Consciously or subconsciously, I roam around in all my stories, and often by name too. Autobiography creeps in somehow, often uninvited. It just happens, and I am not aware of it until after I have written it. There are, I know, far too many Michaels in my books. Sometimes I have very deliberately placed myself and my name there at the heart of the action (as in the novel Kensuke’s Kingdom, and my short stories, Half a Man and Meeting Cézanne). Maybe this reveals a lack of imagination; but my thinking is that, for me, it is all the better to be there inside my tale, if I am going to write it, if I am going to believe in the story as I am telling it. It seems to work.
There are times when I simply use incidents and episodes of my youth as part of the story, as I did, for instance, as Michael who runs away from boarding school in The Butterfly Lion, or in my short story My One and Only Great Escape, as the boy in The War of Jenkins’ Ear (all three of them me, at the same school, my prep school in Sussex). It is not uncommon to find a boy or a girl central to one of my stories who feels isolated in the world, with a father who is absent or remote, a figure of authority, sometimes overly rigid, to be revered and feared. It is mother and child closeness that I knew as a child, with a father figure always more distant, geographically and emotionally, and this is reflected in books such as Why the Whales Came or The Wreck of the Zanzibar. There is often a longing for an absent father to be there, for a far-away father’s love, as in The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips or Billy the Kid.
It is no accident either that in so many of my stories the child finds himself or herself completely alone in the world, without parents altogether, having to manage, to survive: in Kensuke’s Kingdom, in Running Wild, in Alone on a Wide, Wide Sea, in King of the Cloud Forests. Many children, myself included, do feel this overwhelming sense of isolation sometimes, even when surrounded by family and friends. Of course, it is not unusual for children in children’s books to find themselves alone, separated from their parents. Orphan heroes are common enough in stories. It is a convention often used. Alice has no parent holding her hand in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, nor has Paddington in his adventures. Parents are nowhere to be seen, or they are a long way away, in Peru! Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island is not encumbered by the presence of parents out on his great adventure. He does not need them. He does not even miss them. Any story about a child alone in the world gives that child the freedom to discover and explore, to run wild, and it gives freedom also to the writer to create a hero or heroine, entirely uninhibited by parents, away from both their love and their control, a story in which anything can happen, in which parents cannot interfere.
Sometimes, though, I have kept even closer in the telling of my stories to the historical and actual happenings of my youth, allowing my childhood to be the story, not simply the dreamtime for it, but to be the story itself, and so close to the truth of my memory that it is hardly fiction at all, but rather autobiographical truth – embellished, certainly, fictionalized, yes, but not to distort the truth, rather to tease out a different kind of truth. Memory, as we know, is notoriously fickle and unreliable, especially when it comes to childhood memories. I have discovered from time to time, from the evidence of others who were there, that the factual history of my childhood does not necessarily coincide with my memory. Memory can exaggerate truth, or deny it altogether. But for the making of stories this does not matter.
Two of my favourite stories are so connected to my memory, so personal, that they almost wrote themselves. No research was needed, very little dreamtime, scarcely any leap of imagination or invention. They grew almost in their entirety out of the places and people I grew up with, that made me who I am – the writer I am too, come to that.
I have a photo at home – I am looking at it now – of the wedding of my mother and father in 1940. They are standing outside the porch of the church at Radlett in Hertfordshire, the happy couple side by side, my mother radiant, my father slightly sheepish, and looking rather uncomfortable in his wartime corporal’s uniform, and, alongside them, not looking quite so happy, their parents – my grandparents – and various aunts and uncles. An ordinary enough family photo, but not for me. All during my childhood – indeed, for most of my young adult life – I did not know this photograph at all, and that was because this marriage was a marriage never mentioned, a marriage that had never happened. A taboo marriage.
