Читать книгу Michael Morpurgo: War Child to War Horse - Maggie Fergusson, Maggie Fergusson - Страница 19

Like many of the other Abbey parents, Kippe and Jack barely ever came to visit the boys, so that even on ‘Leave-out’ Sundays the only hope of escape was to angle for an invitation from Humphrey and Peregrine Swann to join them, with their parents, for lunch at the Letherby and Christopher Hotel in East Grinstead. But success in sports, and in the choir, earned Michael visits to the cinema, and even, on one never-to-be-forgotten occasion, a trip to the opera. Mr Gladstone, the most sympathetic of the three headmasters, drove the boys in his black Humber convertible, he and his wife, Kitty, in the front, Michael and two others in the back. They purred through the summer dusk, the Downs stretching before them. The memory remains magical.

What did they wear for that outing? Such things mattered to Michael. His two most treasured possessions at the Abbey were the red ribbon he was awarded as Chief Chorister, and the green velvet cap that marked him out as Captain of Rugby. He felt most at home in a costume: ‘I liked playing a part,’ he says. ‘It meant I could forget about myself.’

For Michael, forgetting about himself was a relief, because he was always unsure of who exactly he was. On the rugby pitch, while the other boys cheered his courage, he felt afraid and oddly detached. ‘When I went in for a tackle, I did it closing my eyes because I was so scared,’ he says. ‘Part of me was there, in the scrum; but part of me was standing at the side of the pitch, watching.’

Homesickness afflicted Michael throughout his years at the Abbey, and beyond. It began to take a hold about a fortnight before the end of the holidays, when his stepaunts, Bess and Julie, fetched their sewing baskets and got busy with nametapes. Soon afterwards the brown leather trunk was hauled out, packed, and delivered to the station to travel in advance – ‘and you knew from that moment that you were on a wave that would carry you, like it or not, back to school’. Then came the last supper (always shepherd’s pie), the last night at home, and the dreaded journey.

On Victoria Station, in those days, there was a small newsreel cinema, to which Kippe would take the boys for a final treat before surrendering them to the barrel-chested rugby master, Mr Beagley. This was a boon. The cinema’s dark interior served as a kind of decompression chamber where, as Bugs Bunny or Mickey Mouse flickered on the screen, Michael could allow his ‘home’ self to slip away, and arm himself for school.

After that, it was best if Kippe left quickly. She was the focus for Michael’s homesickness, but she was also an embarrassment to him. When they married, Kippe and Jack had decided that, as Pieter and Michael could not be expected to call Jack ‘Daddy’, they should cease to call Kippe ‘Mummy’. They should address them both simply as ‘Kippe’ and ‘Jack’ – and any further children born to them should do the same. The boys at the Abbey, quick to spot chinks in one another’s emotional armour, homed in on this oddity. ‘Jack is not your real father,’ they taunted, ‘and Kippe is a weird name.’ So it was a relief, really, when she turned to walk away, wrapped in her fragile sadness, smelling of face powder. Michael could then settle into the corner of a railway carriage. To prevent himself from crying he concentrated on following raindrops down the thick windows with his finger, as the train wound out through South London, which was still pockmarked with bomb damage.

Yet, as the terms passed, Michael became aware that there were things about school that he was growing not just to tolerate but to love.

The Abbey is set on high ground, and to the south its gardens tumble gently downwards, allowing wide views over Ashdown Forest. Between the formal garden and the forest were forty acres of school grounds, and on summer evenings the boys were left to ‘play out’ here, unsupervised, until the light failed. The memory of these evenings remains vivid and glorious – ‘I was at that age when one is wide open to everything, antennae out.’ These were hours of camps and camaraderie, of whittling arrows with sheath knives and exchanging secrets.

Winter evenings had a different charm. One of the headmasters, Mr Frith, regularly invited a group of boys to come to his study after supper and sit by the fire in their pyjamas. He served orange squash and biscuits, and read aloud from the novels of Dornford Yates: thrillers which had been very popular between the wars, and in which the narrator-hero, Richard Chandos, drove about the Continent in a ‘Rolls’ tackling crime and hunting treasure. Michael loved these evenings – the warmth, the involvement in a story, the feeling of belonging. He slept well after them.

He was not, himself, a great reader – or at least not the kind that Jack Morpurgo would have wished him to be. The leather-bound copies of Dickens that Jack periodically put Michael’s way were unappealing to him, and to this day he has to overcome a psychological block before tackling large books, and cannot happily read for more than an hour at a stretch. But he was saved from Jack’s contempt by a series called Great Illustrated Classics – easy-to-read, large-print abridgements which, borrowed from other boys and studied in secret, enabled him to pretend that he had read not only much of Dickens, but also of Homer, Dostoevsky and Sir Walter Scott. Privately, meantime, he was developing his own taste for really good yarns, in which pictures relieved his fear of text, so that the text could create pictures in his mind. He devoured the novels of G.A. Henty, of Kipling and, above all, of Robert Louis Stevenson: ‘I was Jim Hawkins,’ he says, remembering his first reading of Treasure Island. ‘I was in that barrel of apples on the deck of the Hispaniola; I overheard the plots of mutiny.’

He was gripped, too, by the stories of real men. On the ground floor of the Abbey was a library, a dark, musty room, whose deep leather armchairs gave the atmosphere of a gentleman’s club, and whose glass-fronted bookcases reached to the ceiling. The shelves were filled, for the most part, with books that had belonged to Sir Abe Bailey; and among these were bound copies of the Illustrated London News, stretching back to the mid-nineteenth century. Michael spent hours of his free time poring over black-and-white pencil sketches of soldiers fighting and dying in the Crimea and in the Balkan Wars.

History lessons fed Michael’s appetite for heroes. He remembers marvelling at the courage of Joan of Arc, steadfast at her stake as the flames began to lick around her (he would later write a book, Sparrow, about her); at the cunning of William the Conqueror, instructing his archers to fire into the air so that Harold’s men would look up and get arrows in their eyes; at the valour of Simon de Montfort as he fell to his death at the Battle of Evesham.