Wonder of words

AS THE author of 110 books, former Children’s Laureate Michael Morpurgo has a lot to say, as Martin Freeman discovers

YOU wait a lifetime for a Michael Morpurgo book about an elephant, and two come along at once.

First there's the story of a boy who survives the Indian Ocean tsunami when the elephant he's riding bolts inland; Running Wild is out now.

And ambling along next, trunk clutching the preceding tale's tail, is the saga of a gentle giant in a zoo in Dresden when the German city is being razed by British bombers in World War Two.

Elephants are his favourite animals, the Devon author reveals, and he had always wanted to write about one. He had been fascinated about stories in which children are raised by wild animals, from the myth of Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, brought up by wolves, to the recent true-life case of the street child in Moscow who survived in the care of wild dogs.

Also in mind were much-loved stories that were read to him in childhood, including Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book and The Elephant's Child (from the Just So series) and William Blake's evocative poem The Tyger.

"All those things were in my head," he says, "but I thought they'd never come together in a book until I read about the boy who was riding an elephant – in Sri Lanka, I think – just before the tsunami struck on Boxing Day in 2004.

"The elephant sensed something and bolted inland.

"There were other scientifically corroborated stories of all kinds of creatures who seemed to sense the tsunami before it hit."

Other themes built in his mind, tying with the animal thread: reports that tigers will be extinct in the wild within 10 years and the last wild orang-utan gone in half that time.

In the case of the apes, this is happening because native rainforests are being ripped out and replaced with palm oil plantations, which provide an ingredient for food and cosmetics.

With the added theme of the war in Iraq, he felt not only that this was the time for the story, but that he had to write it.

Running Wild emerged. "It's about man's inhumanity to man, in warfare, and man's inhumanity to beasts, with the destruction of the planet," he says, in summary.

So was born another book tackling big issues and shot through with loss and pain from one of Britain's best-known, best- loved and most prolific writers for children.

The subjects of his 110 books include the foot-and-mouth disaster (Out Of The Ashes, 2001) and the horrors of war (Private Peaceful, 2003).

He has won a string of prizes, such as the Whitbread Award for The Wreck Of The Zanzibar (1995).

There have been several film, television and stage adaptations, among them the National Theatre's hugely successful production of War Horse, about the lives and deaths of the animals who served on the front line in World War One.

That tale is now a film project, scripted by Billy Elliot author Lee Hall, and there are plans to bring the play to the Plymouth Theatre Royal next year.

The story was inspired by a conversation Michael had with a veteran of the 1914-18 conflict a couple of decades ago in his local, the Duke of York in Iddesleigh, near Hatherleigh, where he is sitting now, sipping a fruit juice.

A saga of the pain and suffering of animals and humans in a war now fading into history was an unlikely subject for a children's book but succeeded through the author's gift for magical storytelling and his understanding of young minds and the way they work.

Michael doesn't lecture or even push points. He shows and guides and leaves young people to make their own informed choices.

Early on in Running Wild there is a beautifully simple, short passage about two males coping with the loss of a loved one: the boy's father, who has been killed in the Iraq war.

The lad's grandfather likens bereavement to a wound which needs covering with a plaster and time to heal. The injury can't get better if it is constantly examined.

"Sometimes – and I know it's not what some people think these days – but sometimes when you're hurting, I think the less said the better," the grandfather tells the boy.

Michael has been saying quite a few things himself that are unfashionable (at least with many politicians) for years now, most importantly that the rigid national curriculum and formal testing are generally stifling children's imagination and in particular putting them off reading.

As a result, they don't experience the 'sunlight' that a story can bring to a mind, he argues.

"There are some wonderful teachers, but some see books only as tools and words only as something to be spelled, written, produced: a series of problems to be tested," he says. "They don't enjoy the music, the magic of words."

The 66-year-old was schooled in a different era but suffered that loss and was not a good reader, 'whether through laziness or a bit of dyslexia, I don't know.' The music and magic only returned when he was read to as an adult – a university lecturer provided that spark – and later, as a qualified teacher, when he saw the stunning effect of a spoken story on much younger minds.

"I always kept half an hour free at the end of the day to read to the children in the class," he recalls.

"I could see the power: thirty-six 11- year-old faces lost in a story.

"The silence that descended on the children was amazing."

Some other European countries don't put children into formal school until they're seven. "Until that age they need home and play," he says. "By the time they're seven they're confident and they're up for it and ready for education. The narrow curriculum, the testing at 11, should all be ended."

