Such Stuff: A Story-Maker's Inspiration by Michael Morpurgo
The Lusitania
In the early part of the First World War, most people in the United States were convinced that Europe’s war was not their fight. President Wilson did not believe that America’s interests were threatened by a European war – as long as trade was allowed to continue unhindered.
In May 1915, 20 kilometres off the coast of Ireland, a German U-boat sank the British liner, the Lusitania. There were 128 Americans among the 1,198 casualties. With the benefit of hindsight, the attack may be seen as one of Germany’s biggest mistakes of the war, because, afterwards, American attitudes to involvement slowly changed. President Wilson repeatedly warned that the US would not tolerate unrestricted submarine warfare and demanded an end to attacks on passenger ships. Germany complied for a time.
Germany needed to prevent goods from America being imported by Britain, while also placating the US, keeping it neutral and out of the war. Britain wanted equipment and money from the States, and, ideally, Britain wanted the US to join the fight against Germany. Following the sinking of the Lusitania, a propaganda war ensued for the hearts and minds of the US people and government.
The Germans argued that they had given fair warning that ships travelling to Britain were in danger. On 1 May a small notice, placed by the German Embassy, appeared on the shipping page of the New York Times, directly under the announcement of the sailing of the Lusitania. The notice warned that Germany and Britain were at war and that a war zone existed around the British Isles. British ships were “liable to destruction”, and people sailing in them “do so at their own risk”.
Previously, U-boat captains had often surfaced and allowed crews and passengers of unarmed boats to take to lifeboats before the vessel was sunk. What the British public were not told was that the British Admiralty had recently issued orders directing merchant ships to escape from U-boats when possible, but “if a submarine comes up suddenly close ahead of you with obvious hostile intention, steer straight for her at your utmost speed…” Armed steamers were instructed to open fire on a submarine, even if it had not yet fired, which therefore meant U-boats would be less likely to surface and give warning before attacking. After the sinking, the British press made much of the fact that the Lusitania was torpedoed without warning.
Of course, the British press put the blame firmly on the Germans. The Liverpool Courier wrote: “The disaster to the Lusitania, in which helpless non-combatants were foully murdered, has affected Liverpool in particular. By one coward blow hundreds of homes in the city have been bereft.” There were riots in Liverpool and other British cities. Germans and their businesses were attacked.
The Germans blamed the British for taking passengers on board ship when it was “known” there were 5,400 crates of ammunition in the hold of the Lusitania. The claim that the Lusitania might have been carrying shells and cartridges was not made known to the British public at the time. After the single torpedo struck, there was a further explosion, which many believe was caused by other illicit munitions cargo (military equipment), such as guncotton or aluminium powder.
The captain of the U-boat was awarded a medal by the German Kaiser (the Emperor). This further inflamed passions in Britain and the US, as did an (untrue) rumour that German schoolchildren had been awarded a day’s holiday to celebrate the sinking.
Some see the incident as a turning point in the rules of war. Britain and the US certainly used the tragedy as a hugely successful propaganda campaign. When the US eventually declared war on Germany in April 1917, recruitment posters urged: REMEMBER THE LUSITANIA! A poster showed a mother submerged in blue-green water with a baby clasped in her arms, above the single blood-red word: ENLIST. The British also had a recruitment poster: TAKE UP THE SWORD OF JUSTICE – AVENGE THE LUSITANIA.
Successive British governments denied that there were munitions on board. But in 1982, the British government warned divers that there had been explosives on board. An estimated four million bullets were found in the wreck, but no evidence of other munitions. What else was on board we may never know. The British government still keeps secret some of the documents from the incident, including some of the signals passed between the Admiralty and the Lusitania. Such records as are available are often missing critical pages, so the idea of a conspiracy, or cover-up, will continue. The Lusitania herself is unlikely to give up any more of her secrets. She will soon disappear as time, tide and rust take their final toll.
My Father Is a Polar Bear
THE DREAM
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 li
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 new
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.
MY FATHER IS A POLAR BEAR
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.