It would be hard to spend more than a few minutes in the picturesque Devonshire village of Iddesleigh without bumping into Michael Morpurgo, either in person or in spirit. A picture of Joey – a handsome bay horse supposedly painted by a cavalry officer in 1914 – hangs above the mantelpiece in the village hall, just as described in the author’s most famous novel, War Horse. And just as in the novel, a clock below the picture is frozen at one minute past 10.
The pub, meanwhile, is papered with War Horse memorabilia, while the lanes leading to the village are dotted with signs to a War Horse theme park, although Morpurgo grimaces when he spots one, explaining that it’s the work of an entrepreneurial local farmer. It has nothing to do with the charity he and his wife, Clare, set up in 1976 to provide an experience of farm life for city children.
The couple, who were married in their teens, live in a cottage on the edge of Iddesleigh. They have become a formidable partnership whose charity now runs two more city farms, in Gloucestershire and Pembrokeshire. Clare is the sounding board and first reader of his books, and sits loyally in the audience during his many talks, ready to provide prompts if his memory lets him down. She will be strategically placed later this month when he takes over a West End theatre – alongside broadcaster Clare Balding and an array of celebrity guests – for a public celebration of his 80th birthday.
The event is just one of many. Tickets have long sold out for next week’s London film festival premiere of the animated adaptation of his novel Kensuke’s Kingdom. He has just launched a princely book retelling his 10 favourite tales from Shakespeare. Meanwhile, All Around the Year, an early collaboration with Ted Hughes and the photographer James Ravilious, is being republished.
All Around the Year is a diary of his first year on the farm, after he and his wife decided that the teaching life was not for them, at just the moment that her father – the publisher Allen Lane, who founded Penguin – died, leaving her a handy inheritance. They settled on Iddesleigh because it was where she holidayed as a child. “We loved the countryside,” says Morpurgo, “but I didn’t know enough about farming. I had to train myself. And then Ted said to me, ‘Why don’t you write it down and we’ll make a book together?’”
Morpurgo and Hughes had met on the banks of a nearby river. “It was one of those moments when you know there is a God,” says Morpurgo. “I was just walking along, minding my own business, and this extraordinary creature loomed up in his huge fisherman’s waders. He said, ‘I think I’m supposed to know you – you’re that farmer working with children.’”
They became friends and, when Morpurgo suffered his first big setback several years later, Hughes again helped him find his feet. As a new writer with a couple of books under his belt, Morpurgo had published what everyone assured him would be his name-making novel. War Horse told a little known first world war story of the farm horses that went into battle. It was inspired by a conversation with a war veteran in the very pub where we’re sitting, and by a troubled young visitor to the farm whom Morpurgo had overheard pouring his heart out to one of the ponies. It was duly shortlisted for the Whitbread prize and the Morpurgos were issued with first-class rail tickets to London, where a limousine took them to the ceremony, which was broadcast live on TV.
“Everyone was sure it was a winner,” he says. “But it won nothing.” They walked out into heavy rain and looked for the limo, but it wasn’t there. “My publisher said, ‘Sorry, we’re all going home by tube.’ The injury went deep.” The next morning, Hughes asked him round for tea. “He leaned across the table and said, ‘It matters not at all. If you win, it’s nonsense. If you lose, it’s nonsense. It’s bad for you either way. Be grateful and move on. You’ve written a good book and you’ll write a better one.’ That was the most wonderful thing any writer could say.”
Morpurgo went on to become one of the UK’s most prolific and successful children’s writers, penning more than 150 books and serving a term as children’s laureate – a post he dreamed up with Hughes. But it wasn’t until the mid-00s, when the director Tom Morris needed a subject for a children’s show at the National Theatre, that War Horse belatedly found its stride. The resulting play, featuring huge puppet horses, made its author an international star. The show was a global phenomenon that only let up when the pandemic halted its second Australian tour.
