Читать книгу Michael Morpurgo: War Child to War Horse - Maggie Fergusson, Maggie Fergusson - Страница 24

The influence of this devout environment is obvious in a diary Michael kept during the spring and summer terms of 1960, when he was seventeen. Day by day, he noted his sporting achievements, adding occasional jaunty reflections on events in the wider world: Saturday 27 February, ‘Princess Margaret is engaged to a photographer chap – Jones. ’Bout time too.’ But he rounded off almost every entry with an anxious, beseeching prayer, ‘God, Please aid me to do my best this term, and to enjoy myself, if it be your will. Please.’

Academically, his performance remained mediocre. On arrival at King’s he had been put in the B-stream, where he remained. Maths was particularly problematic. ‘He is not quick to learn,’ wrote the Maths master at the end of his first term, and his reports thereafter are beset with warnings that Michael might fail his O level – as indeed, on first go, he did. Even in English, and in creative writing, he showed little promise. In the composition section of the English Language O level, which he sat in the summer of 1959, he only just scraped through, with 56 per cent.

And yet, as his King’s friend Peter Campbell remembers, ‘he shone personally. He had an authority about him. He didn’t need to be part of the group.’ This is captured, for Campbell, in a photograph of the Rugby XV taken in his and Michael’s last year at the school. Fourteen of the fifteen – Campbell among them – are clearly part of a team; but Michael stands on the edge, chin defiantly in the air, staring outwards. This independence made him likeable and impressive both to his peers and to the staff. ‘He never makes a fuss, and so far as I know he never causes a harsh word or gets one,’ his housemaster, Richard Roberts, wrote at the end of his first term. ‘He has done well to qualify for promotion in the Corps so young.’