Such Stuff: A Story-Maker's Inspiration by Michael Morpurgo
One of the ways I tried to achieve all this was, as far as possible, to break away from the routine, the ordinary, the expected, to surprise the children. At every opportunity, I took them out of the classroom. So, for instance, before getting them writing about mud, we would troop down to the stream and paddle barefoot, then learn and sing a song together about “mud glorious mud”, then come back, clear the desks to the walls of the classroom and stagger about pretending we were walking in deep mud, sinking into it. We would explore mud together. And when it came to history, I tried much the same tactic.
History for me at school had been a dull business, learning endless dates of battles and wars, of kings and emperors. So I knew all the battles the Duke of Marlborough had won – Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde, Malplaquet, 1704, 1706, 1708, 1709. But I did not have a clue what the battles were for, nor who he was fighting. Just that he won, we won. I didn’t discover till much later that history was full of great stories, remarkable people, and that other countries won battles too! Sometimes they even beat us. Outrageous!
I knew that what interested the children I was teaching was now, the world they knew and lived in, and they were fascinated by the future too. Science-fiction was for them infinitely more interesting than the past. The past was done, over with, full of characters who wore funny hats, people who did not belong in their world. They were all old and dead! I knew that if I was ever to excite them or even hold their interest, I had somehow to make these historical characters come alive.
So, when I was told to take my class on their annual school outing, that the coach had been booked, that I was going to the Tower of London, I thought this might be a wonderful opportunity to introduce the children to the stories of some of the famous people who had been kept there as prisoners – among them Elizabeth I, Lady Jane Grey, the Princes in the Tower, Thomas More, Guy Fawkes and Walter Raleigh. How could I best begin to prepare them for this trip? I wondered. Tell their stories, I thought. Dramatize them, cover the classroom walls with pictures of them, of the houses they were born in, of the Tower of London. And then I thought, Why not make life-sized figures of them? We made them out of straw, dressed them in cloaks and crowns and jewellery. So there they were, a dozen or more of these historical characters – historical scarecrows someone called them – names and dates on cards hung round their necks, so we all knew who they were.
Of all these characters, it was the story of Walter Raleigh that my class liked to hear about best of all. He was the kind of guy they could relate to, colourful, clever, wicked, brave. A multi-faceted hero, but a rogue too. He was the adventurer who sailed to South America, discovered potatoes growing and brought them back. Without Walter Raleigh we wouldn’t be eating crisps today, I told them. And he brought back tobacco, and began the fashion of smoking it – hardly his greatest achievement, I know. He was a favourite of Queen Elizabeth I – explorer, soldier, sailor, writer who was a fine poet – and great historian. Raleigh was the one who sailed across the Atlantic and founded Virginia – named after the Virgin Queen, Queen Elizabeth I – in what is now the United States of America. Without Raleigh, Americans would probably not be speaking English today, of a kind. They’d be speaking Dutch or French instead. He grew up in deepest Devon on a farm, I told them, and he left it, went to court and did all this. So his life-sized straw-stuffed figure in our classroom was a particular favourite. But sadly, they all knew, he ended his days in the Tower – spending years as a prisoner in the Bloody Tower, before he had his head chopped off. I told them when, I told them why too. They were horrified at the cruelty, the injustice of it. We made an executioner’s mask, cut out of black sugar paper, made an axe out of cardboard, painted a mural of the scene of the execution. I read them the poem he wrote the night before he died and had them recite it out loud.
“Even such is time, that takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, our all we have,
And pays us but with earth and dust…”
I told them how old and frail he was, how brave he must have been. All we read, all we painted and made and dramatized brought him alive for all of us.
So off we went one February morning by coach from our school in Wickhambreaux in Kent to the Tower of London. Every stone in the place breathes history. The children loved the armour and weapons in the White Tower, counted the ravens on Tower Green, visited the Crown Jewels, gasped and wondered at them; and then at my suggestion, and because it was cold and raining outside, we climbed the steps to the Bloody Tower to have our lunchtime picnic. We walked Raleigh’s Walk, saw the rooms where he lived and slept for those long years of imprisonment. Some of them talked in whispers, I remember. I read again his last great poem, in the room where he wrote it. Then we had our picnic of sausage rolls and orange juice and apples and crisps, in his honour. And I went on talking, reminding them of all that Walter Raleigh had done, and of his sad and dreadful end. I was just telling them how it must have been: “… and, children, there is the very staircase he went down to be taken away to the scaffold.” As I said this there was a great clap of thunder and the lights flickered. One or two children screamed, others giggled nervously. I don’t know why I did what I did next. Maybe I thought it would make them laugh, maybe I just wanted to be wicked. “And do you know, children?” I went on, looking at my watch. “It’s two o’clock. At exactly two o’clock every Thursday, they say – and it is Thursday today, children – the ghost of Walter Raleigh comes back up these steps and into this very room, with his head under his arm.” More thunder, more flickering of lights. I could hear a whimper or two. I saw the look on their faces. No one was laughing, no one was smiling. I knew at once I had gone too far. I got them out of there as quick as I could, reassuring them that it was just a silly story. Most were quiet in the coach all the way back to school, too quiet and not at all happy. We arrived, and got off the coach. As I watched the children walking away with their parents, I knew some of them would be telling that stupid story I had told in the Bloody Tower.
