Academic success mattered. Measured in ‘pluses’ and ‘minuses’, ‘unders’ and ‘overs’, the performance of every boy was calculated weekly and read out to the whole school on a Sunday evening. Those who did well became ‘Centurions’. Those who did badly were punished. At worst, this meant a journey up the red-carpeted stairway, ‘the Bloody Steps’, to the study of fat-fingered Mr Crump, one of the triumvirate of headmasters, for a caning. Canings took place amidst a collection of African tribal artefacts and hunting trophies left by the Abbey’s previous owner, gambler and mining millionaire Sir Abe Bailey: ‘Swish. Then “Ow, sir!” You had to shake Crump’s hand when it was finished.’
Michael had his fair share of punishment. Pigeonholed from the start as not especially bright – ‘Very much below the standard of the form,’ his Maths master noted at the end of his first term – he remained, throughout his time at the Abbey, somewhere around the middle to bottom of his year. He was not helped by his stutter, which grew steadily worse, tripping him up on his ‘c’s and ‘f’s and ‘w’s. If there was a poem to learn, or a string of history dates, he would lie in the early hours of the morning contriving ways of sliding over these troublesome consonants. This did not always work, and when it failed he was teased. Then he would blush, and then he would be teased again: ‘You’re going red, Morpurgo …’ Anxiety brought on chronic eczema – cracking, weeping knee and arm joints, which Matron daubed with ointment at bedtime, before feeding Michael one tablespoonful of Radio Malt, to build him up.
He might have cut a pathetic figure had not the ‘other’ Michael Morpurgo, the waggish, confident doppelgänger who has accompanied him through life, come to his rescue. Perhaps it was his theatrical genes that enabled him to drop a visor of confidence over his vulnerability; or perhaps it was Jack Morpurgo. Jack’s treatment of Pieter, who was even less academic than Michael, bordered on cruelty. Observing it, Michael had learned early that the only way to rub along with his stepfather was to devise ways to win praise, even if this involved deceit.
Edna Macleod, who, with her husband, Ian, spent so much time with Kippe and Jack that the joint families became known as the ‘Macpurgos’, remembers one Christmas morning on which Pieter got up early to make Edna and Ian breakfast in bed. Just as he was about to carry the tray into their room, Michael lifted it from his hands, walked through and presented it to Edna – ‘getting all the kudos’. Michael was ‘a monkey’, Edna says, but also ‘irresistible’. At home, family and friends were enchanted by his ‘intelligence and humour and charm’.
Very quickly, the same was true at school. Once it was clear that he was not going to shine academically, he found other areas in which he could come out on top. In the Abbey magazine the achievements of ‘Morpurgo ii’ are lauded on almost every page. He is Chapel Warden and Chief Chorister. He is the only boy wheeled out to play a violin solo, ‘Highland Heather’, in the Christmas carol concert. He is in the tennis team, and he is Captain of Cricket. He carries off the cups for Batting, Choir and Personal Merit. Above all, he is a hero on the rugby pitch. Reports of matches against neighbouring schools are peppered with descriptions of his triumphs: ‘From a quick heel, Morpurgo scored a good try’; ‘Morpurgo’s covering and tackling were excellent’; ‘Morpurgo found his swerve would not work on the slippery surface’ but ‘did some good defensive kicking’ instead. Bookish he might not be, but the magazine editor is confident that ‘a great Rugger future’ lies before him.
First XV at The Abbey, winter 1954. Mr Beagley stands centre back, Michael sits cross-legged, front left.
His sporting triumphs brought multiple benefits. They had an anaesthetising effect on Jack, numbing him to Michael’s mediocre academic reports: ‘Far too inclined to flounder about in a sea of ink and inaccuracies’ (Maths); ‘His mapwork is untidy’ (Geography); ‘I do not understand him’ (French); ‘An exasperating boy’ (English); ‘Rather excitable and harum-scarum’ (Headmaster). And they impressed the other boys, among whom Michael both relished and mistrusted his reputation as a ‘clubbable and charismatic’ hero. But, perhaps most importantly of all, they were rewarded with treats – rare, delicious opportunities to break the bounds of the Abbey and taste the wider world.