The circumstances were common enough in wartime Britain. Mother and two children isolated, left vulnerable at home, the father abroad away at the war, the strain of separation, the stress of war, weighing heavily. And then a new man appears in the mother’s life, dashing, attentive, passionate, insistent; and when the father comes home at the end of the war, he discovers his place has been taken. He tries for some kind of a reconciliation, but it is too late. There is a divorce. And divorce in those days was considered shameful, not to be spoken of, to be kept hidden.
My new stepfather, Jack Morpurgo, gave my brother Pieter and me his surname, and there followed two new children born to my mother. We were all of us Morpurgos now to the outside world. But as we grew up, Pieter and I knew we weren’t, that we were different. We learnt also not to ask questions about this. As for my father, he decided, when I was three and Pieter a little older, that as we did not know him at all – he had been away at the war for all but a few weeks of our infancy – he would not stay around playing the occasional father role. Better, he thought, given the circumstances, to absent himself totally, saying only that he wished his surname, Bridge, to be always part of our name (I am Michael Andrew Bridge Morpurgo), and that if we ever wanted to see him later on, when we were grown up, then he would always be overjoyed to see us. None of this arrangement was, of course, known to us throughout our childhood.
So we grew up as Morpurgos in our new family, the divorce hidden and unspoken, with a new father. Our father, our real father, was never spoken of, was airbrushed out. He became a phantom father. Of course, within the wider family, the divorce was thought to be shameful and scurrilous – my mother suffered from this all her life – but very few outside the family knew about it, or, if they did, they were quiet about it. The family’s dark secret was kept. My real father’s name, Tony Van Bridge, was never spoken. We knew, Pieter and I, that he was an actor (as our mother had been), and that he had emigrated to Canada. That was about all.
Pieter and I talked of him from time to time, and resented the pretence of being one family to the rest of the world. But we went along with it. It seemed very important to our mother that we should. About Tony, about her first marriage, she remained silent. Then, at an Easter gathering of family and friends one year (I was about eighteen at the time, I think), we were all sitting down at teatime to watch a television play on the BBC, of Great Expectations – in black and white in those days, of course. Television was relatively new to the family. When we watched, which was not that often, we generally watched together, all of us there. My stepfather was keen on Dickens, keen we should all be keen on Dickens too, so that was why we were watching.
The opening scene is well enough known. Young Pip is making his way home through the graveyard, in the half-dark. He is terrified of every rustling leaf, of the whine and whistle of the wind, of the owl hooting, almost running now to get out of the graveyard. Then, up from behind a gravestone rears the hideous figure of Magwitch, an escaped convict, who grabs him. Even though we were waiting for it, knew it was coming, it was a moment of horror for all of us sitting there watching.
Suddenly, my mother grasps my arm. “Oh my God,” she breathes. “That’s your father, that’s Tony!” Well, no one was paying any attention any more to what happened to young Pip on the television. All eyes were on my mother, and on me and my brother. The unspoken had been spoken. All those years of pretence were undone in one single moment. Tony was in the room. Our father was in the room.
If I am honest, I recall very little of what happened next, but, of course, the genie was out of the bottle and could not be put back. It took a while, and some awkward discussions, before our mother could be persuaded to contact Tony in Canada and arrange a meeting. So, in the end, we did get together, one of those dreadful teatimes when the tension crackled and the teacups rattled and the teaspoons clinked, and no one knew quite what to say. But after that first tentative meeting, Tony came over every few years to visit us, and, finally, we went to see him in Canada. He was an easy man, gentle and kind, unassuming and rather sad sometimes in his demeanour. He had found a wonderful life on the stage, becoming very known and well thought of in Canada, at Stratford, Ontario and at the Shaw Festival in Niagara. I last saw him when he was in his eighties. He was still acting. His whole life was in acting. His company had become his family and he had become their mentor, their grandpa. So, when we went to see him we were treated very much as one of the family, which we were, of course. He had married again, but his second wife had died tragically. And then he married for a third time in his seventies, but it did not last. I think, though he never said it, that he never stopped loving my mother. When he died, a few years ago now, his wishes were that his ashes should be divided, half to be sprinkled on a beach in Bermuda, where he and his second wife had walked a lot together, and half to be laid in the earth in our garden in Devon with my mother’s ashes. It was a love that never died.