Sure enough, the next morning the head teacher called me in and gave me a right royal ticking-off. “You really are going to have to learn to think before you speak, Michael,” she said. She was right, but I’m afraid it’s not something I have learnt to do – even now all these years later.
But that visit, that story, had set my mind going. I had witnessed at first hand how powerful a ghost story could be – how deep down we worry about how ghosts might come to haunt us, to terrify us, that they are in some way evil, malign, maybe envious that we are alive and they are not. I wondered, why not try to tell a ghost story in which the ghost is friendly for a change, simply longing to visit his past, even trying to help? I thought about it for a while, but when it came to it, I either dismissed the idea or another more urgent story took its place. Yet Walter Raleigh, and the Tower of London, and the children in my class at Wickhambreaux School, and that silly story I had told them stayed with me.
Five or six years later, when we had moved down to Devon, we decided to go for a day at the seaside. We had heard that the beach at Budleigh Salterton on the south coast of Devon was lovely. So we went. And sure enough, it was lovely, but the weather wasn’t. So, unable to sit on the beach and swim, we stomped along the beach, threw stones into the waves, and watched the gulls being buffeted about in the sky. I do remember there was an upturned boat high up on the beach, an old one, clearly not seaworthy any more. We sat down beside it for a while – to get out of the wind while our children played. And that was when it came into my head: a picture, a famous picture, called The Boyhood of Raleigh by John Everett Millais. It is of Walter Raleigh as a little boy, sitting, if I remembered rightly, with a friend on the beach, both listening intently to an old sailor telling tales of his adventures across the seas. He was pointing out to sea, living his story as he told it, telling them of his great explorations and his extraordinary adventures. And all the while the young Walter was thinking, When I grow up…
I recalled then that visit to the
So we had our tea in the farmhouse where Walter Raleigh had grown up. After tea I asked if we could possibly see round the house. I said I was a writer and explained how Raleigh had interested me for a long time. The woman there was very kind, took us upstairs and walked us along a corridor into a bedroom. “Here is where Walter was born,” she told us. “And that is his cradle.” There was a wooden cradle by the bed, Raleigh’s cradle. As I stood there, I felt the hairs standing up on the back of my neck, on my arms. I had been in the room at the Tower where Walter Raleigh had spent the last night of his life, and here I was in the room where he had slept the first night of his life! I reached down and touched the cradle, rocked it gently and told myself that now I could do it, must do it. I must somehow help the ghost of Walter Raleigh escape from the Bloody Tower and come home, home to Devon, to East Budleigh, to Hayes Barton, to his childhood home. I could make him live, and breathe, again. I could bring history to life.
I had never done this before, never written a ghost story. I had read a few, of course. Among my favourites were A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens and “The Canterville Ghost” by Oscar Wilde. I had particularly loved these because they had benign ghosts, well-meaning ghosts, who somehow managed to be scary, to frighten the living daylights out of those they needed to frighten in the story – the reader too – but in the end they were doing it to help rather than simply to haunt.
A few books later and I was to write another ghost story: The Ghost of Grania O’Malley. Like Walter in My Friend Walter, this eccentric Irish pirate chief, also from the time of Queen Elizabeth I, returns to her birthplace – Clare Island, off the coast of Galway – to set things right, to help. I remember thinking as I was writing it, I wonder if Walter Raleigh ever met Grania O’Malley when she went to meet Queen Elizabeth at Greenwich, which she did. Maybe there’s another ghost story in there somewhere to be told one day. Those two would have got on so well together, Walter and Grania. Both rogues, both pirates, both brave. Or maybe they would have hated each other. Who knows? Still dreaming that one up. We’ll see.
MY FRIEND WALTER
“I have been searching for you.” He looked at me more closely and smiled and shook his head. “Long ago I knew someone of the same name,” he said. “She was older, I grant you, yet the likeness is unquestionable. You have her eyes, you have her face.” His voice was strangely reedy and high-pitched, and he spoke with a burr much as we do in Devon. He seemed to be waiting for me to say something, but it was hard to know what to say, and so I said nothing. The old man began to chuckle as he looked around the room. “If Sir Walter himself could be here,” he said, “I wonder indeed what he would think of his family.”
“Sir Walter?”