Like many of the other Abbey parents, Kippe and Jack barely ever came to visit the boys, so that even on ‘Leave-out’ Sundays the only hope of escape was to angle for an invitation from Humphrey and Peregrine Swann to join them, with their parents, for lunch at the Letherby and Christopher Hotel in East Grinstead. But success in sports, and in the choir, earned Michael visits to the cinema, and even, on one never-to-be-forgotten occasion, a trip to see Così fan tutte at Glyndebourne. Mr Gladstone, the most sympathetic of the three headmasters, drove the boys in his black Humber convertible, he and his wife, Kitty, in the front, Michael and two others in the back. They purred through the summer dusk, the Downs stretching before them like a Ravilious painting. The memory remains magical.
What did they wear for that outing? Such things mattered to Michael. His two most treasured possessions at the Abbey were the red ribbon he was awarded as Chief Chorister, and the green velvet cap that marked him out as Captain of Rugby. Like the children’s television character Mr Benn, he felt most at home in a costume: ‘I liked playing a part,’ he says. ‘It meant I could forget about myself.’ And this was a relief, because he was unsure of his real identity. On the rugby pitch, while the other boys cheered his courage, he felt afraid and oddly detached. ‘When I went in for a tackle, I did it closing my eyes because I was so scared,’ he says. ‘Part of me was there, in the scrum; but part of me was standing at the side of the pitch, watching.’ This sense of involved detachment persists. As he talks at the Dragon School on that cold winter morning, his storyteller’s costume – red trousers, black beret, stripy scarf – gives him the identity he needs to communicate with children, while at the same time enabling him to remain essentially hidden.
So how many people know Michael Morpurgo really well? ‘Very few,’ he believes. ‘My brother, Pieter, and my half-brother, Mark, they know me.’ But when I visit Mark, born to Kippe and Jack in 1948, at his home in the Scottish Highlands, he suggests otherwise. ‘I wonder whether you will be able to get to the bottom of Michael,’ he muses. ‘I love him, but he’s an enigma to me.’ Peter Campbell, possibly Michael’s closest school friend, agrees: ‘You’ll never really know Michael,’ he says, ‘and he’ll never really know himself.’
Homesickness afflicted Michael throughout his years at the Abbey, and beyond. It began to take a hold about a fortnight before the end of the holidays, when his stepaunts, Bess and Julie, fetched their sewing baskets and got busy with nametapes. Soon afterwards the brown leather trunk was hauled out, packed, and delivered to the station to travel in advance – ‘and you knew from that moment that you were on a wave that would carry you, like it or not, back to school’. Then came the last supper (always shepherd’s pie), the last night at home, and the dreaded journey.
On Victoria Station, in those days, there was a small newsreel cinema, to which Kippe would take the boys for a final treat before surrendering them to the barrel-chested rugby master, Mr Beagley. This was a boon. The cinema’s dark interior served as a kind of decompression chamber where, as Bugs Bunny or Mickey Mouse flickered on the screen, Michael could allow his ‘home’ self to slip away, and arm himself for school.
After that, it was best if Kippe left quickly. She was the focus for Michael’s homesickness, but she was also an embarrassment to him. When they married, Kippe and Jack had decided that, as Pieter and Michael could not be expected to call Jack ‘Daddy’, they should cease to call Kippe ‘Mummy’. They should address them both simply as ‘Kippe’ and ‘Jack’ – and any further children born to them should do the same. The boys at the Abbey, quick to spot chinks in one another’s emotional armour, homed in on this oddity. ‘Jack is not your real father,’ they taunted, ‘and Kippe is a weird name.’ So it was a relief, really, when she turned