The focus on literacy is correct, but carried out incorrectly, Michael believes.

"The only point of testing is so that the government can prove they're doing something about literacy."

That same desire is behind the 'nonsense' plans to subject to criminal records checks even people who have supervised contact with children in schools, such as authors like himself.

"All that is happening is that children are being inculcated with a suspicion of all adults," he says.

His concerns extend to fears which more and more concerned adults are voicing: that children are losing their childhood. "They're being constantly exposed to the problems of adulthood, through the internet, through television soaps," Michael says. "My grandchildren know more of the problems of the world than I did when I was 20: but understanding is a different thing. They see the world through a screen and can flick from death and destruction in Afghanistan to The Simpsons and Hollyoaks, but which of it is real to them?"

The escapism of the 'brilliant, wonderful' books of other authors such as Harry Potter creator JK Rowling and Philip Pullman, of the His Dark Materials trilogy, is one way to engage children, but he chooses to focus on the real world and particularly to help children 'empathise with the individual, not just the situation.

"I want to show them somebody from another culture, another place, another time, so they see they're not alone; other people are different; being different is fine."

Such empathy and understanding of young people was one reason why Michael became the third Children's Laureate (2003-05) and earned him the OBE for services to literature (2006).

He and his wife, Clare, were both awarded the MBE for their work for young people through Farms For City Children, the charity they founded in 1976.

More than 70,000 young people, mainly from inner-city areas, have had a glimpse of the different world of farming and the countryside in stays on the charity's three farms, in Devon, Wales and Gloucestershire. A key part of that experience is to encounter animals and make a connection across the species barrier, another recurring theme in Michael's books.

Clare remains president of the charity and Michael a board member, but in recent years both have stepped back a little. "We were both aware that other people with energy had to get involved because something like 60 per cent of charities don't survive their founders," he says.

The couple were married 'ridiculously young' – he was 19 – and brought up three children, one whom they adopted. They have seven grandchildren.

As for his own childhood, the trauma in it doesn't compare with the troubles experienced in the lives of some young people who visit the farms, though it was not conventional.

His parents were both actors, but were divided by World War Two. When father returned from the conflict in 1946 to find mother was living with another man, he left her and his children – Michael and his brother – with the stepfather and emigrated to Canada.

Michael didn't learn the full story until he was 19. He wasn't allowed to call his mother Mum and stepfather Dad; instead she was referred to as Kippe and he was Jack.

Michael didn't meet his birth father until he was in his mid-twenties, but they got on extraordinarily well, 'without the baggage', Michael has said. "I could see he was a man, not just a father."

He believes he was 'not a terrible father' himself, but has said he didn't give enough time and empathy to his children and feels more at ease with his grandchildren.

His own experiences as a child, as a father and grandfather and as a teacher (for 10 years before the charity was founded), and through constantly mixing with children on the farms and through readings and encounters in school, has given him 'an understanding of children,' he believes.

"I've worked through solutions to problems I've had and maybe I understand things a bit more than they do because I'vr lived through them, but children are able to deal with problems a lot more than we think," he says.

That considered, cautious approach – neither assuming he knows better nor talking down to children, in conversation, in the content and vocabulary in his books – helps set Michael apart. He gives the impression that he learns as much from children as they do from him.

Take the example of a young lad a quarter of a century ago who helped inspire the author's continual fascination with the relation between man and beast.

When Billy, 'a very sad, sensitive soul' from Birmingham, arrived on the Devon farm his teachers told Michael that he wouldn't speak because of a terrible stammer, and if stressed would 'do a runner.'

One autumn evening as darkness fell Michael was outdoors and heard a loud clear voice. He saw a figure silhouetted in the light from a stable and realised it was Billy, telling all to a horse.

"I stood to one side and listened and then I went and got the teachers and they listened too," says Michael.

"It was the most extraordinary moment, because I was convinced that the horse was listening.

"I'm not saying that it understood what was being said, but it knew the moment of communication was important and it taught me that children know that animals aren't a threat; they won't mock you."

Despite his fascination with animals, Michael hasn't had the companionship of a pet since Bercelet the lurcher died five years ago. "She was very much Clare's dog," he says. "We both decided that we shouldn't get another dog until we retire, because we travel so much.

"When we do, I think Clare would like something small and slim again because she has a husband who's stout."

Which leaves me to try to make an animal connection for Michael: an elephant, perhaps – he is a big beast of the children's literary jungle, powerful yet gentle and with a disarming grace and patience.

Running Wild is published by Harper Collins at £12.99