Such Stuff: A Story-Maker's Inspiration by Michael Morpurgo
So I found myself at last inside the room where Walter Raleigh had spent thirteen years of his life. There wasn’t much to see really, just a four-poster bed, a chest and a tiny window beyond.
I walked up and down Raleigh’s Walk, a sort of rampart that overlooks the River Thames, and I wondered again about the old man no one else had seen at the party.
Storm clouds had gathered grey over the river and brought the evening on early. The river flowed black beyond the trees and people hurried past to be under cover before the rain came. I was alone and I was suddenly cold. Aunty Ellie and Miss Soper had gone on without me. They would wait for me outside by Tower Green, they said. They had found the Bloody Tower grim and damp, not good for her rheumatism, Aunty Ellie said. “Don’t you be too long,” she’d told me. “We’ve got to get back.”
I was wondering why Walter Raleigh hadn’t just made a rope out of sheets and let himself down over the wall. It’s what I would have done. I leaned over the parapet. “Too far to jump,” said a voice from behind me. A tall figure was walking towards me, his black cloak whipping about him in the wind. He was limping, I noticed, and carried a silver-topped cane. “So,” he said. “So you came. Allow me to present myself.” He bowed low, sweeping his cloak across his legs. “I am, or I was, Sir Walter Raleigh. I am your humble servant, cousin Bess.”
The ghost in the tower
The Bloody Tower (one of twenty-one towers that make up the Tower of London) is thought to be home to Sir Walter’s ghost. If Sir Walter’s ghost does parade around the Tower, he must be a very busy travelling ghost, as he goes regularly to Exeter as well, namely to the Royal Clarence Hotel (now called the ABode), the city’s oldest hotel, an elegant building overlooking the cathedral. The hotel was built in 1769 on the site of Walter Raleigh’s father’s house, and the coughing noises that have been heard at the hotel, in empty rooms and with no possible source, have been attributed to Sir Walter Raleigh, perhaps because he popularized tobacco smoking in his lifetime!
His ghost has also been seen at another of Sir Walter’s homes, Sherborne Castle. There he is said to wander the grounds, enjoying the surroundings, until he gets to his former smoking spot, known as “Raleigh’s Seat”. In the eleventh century, a Norman nobleman gave the castle to the Bishop of Salisbury. Legend has it that “whosoever shall take those lands from the bishopric should be accursed”. The bad luck Raleigh had after taking over the castle makes the curse almost believable…
Sir Walter fell out of favour and was imprisoned in the Tower of London for thirteen years during the reign of James I. In fact, he lived there in relative comfort, with his wife, Elizabeth Throckmorton, and their two sons, Walter and Carew, the younger born there in 1605. Sir Walter was finally beheaded in 1618.
In life he had the freedom to wander the Tower of London at will, and his ghost continues to do so, looking exactly as he does in his portrait hanging in the Tower. Sir Walter’s ghost has been seen on the ramparts known as Raleigh’s Walk, where he exercised during his imprisonment. He also walks the Byward Tower and the Seven Tower Green, now used as a lodging for the Yeoman Warders. There are claims that some Tower of London ghosts are seen headless, and heard rattling chains! The wife of one Warder was scared to take a bath because she claimed to have been physically touched by an entity she thought was a man from Sir Walter’s time. How the apparition could be identified as Sir Walter, as it was headless, is anyone’s guess!
The Tower of London, the site of aristocratic executions for centuries, claims to be the most haunted place in Britain. Other ghosts include St Thomas à Becket and Queen Anne Boleyn, who is buried under the chapel’s altar. Her ghost has been spotted there on many occasions. No doubt she is aggrieved by her execution in the Tower in 1536.
The “Princes in the Tower” also haunt the buildings. The sad mystery of these two little princes has intrigued historians for hundreds of years. The two were Edward V, aged thirteen, and his younger brother Richard. Edward only reigned for around two months in 1483, before disappearing with his brother from the Tower some time later. The two little princes were never seen again and it is generally assumed that they were murdered. No one really knows who by, although popular suspicion fell on their uncle and Lord Protector, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, later Richard III.
In 1674, the skeletons of two young children were discovered in the White Tower under the stairs leading to the chapel. They were reburied in Westminster Abbey, but it is claimed that their spirits live on. The two young princes have been seen holding hands, wearing white nightgowns and cowering in various rooms of the Tower. From the fifteenth century to the present day there have been reports of two small figures gliding down the stairs. If people reach out for them, they back up slowly to the wall and disappear. In 1990, two Coldstream Guards said they heard two young children giggling just outside the Tower.
Sir Walter’s ghost at the Tower is in distinguished company!
Waiting for Anya & The Dancing Bear
THE DREAM
I have set my stories all over the world, and down through the ages too, from ancient times to yesterday. I have never invented worlds of fantasy, nor travelled into the future. Maybe I lack the imagination to do that. I need the canvas of places I know, or can find out about. I need the past or the present as firm foundations upon which I can build my stories. And the more connected places and events are to my own life, to my memory, half imagined or otherwise, or to the memory of others, the more confident I feel that I can dream up my plot through the people and places that will animate it. I have returned often in my stories to those places and people I know best, my home in Iddesleigh, in Devon, and to the Isles of Scilly, to memories of post-war London, and the Essex coast near Bradwell, where I grew up, to my years in boarding schools – all of these old familiar places, from which so many of my stories grow.
