Book review: An Eagle in the Snow
WHEN children’s writer, Michael Morpurgo, was a young middle-class boy growing up in England in the 1940s and 1950s, life seemed very innocent at a time when parents could protect their offspring from the harsh realities of life.
“There was nothing intruding,” says the former UK Children’s Laureate best known for his novel, War Horse which was made into a hit musical and also a film directed by Steven Spielberg.
“The biggest intrusion was Listen with Mother (a BBC Radio programme for children.) Otherwise, you played outside and your mum read to you in the evening. She chose the books so you were guided. But now, that really has all gone.”
Seventy-two year old Murpurgo, who has written over 120 books, was in Cork recently at the invitation of Cork City Libraries. He enthralled 1,000 youngsters in Millennium Hall, City Hall, talking about his writing life and his fascinating novel, Listen to the Moon, inspired by an account he read of the sinking of the Lusitania off the Old Head of Kinsale in 1915.
This wise benign writer, a father of three and grandfather of seven, feels sorry for today’s children who, unlike his generation, grow up too quickly and are “traumatised by all kinds of things. There’s the pressure of expectation within the home and within the school. It’s all about being tested. And there’s this separation of success and failure from a very young age.
“As a result, children’s sense of failure and their lack of self worth are reinforced at a very young age. The other thing that happens, I’m afraid, is that when they’re successful, it’s overcooked. The children get to feel rather too special too young.”
It’s no longer possible to shield children from our troubled world, says Morpurgo. “Children now have a great ease of access to the world of social media and google or whatever it is. They’re in touch all the time and they see babies washed up dead on beaches (on screens.) What are we to do? Are we to write stories which just make the world out to be funny — which it isn’t.
“There are funny things in it and we’ve got to laugh from time to time, but if you are trying to convince them that that’s how life is going to be, then you’re just going to create disappointed children.”
Children today know that life is “more complicated”.
“Even the soap operas that they see on television are full of domestic strife. At least one third of children in the UK are from split families. So you can’t serve up stories about Janet and John and their nice little dog, saying that the world is sweet. As we grow up, we all have to confront the uncomfortable things in life like death and loss.”
But, he points out, too much choice is a problem. “We all have more choices than we had before. What do children do in their spare time? They are reading books but reading is only one of many choices. Books have to line up alongside video games and all those other things that occupy their hands and their brains.”
Morpurgo is pleased that children’s books are selling well but he is conscious of not reaching those children who don’t have a reading culture at all. “If they’re not read to at home and their teacher doesn’t read to them, an awful lot of children are freezed off from ever reading a book.”
An old fashioned story-teller, reared on Kipling and RL Stevenson, Morpurgo started his career as a primary school teacher in Kent where he taught for nine years. He and his teacher wife, Clare, gave up classroom teaching 40 years ago to set up a charity called ‘Farms for City Children’.
The aim is to relieve the poverty of experience of young children from inner city and urban areas by providing them with a week during which they work on a farm and learn about where food comes from. The couple now have three farms; in Wales, Gloucestershire, and Devon, where they live. Morpurgo estimates that 90,000 children have spent
a week on one of the farms.
He says he wasn’t disillusioned with teaching. “But I found it was limited by circumstances. Those kids who came from backgrounds where people talked, read books and did stuff, were going to do fine with or without me. But at least half the children in my class didn’t have that. No one seemed to pay any attention to those children. We thought that was wrong.”
And so, the Morpurgos started the farm project.
Morpurgo started writing while he was teaching. “I was trying to get my 10- and 11-year-olds focused on the excitement of listening to stories. One day, I was reading a book which didn’t work. I told my wife and she said I had bored the kids and suggested that I make up a story of my own.”
The children responded well to Morpurgo’s story, “not because it was a good story but because it was mine and I was telling it with even more passion than usual.”
He spun the story over several days. The head teacher sat at the back of the classroom one day and was impressed enough to suggest that Morpurgo send off his story to a contact of hers at MacMillan Publishers.
“I sent off the story. They wrote to me a month later and said they’d like five more stories. And they paid me £75.”
He has since been combining writing with helping kids to muck out on the farms, tend to animals and grow produce.
“In a way, it gave me a bit of sanity. One of the problems with teaching is that you can get sucked into it too much and your inner life can get left behind. I knew that was a danger. I needed something more than teaching.”
But in a subtle way, Morpurgo’s books are instructional. He says he “can’t do fantasy” like children’s writers including JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books. “I think there’s room for all of us. I deal with issues, history, and also there’s an element of adventure in my books. I have to have my books rooted in something that is true and real. Otherwise, I can’t seem to grow my stories.
“When I was little, I learned about history such as the Stuart rebellions in Scotland which RL Stevenson wrote about. I also learned from the books of JA Henty, which, when you look at them now, are awful. Henty wrote historical novels but they were heavily laden with the empire. But for a kid growing up in the 1950s, that didn’t matter too much.”
What would he say to parents who, despite their best efforts, find that their children eschew books for other distractions.
“At the age of seven or eight, I was profoundly put off reading by a school I went to (he attended several) where it was all about testing me and spellings. I just wanted to play outside.
“I hardly picked up a book from then until I was 16. I’m not a good reader now. I enjoy writing more. When it comes to (getting children) reading, you can’t force the issue. But the great thing is that if you sow the reading seed young, there’s a chance it will grow at some stage.”
Morpurgo doesn’t think that screens are going to take over from the printed word. “When ebooks came in, everyone thought there would be no (hard copy) books anymore. The ebook rose and rose — and then it flattened and it’s going down again. We are fascinated by the new.”
But as far as Morpurgo is concerned, classic old fashioned stories will always have a place in our at times scary new world.
His latest book, An Eagle in the Snow, is a gripping account of a man who had the opportunity to kill Hitler but failed to do so. It combines history with a great yarn. Vintage Morpurgo.
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