Prior to that, a Steven Spielberg film was released in 2011, followed by an adaptation of another of Morpurgo’s first world war novels, Private Peaceful. He doesn’t love either film. “What can I say? They could have been better. I’m very difficult to convince when it’s a story of mine. I miss what they’ve left out.”
About Kensuke’s Kingdom, though, he has no such worries, not least because he was in constant consultation with its screenwriter Frank Cottrell-Boyce. Twenty years in the making, and featuring a starry cast of voices including Sally Hawkins, Cillian Murphy and Ken Watanabe, the film nearly didn’t happen because funding kept falling through. In fact, the production company was about to call time when the BFI suddenly stumped up the remainder.
“I said, ‘Why? I’m not Roald Dahl.’ And the producer said, ‘No, you’re not. It’s because they haven’t got live-action films to put the money into, as everything has stopped in the pandemic. So they’ve decided to put it into animation – and they’ve chosen this.’ Suddenly we had about 1,600 people beavering away in their little rooms all over the place, not just in this country, to make it happen. And it’s just beautiful.”
First published in 1999, Kensuke’s Kingdom is the story of a boy who gets washed off his family’s boat with his dog and marooned on an island with a stern Japanese man, a shipwrecked naval doctor who is heartbroken by the realisation that his family must have died in the bombing of Nagasaki. The novel was a return to two big Morpurgo themes: war and history. “I’m interested in how little attention we pay in this country to the implications of history,” he says. “I think we’ve tended to believe that if it’s historic, we can look down on it a bit, because we know better now.”
His own family history gave him an early lesson in the collateral damage of war: his parents met as actors, but their marriage disintegrated after his father was sent to fight in the second world war and his mother fell in love with another man. He was two when his father emigrated to Canada and his mother remarried, giving her two small sons their stepfather’s name.
“Have you heard how I learned about my father?” he says. “It’s the best story of my life.” It happened shortly before Morpurgo got married, when he went home for a holiday. His family had gathered around the TV to watch a 1962 Canadian adaptation of Great Expectations. When the escaped convict Magwitch loomed up over the terrified Pip, Morpurgo’s mother shouted: “Oh, my God – it’s your father!”
“It was a secret that no one ever spoke about,” says the author, who sees the whole situation as the fallout of war. “I don’t think anyone really realises that bombs don’t just destroy buildings and bodies. They kill families and societies.”
This thought brings him back to some of the Shakespeare plays he has chosen to retell, which include Julius Caesar and Henry V. “The tyranny, the banner-waving, the anti-foreigner stuff,” he says. “It’s all still rattling around, you know. That’s what upsets me so much about Brexit. One of the best things this country ever did was decide it would belong again to the continent. That was a moment of great hope.”
It is a hope that is embodied today in his eight grandchildren. “I have Croatian, French and Romanian grandchildren. That was how we thought the world was going to be. I think we lost our senses to a line that was full of clever falsehoods, and which teased people into believing them. And the people like me who were batting for Europe didn’t bat well enough.”
Five years ago, Morpurgo reissued a book about Joan of Arc. When he told a group of French schoolchildren about it, one girl said: “But you burned her.” He recalls: “So I explained how the English were at the time, that quite a lot of them were descended from the Normans who had come across and occupied the country.” Months later, he asked a group of Devonshire teenagers what they knew about Joan of Arc. “There were 35 blank faces then one boy said, ‘We burned her.’ So I said, ‘Yes, but do you know what for?’ And he said, ‘Because she was a witch.’ So the judgment of that 15th-century court still echoes in the propaganda in people’s heads.”
As we head out on to the village green, where farm horses were mustered before being shipped out to France and the war, he pauses and says: “It is extraordinary how history has been twisted and turned.” He’s done a bit of this himself, by commissioning a new painting of a handsome bay, and installing it above the mantelpiece in the village hall – as if there really was once a warhorse called Joey.
• Event details: michaelmorpurgo.com
All Around the Year by Michael Morpurgo (Little Toller Books, £16). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