However, from time to time, and always by happy accident, it is spreading my wings and journeying over the seas that has provided me with fresh ideas and pastures new. My second country is France. It was the first foreign country I ever visited, when I went to the seaside in Normandy, to Sables-d’Or-les-Pins, as a small boy. Here I first discovered chocolate eclairs, and tasted my first sip of cider. Later, after I learnt to speak the language a bit, it became the only foreign country where I could communicate properly – Clare could already speak it fluently, as fast as the French do, so that helped. The more we went there, the more I felt at home. We made friends there, and often through them, became ever more aware of its people and culture, of how deeply connected we are to France historically, by language, by war, by kings and queens. As a writer, I am often translated into French. I have been into schools and colleges in France, attended book fairs and conferences all over the country, in the great cities, in tiny villages. In Sparrow, I even retold the story of Joan of Arc – an unlikely, and some said, ill-advised enterprise for an English writer.
I have a French side to the family too, four grandchildren, who have a family house in the Béarn region of France, in the South-West, not far from the Pyrenees and the Spanish border. It was after a family wedding down there many years ago that I happened upon a small remote village in the foothills of the Pyrenees, called Lescun. This tiny place was to provide me with the background to two of my favourite stories, but more than that, it provided me with the stories themselves. It was as if the village and the stories were simply waiting there for me to turn up and discover them.
We nearly didn’t get to Lescun at all. I had found the place on the map, chosen it because there was a small inn there where we could stay. I could see it was so close to the mountains that we could walk up into them from the village, up to the Pic d’Anie, and over the border into Spain. I had always had the rather ridiculous notion that it would be fun to stand with one foot in one country and one in another. Silly, I know. But here was my chance.
We lost our way – it was before satnav made that well-nigh impossible. I confess I was becoming just a little shirty wi
Then she spotted a strange sign by the side of the road – a huge cut-out figure of a bear, holding a pot of honey in his paw, and an arrow, beside him, pointing off the road to the right. Across his stomach was painted one word in large letters, which read: MIEL.
“Honey,” Clare said. “We like honey, don’t we, dear? Let’s turn right here.” I was sulking too much even to argue by now. We turned off the road and drove into a village called Borce – just a few houses, a shop, a café and a village green. And on the village green there was a large cage. We got out of the car to have a closer look. There was a bear in the cage, and a notice on the bars: JOJO. EUROPEAN BEAR, FOUND AND REARED AS AN ORPHAN CUB BY A GIRL FROM THE VILLAGE. DO NOT FEED THE BEAR. The bear looked old, his fur tatty and ragged and matted. He seemed rather sad, heartbroken even, from the look in his eyes. He sat there swaying, longing to be let out, to be free. Clare bought her honey in the café, while I stood there looking into that bear’s eyes, already determined there and then to tell the story of the little girl and the bear cub.
A question or two over a coffee in the village café gave me a helping hand with my embryonic story. The bear cub had been found, it seemed, many years ago by a little girl who was playing Poohsticks by a stream on the edge of the village. She had picked the cub up in her arms, easily enough in its weakened state, and brought it back into the village. It caused quite a stir. Everyone came running. One of the old farmers said, “Knock it on the head – we don’t like bears here, they kill our sheep.” But someone else said, “No, let’s keep him. We’ll make a cage for him, call him JoJo, put his picture on our pots of honey, call it ‘JoJo’s Honey’ and sell all the honey our bees can make. Then we’ll put a notice down by the road, telling all those gullible tourists driving by to come and buy our honey.” So that’s what they had done, and of course that’s why we were there. As we were leaving the café, Clare happened to ask: “Are we anywhere near a village called Lescun, by any chance?”
“Oh, yes,” they said. “Just a kilometre up the road, before you come to the mountains. You can’t miss it.”
Clare didn’t say, “I told you so”, but I could tell she wanted to.
We found Lescun up the road, just as we had been told, and there, right in the centre, was the little village inn. As we walked in we saw two bearskins stretched out on the walls, and a huge black and white photo of village hunters, standing in the square in front of the inn, rifles at their sides, a dead bear stretched out on the ground at their feet. Maybe the mother of JoJo, I thought, and then looked away. It wasn’t a photograph you wanted to look at twice.
Next morning after breakfast, taking a picnic with us, we walked up out of the village towards the Pic d’Anie and the mountains. We were followed all the way by a huge white sheepdog, I remember. He was most definitely keeping an eye on us, we felt. We saw shepherdesses sitting in fields, knitting, their sheep all around them on the hills, bells tinkling softly, as we followed the trail up onto the high pastures, where we found cows being milked and cheese being made. We stopped and watched for a while, and then climbed on and up, until we were on top of the Pic d’Anie, the frontier of France and Spain. Now I could stand there, arms raised, one foot in Spain, the other in France, and breathe in the air of both!
