up on her feet, leaning on my shoulder for support.

  “The books,” she breathed. “The books.”

  When she began to walk back up the steps I followed her without thinking.

  “No, Tomas,” she said. “You stay here and look after the unicorn.” Then she was running up the steps into the library, only to reappear moments later, her arms piled high with books. That was the moment the rescue began. People seemed suddenly to surge past me up the steps, and into the library, my mother and father amongst them.

  It wasn’t long before a whole system was set up. We children made two chains across the square from the library to the café opposite, and the books everyone rescued went from hand to hand, ending up in stacks on the floor of the café. The fire was burning ever more fiercely, the flames crackling, smoke billowing now from the roof. No fire engines came – we found out later the fire station had been hit. Still the books came out. Still the fire burned and more and more people came to help, until the café was filled with books and we had to use the grocer’s shop next door.

  The moment came when there were suddenly no more books to pass along and we all wondered why. Then we saw everyone coming out of the library, and last of all the unicorn lady, helped by my father. They came slowly down the steps together, their faces smudged and blackened. The unicorn lady sat down heavily on the unicorn and looked up at the burning building. We children all gathered around her as if waiting for a story.

  “We did it, children,” she said. “We saved all we could, didn’t we? I’m sitting on the unicorn so any story I tell is true because we believe it can be true. We shall build our library up again just as it was. Meanwhile we shall look after the books. Every family can take home all the books they can manage and care for them. And when in one year or two or three we have our new library, then we shall all bring back our books, and we shall carry the magic unicorn inside and we shall all tell our stories again. All we have to do is make this story come true.”

  So it happened, just as the unicorn lady said it would. Like so many families in the town we took home a wheelbarrow full of books and looked after them. Sure enough the library was rebuilt just the same as the old one, only by now everyone called it the Unicorn, and we all brought our books back just as the unicorn lady had told it in her story.

  The day the library opened, because I had helped carry the unicorn out, I got to carry him back up the steps with the unicorn lady, and the whole town was there cheering and clapping, the flags flying, the band playing. It was the proudest and happiest day of my life.

  Now, all these years later, we have peace in our valley. The unicorn lady is still the town librarian, still reading her stories to the children after school. As for me, I’m a writer now, a weaver of tales. And if from time to time I lose the thread of my story, all I have to do is go and sit on the magic unicorn and my story flows again. So believe me, I believe in unicorns. I believe in them absolutely.

  we are what we write

  It was, thinking back, a remarkably quick transition from the rediscovery of my love of words, of reading, of stories, of poems, to discovering I had a voice of my own, a story-telling voice, a writer’s voice. I became a father first and then a teacher. Both helped in this discovery. I read to my own children at bedtime, although not often enough, my wife, Clare, tells me, and she’s right, of course.

  Sometimes, as fathers and mothers do, I made up stories I thought they’d like. And they did too, sometimes. By day I was in my classroom trying to motivate children to want to read. I found the best way to do that was to read stories to them, to tell them tales. I suppose I was trying at home and at school to do what my mother had done for me all those years before, because I knew now how important that had been for me. But I was no actor. There was only one way, I discovered, to convince my audience of children, and that was to be convinced myself, utterly convinced, by everything I was reading or telling them. I had to mean it, not to fake it. And I found it was easier to mean it if I made it up myself and told it. There wasn’t a book between us then, separating us.

  I found common ground between me and many – I should say most – of the children I was now teaching. Many had already experienced difficulty in learning to read and write, as I had, had been bored by ill-chosen stories often read to them by teachers who didn’t much like stories or poems themselves, had for too long suffered the tyranny of punctuation tests and spelling tests and comprehension tests, were already deeply alienated from literature and simply not interested in anything a book had to offer. I had been there. I knew that before they could engage with stories (and certainly with literacy), all the fear and the resentment had to be excised. I would simply tell stories or read them, try to make every one of them as enjoyable and compelling as I could, and I would not ask questions afterwards, nor use the test to teach. Let them enjoy the stories, I thought. Then they might see and understand the need for punctuation and spelling. It might all begin to make some sense to them. Words would hold less fear for them; in fact, they might see that they could turn out to be fun and fascinating and filled with music and magic. And it worked, it really worked.

