Interview Transcript

MIchael Morpurgo

Q: What do you think are the main challenges in setting a work of fiction in a historical period?

A: Well, I suppose the main challenge is to get it historically accurate without being too concerned about being meticulous about it. The problem is, that with history and the writing the fiction around history is that to some extent you have to have the history as your skeleton, your truth skeleton. But actually then you’ve got to forget it. Don’t forget the truth within it but you have to weave your story through the truths you’ve learnt and create a fiction. And that is never going to be true history. Some historians would say – many of them would say – that it’s corrupting history but actually, every time you’re writing a history book you’re doing the same thing because a book of history is always a work of opinion based on fact and it’s a question of which facts you emphasize. That’s what decides what kind of a truth you’re going to tell. All fiction does is to take that a stage further and, to me, that is wonderful if you do it right because it can have both the writer and the reader lose themselves to such an extent that they feel they’re living in that time and if you can do that and get that right, and I’ve done that a lot in my life.

I think it’s because I’m very, very connected to my own roots, to growing up in the 1940’s and to the roots of my family who of course grew up in the 1910’s, 20’s and 30’s. We do go back, we do come from somewhere and that past is really important and I do feel that if we don’t know about our past, if we’re not connected to our past, then how the Hell do we cope with life as it is now, with all its complexities? Particularly now for children because the world they see around them is massively complex and if you don’t know where, for instance, the history of this country and how it’s been for people of this country for the last hundred years, and if you don’t know what we’ve done in the world, how on earth could you begin to understand what are the causes of the conflicts, the causes of bad feeling and good feeling and what’s this all about unless you’ve kind of mapped out in your head some sense of where you are. And then maybe you can have some sense of where you’re going. So history seems to be, to me, the great springboard we all need and fiction, for me, is a great way of getting to understand that.

 

Q: How important was it for you in telling the story to represent different perspectives on the conflict?

A: Well, it was critical and I think I wouldn’t have attempted it unless I felt I could do that. Certainly, I batted away, very quickly, the idea of a telling a story which was one-sided, which in any way glorified victory - because there is no such thing – or glorified somehow that part of war which seems to be glorified a lot which is the excitement of it. That is not to say that war is not exciting. I think one of the things that’s happened, that I’ve learned from people who were there is that it’s very heightening. It may be dreadful but it’s very heightening and that’s a kind of an excitement.

But we also want to know the result of it and it’s the result of it, the grief that it causes. And, of course, what grief causes when someone has died, the dying is terrible enough and the manner of dying is terrible enough, and it’s usually young lives. Almost always it’s young people; it’s old men who send young men to war, that’s the way it’s always been. And I think it’s very, very hard if you’ve kind of concentrated a little bit on loss and I had in my own family history an uncle who died aged twenty-one. So, what do I know about that? Gradually, over my life I’ve thought about it a lot, a lot, a lot. What did my uncle Peter miss out on? Well, he missed being a father. He missed being a grandfather. He missed being around to see all these people you know and love grow up. And what a cutting short of promise that was. He was a very beautiful man, an extraordinary looking man. He was an actor and he died in a way which was useless. Utterly useless. And my mother suffered the grief of that all her life and you know that has happened millions of times in millions of families: Germany, Japan, Afghanistan, England, Scotland, Wales; it doesn’t matter where it is, this is what happens when men die and women die at war and when people on the ground are killed as well. So, for me, when I see, which you do, we all see on our televisions, we see some bomb going down on to a lorry crossing a bridge in Iraq and I think we’re supposed to think, ‘Isn’t that clever?’ when you’ve got a little cross and you see a (makes noise) and the lorry is not there anymore. And then you think, ‘Well, hang on… there was a father in that lorry.’ Now there are children grieving after that father, a wife grieving, and what are they going to feel about the people who dropped that bomb?

We know what happens. Grief and anger turn to revenge which is why the war seems to repeat itself. It’s interesting, historically; if you look at the First World War – which is, of course, what we’re supposed to be talking about. Well, at the end of that war it looked as if things had been resolved. They had a treaty and it looked as though it had all been set up. No it wasn’t. What actually happened was one side was humiliated. Quite deliberately. They had to pay for everything and they were humiliated they’d lost. And what grew out of that? What grew out of that was the most hateful regime the world has ever known and then another world war only twenty years later. I’m not quite sure why we call it the first and the Second World War, it’s one with a twenty-year gap between the two but the one is simply consequent of the other.

You know, I’m very interested also what might stop things. There was a moment in the First World War, which you will know about and most of us know about, in 1914 when British troops and German troops, on Christmas day, decided actually they’d like to say ‘Happy Christmas’ to the other side. And they all waved flags and they got up. They exchanged Schnapps and whiskey and sausage and biscuits, or whatever, and they played a game of football, which incidentally the Germans won as usual. But there we are. But the really interesting thing about it is that they got on. And they got on so well that, on both sides, the officers and the hierarchies were really worried that the men might make a sort of a peace, a truce, and then what do you do about your war if the people supposed to be fighting it don’t think it’s worth the fighting? But there was just a moment, just a moment, at Christmas 1914 when if it had gone on to the next day, and gone on – it’s rather like it’s Arab Spring stuff at the moment. If that had continued, then the First World War might not have gone on the way it did. If that had happened there would not have probably been the Russian revolution in the same way that it happened. We would never have had a second world war. That’s what’s fascinating about history: the ‘what-if’s’. Sadly, sadly, Christmas Day came to an end and they didn’t do it again.