“Sir Walter Raleigh!” he said rather sternly. “You have heard of him I trust?”
“Yes, I think so,” I said. “Wasn’t he the one that laid his cloak in a puddle so Queen Elizabeth could walk across without getting her feet wet?”
The old man looked at me long and hard and then sat back on the sofa and shook his head sadly. “Is that all you know about Sir Walter Raleigh? Well, you should know more. Do you not know that he is an ancestor of yours?”
“Of mine?”
“A distant relative I grant you, but everyone in this room has the blood of Walter Raleigh running in their veins, albeit thinly.” He drew on his pipe and sighed as he looked around him. “It is hard to believe it, but it is so.” He turned to me again. “He lived close by for some time, you know.”
“Close by?” I said.
“In the Tower of London. If ever a man served his country well it was Walter Raleigh – and how did they repay him? They locked him up and cut off his head.”
“Cut off his head? But why?”
“That is indeed a long story and a hard one for me to tell.” He leaned forward again and spoke gently. “But since you have some connection with him by blood, perhaps you should go and see where he lived all those years ago. Thirteen years he was there. Thirteen long, cold years in the Bloody Tower. You should go there child. You should see it.” He gripped my arm so tightly that it frightened me, and looked at me earnestly. “He is part of your history. He is part of you. Will you go?”
“I’ll try,” I said, and he seemed happy with that.
He looked past me. “I long for something to drink, child; but there is a crush of people about the table.”
“I’ll fetch it,” I said. “Tea?”
He smiled at me. “Wine,” he replied. “Red wine. I drink nothing else. I shall be here or hereabouts when you return.” When he stood up he was a lot taller than I expected. I looked up into his face. His beard was white and pointed, and he seemed for a moment unsteady on his feet. “Back in a minute,” I said.
I suppose I was gone a little longer than that because there was a queue for the wine, but when I came back he was nowhere to be seen. I asked after him everywhere but no one seemed to have noticed a tall old man in a black cloak carrying a silver-topped cane. I thought I had found him once and tugged at a black-cloaked figure talking to Aunty Ellie, but he turned out to be a vicar in his cape and so I offered him the wine anyway to cover my embarrassment. Aunty Ellie was delighted at my politeness. She introduced me as her little niece, her “little china doll”; and I was once more yoked to her skirts and paraded around amongst my inquisitive relatives. But I remember little enough of the party after that for all I could think of was the tall old man who appeared and then disappeared, who had insisted that I visit the Tower where Walter Raleigh had been locked up all those years. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to go; but I wondered how on earth I was going to persuade Aunty Ellie to take me.
In the end, though, it was Aunty Ellie herself who suggested it. She had met with a long-lost cousin of hers whom she had not seen since she was a child and I suppose they wanted something to keep me happy, or quiet, whilst they reminisced about the childhood summer holidays they had spent together by the sea at somewhere called Whitstable. We could either go on a trip up the river or to the Tower, Aunty Ellie said. Which did I want? “The Tower,” I said. And so I found myself that afternoon inside the Tower of London walking past red-coated, bearskinned guards whose eyes wouldn’t even move when I looked up into them, past Beefeaters who smiled down at me and curled their abundant moustaches as if they were Father Christmases.
As we stood in the queue waiting to see the Crown Jewels, I tried to ask Aunty Ellie about Walter Raleigh. After all, if he was related to me he was related to her too. She told me not to interrupt and finished telling her blue-haired cousin, Miss Soper I was to call her, all about her life as a midwife, about how she had looked after almost all the newborn babies born in Devon for over thirty years and how so many of them were named after her. “Now dear,” she said, turning to me at last, “what was it?”
“Someone at the party told me we were related to Walter Raleigh.” Aunty Ellie opened her mouth to speak, but Miss Soper got there first.
“Indeed, we are, dear,” said Miss Soper. “But thankfully only distantly, and on his wife’s side. He was a terrible rogue, that one. He was imprisoned here, you know.”
“I know,” I said.
“And he was a traitor,” said Miss Soper. “That’s why he had his head chopped off. We are more proud of our Sir Francis Drake connection
“I think so too,” said Aunty Ellie, “But what does it matter? Oh, it’s so good to see you again, Winnie, after all this time. You haven’t changed a bit.” And they hugged each other for the umpteenth time and I began to wish I was with someone else.
We saw the Crown Jewels and ooohed and aaahed with the others as we filed past all too quickly. There wasn’t time to stop and stare. There were always more people behind, pressing us on, and Beefeaters telling us to move along smartly. The Crown Jewels were splendid and regal enough but they looked just like the pictures I had seen of them, no better. I was impatient to get to the Bloody Tower to see where Walter Raleigh had been imprisoned, and it was already getting late. When we came out of the Crown Jewels Aunty Ellie said there’d only be time for a short visit to the Bloody Tower.