From time to time, during his life, and since he died, we would come across, or be sent, reviews of his plays. Then, after his death, and quite by chance, when visiting a friend’s house, I happened upon a huge pile of magazines – hundreds of copies of Theatre World. I picked up the one on the top, dated 1949, and was flipping through. The pages fell open at a spread that was immediately interesting to me. There was a photograph of two polar bears in costume, both about to eat a child. I read underneath that this was from a production at the Young Vic of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen. Then I read the actor’s name. The polar bear on the left, the fiercest-looking one, was Tony Van Bridge. Me dad! So my father was a convict, AND a polar bear. What genes I have inside me!
Just tell it down, I thought. Let it tumble out of you. The whole story has been waiting long enough inside you. Call it My Father Is a Polar Bear rather than My Father Is a Convict. He’d like polar bear better.
Almost entirely autobiographical too was Homecoming, originally called Singing for Mrs Pettigrew. But this story is more about place and people, about the childhood home I loved. Why we moved as a family to Bradwell-on-Sea, a seaside village on the coast of Essex, I don’t really know. It was a rather grand, but crumbling Georgian house, called New Hall, right in the middle of the village. My brother Pieter and I shared an attic at the top of the house – slightly separate from the rest of the family – but we liked it. It was our world. We used to go on long cycle rides exploring, past the US Air Force base, down the road to St Peter Ad Muram, St Peter’s-on-the-Wall, one of the oldest Saxon chapels in Britain. We had fights with local children who resented us because we went away to school and spoke differently, and lived in a big house. We went camping, once in the garden of a strange lady who lived on her own in a railway carriage by the sea. I loved the marshes, the sea wall, and the wind, and the long and happy hours spent roaming free. I loved the wilderness of this garden, cricket on the front lawn, table tennis in the spidery barn. There were good times, despite that old family secret, and I felt for the first time in my life that I belonged in a close community. We knew everyone and everyone knew us.
But then the community fractured, shattered all around us. There was news that the government wanted to build an atomic power station just outside the village. There were those who were for it, those who were not. My family was against it. There was fierce and public argument. Tempers frayed. We lost the argument. The plans to build went ahead. We moved out. Go there now and you will see a huge concrete wart dominating the landscape. The power station devastated a community, warmed the seawater so that the oyster beds died. It never operated at full capacity, did not produce much local employment, nor the cheap electricity promised, and was finally shut down decades ago. It remains, of course, a relic of idiotic planning, of environmental destruction, soon, I am told, to be rebuilt and renewed, this time as a new nuclear power station. Poor Bradwell.
I’ve been back a time or two to see the place, visited St Peter’s again, tramped the seawall, felt the wind on my face, remembered. If you walk past the village houses on the way to St Peter’s, as I did on my last visit, you will pass a bungalow. It’s called New Clear View. Honestly! And everywhere you go, there is a view of the monster, the monster that drove us out of our home all those years ago.
Downstairs, the whole family were gathered in the sitting room: my mother, Douglas, Terry and my two sisters (half-sisters really, but of course no one ever called them that), Aunt Betty, now married, with twin daughters, my cousins, who were truly awful – I promise you. We were decorating the tree, or rather the twins were fighting over every single dingly-dangly glitter ball, every strand of tinsel. I was trying to fix up the Christmas tree lights which, of course, wouldn’t work – again – whilst Aunty Betty was doing her best to avert a war by bribing the dreadful cousins away from the tree with a Mars bar each. It took a while, but in the end she got both of them up onto her lap, and soon they were stuffing themselves contentedly with Mars bars. Blessed peace.
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 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”.
