Yet, as the terms passed, Michael became aware that his homesickness was more habitual than real, and that there were things about school that he was growing not just to tolerate but to love.
The Abbey is set on high ground, and to the south its gardens tumble gently downwards, allowing wide views over Ashdown Forest. Between the formal garden and the forest were forty acres of school grounds, and on summer evenings the boys were left to ‘play out’ here, unsupervised, until the light failed. The memory of these evenings remains vivid and glorious – ‘I was at that age when one is wide open to everything, antennae out.’ These were hours of camps and camaraderie, of whittling arrows with sheath knives and exchanging secrets.
Winter evenings had a different charm. One of the headmasters, Mr Frith, regularly invited a group of boys to come to his study after supper and sit by the fire in their pyjamas. He served orange squash and Garibaldi biscuits, and read aloud from the novels of Dornford Yates: mild, sex-free thrillers, which had enjoyed a vogue between the wars, and in which the narrator-hero, Richard Chandos, drove about the Continent in a ‘Rolls’ tackling crime and hunting treasure. Michael loved these evenings – the warmth, the involvement in a story, the feeling of belonging. He slept well after them.
He was not, himself, a great reader – or at least not the kind that Jack Morpurgo would have wished him to be. The leather-bound copies of Dickens that Jack periodically put Michael’s way were anathema to him, and to this day he has to overcome a psychological block before tackling large books, and cannot happily read for more than an hour at a stretch. But he was saved from Jack’s contempt by a series called Great Illustrated Classics – easy-to-read, large-print abridgements which, borrowed from other boys and studied in secret, enabled him to pretend that he had read not only much of Dickens, but also of Homer, Dostoevsky and Sir Walter Scott. Privately, meantime, he was developing his own taste for really good yarns, in which pictures relieved his fear of text, so that the text could create pictures in his mind. He devoured the novels of G. A. Henty, of Kipling and, above all, of Robert Louis Stevenson: ‘I was Jim Hawkins,’ he says, remembering his first reading of Treasure Island. ‘I was in that barrel of apples on the deck of the Hispaniola; I overheard the plots of mutiny.’
He was gripped, too, by the stories of real men. On the ground floor of the Abbey was a library, a dark, musty room, whose deep leather armchairs gave the atmosphere of a gentleman’s club, and whose glass-fronted bookcases reached to the ceiling. The shelves were filled, for the most part, with books that had belonged to Sir Abe Bailey; and among these were bound copies of the Illustrated London News, stretching back to the mid-nineteenth century. Michael spent hours of his free time poring over black-and-white pencil sketches of soldiers fighting and dying in the Crimea and in the Balkan Wars.
History lessons fed his appetite for heroes. He remembers marvelling at the courage of Joan of Arc, steadfast at her stake as the flames began to lick around her; at the cunning of William the Conqueror, instructing his archers to fire into the air so that Harold’s men would look up and get arrows in their eyes; at the valour of Simon de Montfort as he fell to his death at the Battle of Evesham. But one man preoccupied him more than any other, and that was Jesus.
The pupils at the Abbey filed into the school chapel every morning, and twice on a Sunday. But Michael, privately, went much more often. Apart from the ‘bog’, the chapel was the one place he could escape the other boys, and he liked being alone there with his thoughts, sitting before the altar where there was always a red lamp flickering. Though his faith was uncertain – ‘I wanted to believe; I still do’ – he felt drawn to the life of Jesus, told in stained glass. He longed to meet the man, yet at the same time felt sure that, were they to meet, Jesus would dislike him – ‘because he was more perceptive than other people, and would see straight through me’. The mask he had developed to protect his more private, sensitive self from the sink-or-swim perils of prep school was already a source of confusion and guilt.
At home, Michael could allow his mask to slip, and his elation at the start of each school holidays was greater than any he has since experienced. Kippe and Jack had moved, in 1950, to a small village, Bradwell-juxta-Mare, on the Essex coast. With financial help from Bess and Julie they bought a large, haunted, sixteenth-century house, set in several acres of garden. In the post-war years, as domestic staff became for many a thing of the past, houses like New Hall had dropped in value. Buyers were struck less by the beauty of their architecture than by the number of windows that needed cleaning, floors sweeping, stairs running up and down. But Jack Morpurgo, socially ambitious and domestically impractical, had no such misgivings. What he saw in New Hall was a house that confirmed his transformation from East End working-class boy to English country squire.
Michael loved New Hall for other reasons. Its down-at-heel, rambling cosiness gave him a sense of belonging, and all the houses he has lived in since have been in some way attempts to recapture this. He and Pieter slept in adjoining attic bedrooms, with low sloping roofs, reached by a narrow staircase which the rest of the household rarely climbed. This was their private world, in which they made candles on a paraffin stove, read Tintin and Asterix and novels by Enid Blyton, all outlawed by Jack, and hoisted themselves out of the windows at night to sit in the leaded gully running between the roof and the house façade. The darkness was filled with the hooting of owls, the calls of wildfowl, and the mournful arhythmic clanging of boat riggings a couple of miles away, beyond the salt marshes, in the Blackwater Estuary.
The garden, too, was a boy’s paradise, with a smooth front lawn for cricket and slip catching, and beamed stables with a sagging roof in which Pieter and Michael built a giant racetrack for their cars and played ping-pong on rainy days. To the back of the house the garden had been allowed to run wild. Dog roses climbed over two old Nissen huts that had been used as a mess by RAF fighter squadrons flying out of Bradwell airfield during the war. There was an overgrown orchard with apple, pear, plum and damson trees, and a mulberry bush from which, in the summer holidays, Pieter and Michael harvested the purple, staining fruit in boiler suits.
Pieter, Mark and Michael outside New Hall.
Around the garden ran a high wall, up to which the sea would occasionally flood. The wall was a statement in mottled brick that New Hall was the big house; that its inhabitants lived somehow apart from the rest of the village. It taught Michael his first lessons about class division, because local boys liked to scale it, lean over the top, and jeer at the ‘posh kids’ on the other side.
When the Morpurgo brothers came out of the front gates these boys sometimes formed roadblocks, or kicked their bicycles, or threw stones. None of this deterred Pieter and Michael. If they loved the world within the garden wall, they loved what lay beyond it also. Bradwell-juxta-Mare was the sort of quintessentially English village that might have sprung from the pages of an Agatha Christie novel. Opposite New Hall was the home of retired Major Turpin; a little further along the road the three Miss Stubbings, spinster sisters, shared a cottage with wisteria around the door. And in the only other big house lived the Labour MP Tom Driberg. He struck Michael as ‘fat and foul’, though he knew nothing of Driberg’s rampant homosexuality, which was still in those days a criminal offence.
Between the village and the sea lay a stretch of marshland that entered deeply into Michael’s imagination – the marshland Paul Gallico captures in the opening pages of The Snow Goose: ‘one of the last wild places of England, a low, far-reaching expanse of grass and reeds and half-submerged meadowlands ending in the great saltings and mud flats and tidal pools near the restless sea’.
It is a rich landscape for a storyteller, sunk so deep in time that distinctions between the ordinary and the fabulous begin to blur. Towards the end of the third century the Romans established a fort, Othona, on the coast by Bradwell. Four hundred years on, at the invitation of the Christian King Sigbert, a Lindisfarne monk, Cedd, arrived in a small boat. Using blocks of Kentish ragstone from Othona, he built a chapel in the sea wall. St Peter-on-the-Wall remains