I was born in 1943, near London. I played in bomb sites, listened to the stories told around the kitchen table, stories of war that saddened all the faces around me. My Uncle Pieter lived only in the photo on the mantelpiece. He had been killed in the RAF in 1941. But for me he lived on, ever young in the photograph, as I grew up, as I grew old.
So I have been drawn instinctively, I think, in many of my stories, to the subject of war, the enduring of it, the pity of it, and above all the suffering of survivors. Some thirty years ago, after meeting an old soldier from my village who had been to the First World War in the Devon Yeomanry in the Cavalry, I wrote War Horse, a vision of that dreadful war seen through the eyes of a horse.
Then, almost ten years ago, on a visit to Ypres to talk about writing about war for young people at a conference, I visited the In Flanders Fields Museum.
Talking to Piet Chielens, its director, I was reminded that over 300 British soldiers had been executed during the First World War for cowardice or desertion, two of them for simply falling asleep at their posts.
I read their stories, their trials (some lasted less than twenty minutes – twenty minutes for a man’s life). They knew then about shell shock – many officers were treated in psychiatric hospitals for it, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon amongst them. They knew even as they sentenced these men (they called them ‘worthless’ men), that most of them were traumatized by the terrors they had endured, by the prolonged and dreadful brutality of trench warfare.
In all, over 3,000 were condemned to death, and 300 of them were chosen to be shot. I visited the execution sites, the cells in Poperinghe, I read the telegram sent home to a mother informing her that her son had been shot at dawn for cowardice. I knew recent governments had considered and rejected the granting of pardons for these men, had refused to acknowledge the appalling injustice visited upon them.
Standing in a war cemetery in the rain five miles outside Ypres, I came upon the gravestone of Private Peaceful. I had found my name, my Unknown Soldier. I had found my story, a story I knew I had to tell and that should be told.
The question then was how it should be told. I decided to put myself at the centre of the story, to become the condemned man waiting only for dawn and death. A glance at my watch, recently returned from the menders who had declared it was made in 1915, gave me the idea that the chapter breaks should happen only when the soldier glances down at his watch which he dreads to do, and tries not to do.
My soldier would reflect on his life, live it again through the night so that the night would be long, as long as his life. He does not want to sleep his last night away, nor waste it in dreams. Above all he wants to feel alive.
Each chapter begins in the barn in Belgium, but his thoughts soon take him back to Devon, to the fields and streams and lanes of Iddesleigh, his home and his village.
Memories of his childhood come back to him, of family. Of the first day at school, of the first stirrings of love, a father’s death, a night’s poaching; then of the first news of approaching war and the recruiting sergeant in the town square at Hatherleigh. So to the trenches and to the events that have led him to the last night of his life.
And all the while the watch he does not want to look at is ticking his life away.
Michael Morpurgo
In the First World War, between 1914 and 1918, over 290 soldiers of the British and Commonwealth armies were executed by firing squad, some for desertion, some for cowardice, two for simply sleeping at their posts.
Many of these men were traumatized by shell shock. Courts martial were brief, the accused often unrepresented.
The injustice they suffered at the start of the twentieth century was only officially recognised by the British Government at the beginning of the twenty-first century and some ninety years later the men were granted posthumous pardons.
Private Peaceful was first performed on 7 April 2004 at Bristol Old Vic’s Studio theatre, with the following company:
TOMMO, Paul Chequer
Director, Simon Reade
Designer, Bill Talbot
Lighting Designer, Tim Streader
Sound Designer, Jason Barnes
Stage Manager, Juliette Taylor
Production Manager, Jo Cuthbert
Studio Technician, Olly Hellis
Casting Advisor, Amy Ball
Dialect, Charmian Hoare
The production has subsequently toured throughout the UK with Scamp Theatre and played in Ireland, Off-Broadway, Hong Kong and Wellington, New Zealand, with Tommo played by Alexander Campbell, Finn Hanlon, Mark Quartley and Leon Williams.
Thanks to Michael and Clare Morpurgo, Alison Reid, Rose and Amy Reade, David Farr and Mark Leipacher.