  Of course, not all my children became instant book lovers, but some did, and that encouraged me to go one step further and see if I could make writers of them as well as readers. Now that they were beginning to enjoy words, to feel more at ease and at home with them, maybe, I thought, they could use them on paper and express how they felt, could experiment, paint pictures with words, make music with words, play with words. Maybe they could use their lives and their dreams and make their own stories and poems happen. Maybe we too co
uld be writers.

  At the time there were the most extraordinarily creative programmes on BBC School Radio – Living Language and Listening and Writing. On one of those programmes I heard Ted Hughes’s Poetry in the Making. For me certainly and for many of the children I was teaching, it was a life-changing programme. Here was one of our greatest poets saying: “Here’s how I do it; you can do it too. Anyone can. You just drink in the world around you. Look, feel, dream, read – and then tell it your own way. And when you write, listen hard and you can hear the music in the words, aloud in your head. Make music and meaning merge. And it must matter. You have to care.”

  Fired up with new enthusiasm and confidence, my class and I became poets and storytellers together, faced the same blank page together. As they became readers and writers, so did I. I was reading everything now, poetry, history, short stories – I loved Hans Christian Andersen, Paul Gallico, Jean Giono, Guy de Maupassant, Robert Louis Stevenson. The children had their poems broadcast on BBC School Radio – they were that good – and I published my first book, more a pamphlet really. I called it Children’s Words, an anthology of writing by children (amongst them one by a young poet called Daniel Day-Lewis, aged thirteen). With all these young writers, I was discovering, and the children were discovering, just how right Ted Hughes had been. We really do have it in us to be writers, to be storytellers; we have only to find our voices.

  All this time, although I really wasn’t aware of it then, I was taking my own first tentative steps as a writer. I had already tested myself as a storyteller – thirty-five expectant children for half an hour’s story time at the end of each school day had done that. Confidence was growing. But I still had not grasped that I could do more than entertain, and I knew that entertaining was not enough for me. I knew that the best books I had read, the best poems, had made me think and wonder and question. But at the time I thought that it was only geniuses that wrote such books, clever people, literary people. I was still encumbered, I suppose, by this feeling of intellectual and creative inadequacy. The stories I wrote, which were now being published, were thin, too contrived, never really getting to the heart of the matter. I wasn’t sure I had it in me to do any better. It was an uncomfortable reality to confront. I almost gave up.

  But then I got lucky. My life as a teacher was suddenly and dramatically altered. At my wife Clare’s behest we upped sticks from Kent and moved down to deepest Devon. Both of us as teachers had felt that children could never learn enough within the confines of the classroom, that children – and city children in particular – would benefit hugely from the experience of living for a while in the countryside and working on a farm, as indeed Clare had done when she was little. Happily, she had the wherewithal financially to buy the large house and the farm we needed to set up an educational charity, Farms for City Children (FFCC), and off we went on our great adventure down to Devon, to Iddesleigh, to get it started. (It was rather like beginning a new novel, a moment of great hope and determination, and behind it all a rush of madness to the head!)

  I will not write too much here about the thirty years since, only to say that FFCC now has several farms: Nethercott in Devon, Wick Court in Gloucestershire, and Treginnis in Wales; there’s one too in Vermont in America. Some sixty thousand children have come to the farms, harvesting, mucking out, feeding sheep and pigs and calves, have had the week of their young lives and have gone home enriched, encouraged and invigorated.

  But quite unexpectedly, it turned out that I was the one who benefited most from all this, for in moving to Devon, in immersing myself in farming, in working with the children and the farmers who were our partners in the project, in living with my family in a small tight-knit community, I inadvertently enriched myself hugely as a person, and so as a writer. I grew up. When I wrote now, I really had something I knew about, something I wanted to say, indeed needed to say. I came to know a place and its people, became fascinated with their history and their lives. Now I was beginning to write about what I cared about, not simply to entertain children or anyone else for that matter. I was exploring in my stories my own hopes and doubts and fears, engaging with my own past and present. I was finding my voice.

  So I would be out on the farm with the children, listening to them, to their stories, watching how they interacted with the animals, with one another. We would walk the fields and lanes, see and wonder at buzzards wheeling and mewing above us in the summer, watch larks rising off the hills and disappearing into the sky. We would stomp the muddy fields in winter, ford rushing streams to feed the lambing sheep. We would be there at births, at deaths. We would follow badger tracks through hedges, discover their toilets, glimpse deer and foxes and otters (Henry Williamson, the great author of Tarka the Otter, had been there on the banks of the same river before me), we’d see salmon and sea trout rise in the river, stay to watch a heron fishing. I would come back home afterwards and dream up my stories around this place I had discovered with the children, a place I was coming to know and love, just as Edward Thomas knew and loved the woods and hangers above Steep in Hampshire. Now I was beginning to discover what Ted Hughes really meant in his Poetry in the Making. First immerse yourself in the world about you, become part of it, then you’ll be able to write. It was from this total immersion that I was finding at last I had a story of my own to tell and a voice of my own with which to tell it.