We stayed a couple of nights in Lescun, and in that time got talking to people. We learnt that the village had been occupied by Germans during the Second World War. They had taken over the priest’s house by the church. They were patrolling the hills all around, trying to prevent people escaping over the border into neutral Spain – shot-down Allied airmen, Jews, Frenchmen escaping transportation to Germany. There was a cross by the side of the road outside the village where an escaping Jew had been shot and killed. We were also told that, although few knew about it at the time, there had been a safe house outside the village, a farmhouse where an old lady had courageously hidden away many of those who were trying to escape, before arranging for a guide to take them over the mountains to freedom – this at the risk of her life.
The bear story was one thing. I decided this was another. I put JoJo out of my mind, for the moment. I knew that in Lescun I had stumbled upon a remarkable story. I needed to learn more. It was difficult, though, to ask about how it was occupied. The subject is a sensitive one in France, was then, is now. But then, by great good fortune, I was given a window of opportunity. At supper one evening, the hotel manager’s daughter, a girl of about ten or eleven, approached our table. “Excuse me,” she said, “but my father says that when you came to the hotel, and signed in, he recognized your name from a book I am reading. This one.” She held out a copy of Cheval de guerre (War Horse). “I wonder if you would please sign it for me.” So I did, with pleasure. “And,” she went on, “my father says you are invited to our house tomorrow for wine and pâté.” She said she would come and fetch us, which was how we found ourselves sitting in a farmhouse kitchen at midday the next day, eating wonderful home-made pâté and sipping delicious wine. Her father was there too – it was he who was the most talkative and friendly, friendly enough for me to dare to ask him a question. “Did you live here in the war when the village was occupied?”
“Yes,” he said. “I was a boy. “The German soldiers used to give us sweets. We did not want to like them, but we did – the soldiers, I mean, not the sweets. They were mostly old soldiers, not fighting soldiers. They just wanted to go home. People got on quite well with them – some of the Germans had fought in the First World War, and so had many of the older men in the village. They were in a strange way all old comrades. Then one day after long years of occupation, we woke up, and they were gone. War over. We rang the church bell, put out the flag, had a big party.”
I left the village, my head full of the story that was already taking shape. One of our French family, the grandmother, later told me how as a child she had stood at the roadside and watched the Germans come marching in. “I don’t like to admit it,” she had said, “but in a horrible way, when I think about it, we children admired them in their smart black uniforms, handsome, victorious.” I was having quite unexpected and honest insights into how it was for children then to see their country occupied.
On the way up through France back to England, we stopped by a village called Oradour-sur-Glane, a village left in ruins as a memorial to the eight hundred or so villagers massacred by SS troops in 1944. The village was burnt out entirely, the charred remains of a few cars still there, the church and the barns where so many had been killed, still charred and gaping, open to the skies. This was the other face of the occupation. We stopped too by a wood and walked into its silence. Here were graves in among the trees. Here was all that was left of a concentration camp, a holding camp for those prisoners, mostly Jews, destined for Auschwitz or Treblinka or Bergen-Belsen – death camps.
In Waiting for Anya, I would tell my story of a shepherd boy in Lescun, of a bear who is shot, of the Nazi occupation of the boy’s village of Lescun, of the safe house he stumbles upon where Jewish children are kept hidden, of the secret he must keep. In The Dancing Bear, I would tell another kind of story altogether, but they both took root in and around Lescun, that little village in the mountains, which we so nearly didn’t find.
WAITING FOR ANYA
Then one blustery Autumn day, after the sheep had come down from the pastures and he was spreading out the bracken for the bedding in the barn, he saw Widow Horcada scurrying past, black scarf over her head, flowers in her hand. He knew she’d be making for the churchyard to put flowers on her husband’s grave. She’d stop to do her shopping on the way back, she always did. Jo knew he had a clear half hour to get up there and back: he could do it if he hurried. She’d never see him, not if
He kept under the cover of the trees as long as he could. From there he could see without being seen. Her pigs were foraging in the field below the house and the cow was lying curled asleep in the middle of them. There was no one about. He threw caution to the wind because he had to – there was no time for anything else. He hared across the field until he reached the safety of the barn wall where he knew he could not be seen from the house. He ran around the back of the barn and into the courtyard behind. There was no sound except for the contented grunted of rooting pigs. He was creeping past the barn door when he heard something shuffling around inside. The bear cub, it must be the bear cub.
He looked about him and then opened the door slowly. Like all the barns it was long and low and dark, with bracken on the floor and hay in the wooden rack that ran the length of the wall. But there was no bear cub, and no other animals either. Yet he was sure he’d heard something, quite sure. He pushed the door wide open so as to throw as much light as possible down the barn. There was one small dirty window at the far end, and the shutters were banging open and shut, first one and then the other. Jo peered into the darkness. He would go no further. He could see well enough from the doorway. He was turning to go when he trod on something. He bent down and picked up a shoe, a child’s shoe. The strap was broken. He thought little of it at first. He would have dropped it and left had he not heard the breathing – a regular wheezing breathing.