  Then, one evening, Ted Hughes was there, this great poet, fishing on our river, and we met. He became a friend to us and to Farms for City Children, and became my mentor as a writer. And just down the lane lived another great poet and great friend, Sean Rafferty, sadly still largely unknown, but the best-read man I have ever met. We all three of us exchanged ideas, gave one another poems and books on birthdays and Christmases, celebrated our publications, moaned about publishers. I was, of course, always the youngest and least distinguished, but I loved hearing them speak. Theirs were the feet I sat at, usually in front of a roaring fire, all of us with a glass of Bordeaux. It was a glowing time. And my books flowed: War Horse, Waiting for Anya, King of the Cloud Forests, The White Horse of Zennor, All Around the Year with Ted Hughes himself; and all the while the truth about them as writers, and about me too, was becoming clear.

  Don’t pretend. Tell your tale. Speak with your own voice. We are what we write, I think, even more than we are what we read.

  my one and only great escape

  I still think of the house on the Essex coast where I grew up as my childhood home. But in fact it was my home for just four months of every year. The rest of the time I spent at my boarding school a whole world away, deep in the Sussex countryside. In my home by the sea they called me Michael. In my boarding school I was Morpurgo (or Pongo to my friends), and I became another person. I had two distinctively different lives, and so, in order to survive both, I had to become two very different people. Three times a year I had to make the changeover from home boy to schoolboy. Going back to school was always an agony of misery, a wretched ritual, a ritual I endured simply because I had to.

  Then one evening at the beginning of the autumn term of 1953 I made up my mind that I would not endure it any longer, that I would run away, that I would not stay at my school and be Morpurgo or Pongo any more. I simply wanted to go home where I belonged and be Michael for ever.

  The agony began, as it always began, about ten days before the end of the holidays – in this case, the summer holidays. For eight blessed weeks I had been at home. We lived in a large and rambling old house in the centre of a village called Bradwell-juxta-mare (near the sea). The house was called New Hall – new being mostly seventeenth century, with lots of beams and red bricks. It had a handsome Georgian front, with great sash windows, and one or two windows that weren’t real windows at all but painted on – to save the window tax, I was told. House and garden lay hidden and protected behind a big brick wall.

  Cycling out of the gate, as I often did, I turned left onto the village street towards Bradwell Quay and the sea, right towards
the church, and the American airbase, and then out over the marshes towards the ancient Saxon chapel of St Peter’s near the sea wall itself. Climb the sea wall and there was the great brown soupy North Sea and always a wild wet wind blowing. I felt always that this place was a part of me, that I belonged here.

  My stepfather worked at his writing in his study, wreathed in a fog of tobacco smoke, with a bust of Napoleon and a Confederate flag on his leather-topped desk, whilst my mother tried her very best to tame the house and the garden and us, mostly on her own. We children were never as much help as we should have been, I’m ashamed to say. There were great inglenook fireplaces that devoured logs. So there were always logs for us to fetch in. Then there were the Bramley apples to pick and lay out in the old Nissen huts in the orchard. And if there was nothing that had to be harvested, or dug over or weeded, then there was the jungle of nettles and brambles that had to be beaten back before it overwhelmed us completely. Above all we had not to disturb our stepfather. When he emerged, his work done for the day, we would play cricket on the front lawn, an apple box for a wicket – it was six if you hit it over the wall into the village street. If it rained, we moved into the big vaulted barn where owls and bats and rats and spiders lived, and played fast and furious ping-pong till suppertime.

  I slept up in the attic with my elder brother. We had a candle factory up there, melting down the ends of used-up candles on top of a paraffin stove and pouring the wax into jelly moulds. At night we could climb out of our dormer windows and sit and listen to the owls screeching over the marshes, and to the sound of the surging sea beyond. There always seemed to be butterflies in and out of the house – red admirals, peacocks. I collected dead ones in a biscuit tin, laid them out on cotton wool. I kept a wren’s nest by my bed, so soft with moss, so beautifully crafted.