EVERY evening this last week before Remembrance Day we have seen the faces of young men smiling out at us from our television screens; Black Watch soldiers, sons, brothers, husbands, fathers, killed not in the fields of Flanders, not in some distant historical war, but only hours before. Alive yesterday. Dead today.
A fresh-faced lad from Fife has been blown up by a suicide bomber on some dusty road in Iraq thousands of miles from home. We see the house where he lived, see flowers laid: “To my daddy”. We’re told of a family devastated by grief. And our children are watching with us. They hear all this, see all this, feel all this. Can we shield our children from the pain and suffering of war? Should we even try? A young man has been brutally killed. He has died on our behalf. What should we tell the children? How shall we tell them? Can stories and poems help to make sense of all this?
There’s a glowing time in early childhood that most of us may not even remember, a time of blessed and brief innocence. My children and my grandchildren lived it and some of them are living it still, and each time I have relived it with them. That’s how I can be sure it happened to me too. With each child and grandchild it has been a chance to rediscover the child in myself, and also to indulge in that delightful and necessary conspiracy in which I suspend all the trials and tribulations of the real world I have come to know, and share with them for a while the wondrous worlds of Trumpton, and Thomas the Tank Engine, and The Wombles, and The Clangers, and Winnie the Pooh and Peter Rabbit. This is a time of pure delight, when we can live together for a while in contented reassuring worlds of stories where we know for sure that all will be well for those we love, be it in Hundred Acre Wood or on Wimbledon Common. There may be an interfering Fat Controller or the threat of a Mr McGregor; but we know it will all turn out just as we’d hoped it would, that Thomas and Peter and Pooh will be fine.
It is a cuddly comfortable time, and so it should be in those early years. There may be Wild Things or Gruffaloes, a little scary perhaps, but never hiding-behind-the-sofa scary, more marvellous and magical than truly monstrous. Dark clouds in those early years should never be that dark, and anyway should always give way to sunshine.
But then gradually, gradually there comes a time — and when it comes varies with every child — when they seem to want more from a story than mere comfort and reassurance, for they are becoming more aware of some of the difficulties and dangers and sadnesses of the world they live in, and need to find these complexities reflected in stories and poems. Sadly this gradual transition, this awakening of awareness, is not allowed to be as gradual as it once was. Indeed, it seems to be accelerating more rapidly with each generation.
For most children now, it is the screen that rules: the television, the video, the DVD, the video game, the computer. While there are of course many television programmes and films sensitively and intelligently devised for children (BBC’s Newsround is a great example of this), young children soon turn for preference to programmes and films enjoyed by their elders. And because one aspiration leads inevitably to another, very soon children are watching to a great extent whatever it is that their older brothers and sisters watch or their parents watch, and much of this will be dealing with the world of adults. Just one episode of EastEnders or The Bill may involve domestic violence, rape, incest, adultery and death. A look at the 6pm BBC News might bring paedophilia or a school massacre or war or all three into the sitting room within the space of ten minutes.
So this generation of children is brought face to face with this hugely disturbing world, sometimes even before they can comprehend the difference between fact and fiction. The world of gentle dreams has all too suddenly become a world of hideous nightmares. What took me 20 or more years to discover, to assimilate, to begin to comprehend, now takes perhaps ten years for the child of today, who has been “untimely ripped” from that glowing time. Many efforts have been made over the years to slow this process down, to protect the child for as long as possible, because we knew how traumatic it can be for a very young child to have to come to terms with the stark realities of our modern world. But the truth is that, try as we must to protect our children from the worst effects of this all-pervading assault on their senses, it will be sooner rather than later that the child of the 21st century will have to learn to deal with issues and feelings hitherto thought to be the preserve of adults.
It is against this background that children choose (or do not choose) books to read, that writers like myself write books for young people. It seems clear that books should not and cannot exist in some cosy isolation — and in any case if they do they will simply not be read. Books must be part of this ever-burgeoning early awareness and self-awareness. They cannot be used to hold back the tide. On the contrary, they must surf the waves of concern and anxiety with the children and so help to enable children to find their own sense of balance and power. In so doing they will discover, through reading, the sheer exhilaration of discovery, making some sense of it all.
Despite its dangers this fast-track growing does have some surprising benefits, one of them being that, in a sense, the worlds of the child and the adult have come closer together. More of our preoccupations seem to be shared. Perhaps one of the great strengths of children’s writing at present is that because the writer and reader no longer feel the experiences of childhood and adulthood to be as separate as they once were, writers feel they are free to tackle just about any subject that interests them, the presumption being that the child belongs to the same world, that the story will resonate as much for adult writer and child reader alike. So called “cross-over books” are no accident, I think. The blurring of this arbitrary division between child and adult seems one of the more positive outcomes of the accelerated growing of children. We have, it seems, been brought closer together. I think I have always considered we were close anyway, that the child and the childishness in us is never “put away”, as St Paul suggests it should be, but remains the heart of who we are, of what we grow up to be. So when I begin to think about writing a novel, I do not consider whether my story might be suitable for a child, nor even whether a child reader might like it. The only consideration is whether the story interests me sufficiently; whether I am, or can become, passionate about it.
Like many of my fellow children’s writers (and illustrators and storytellers and poets) I have made hundreds of visits to schools and conferences and festivals all over the world. Questions are often challenging. From a nine-year-old last year: “To be a writer you need knowledge and imagination. Which is the more important of the two?” I am still thinking about that. But more commonly asked is this: “In your books like War Horse, like Friend or Foe, like Billy the Kid, like Waiting for Anya, like Private Peaceful, you write about war. Why do you do that? Why are they so sad?”
“Because,” I reply, “I write about what I know about, what I care about. I know what war does to people, because I grew up in London just after the Second World War, a London of bombsites and ration books. I played in bombsites (surely the best playgrounds ever made). We had cellars for dens, crumbling walls to climb, and among the rubble I made endless finds — an old kettle, a shoe, a penny coin, a burnt book; they all became my treasures. Only later came the growing awareness of what the war had done, not just to buildings, but to people’s lives.
“My mother often wept when she talked about the war. On the mantelpiece was a photo of my uncle Pieter, shot down in 1941, two years before I was born. He looked back at me when I looked at him, and I knew he wanted to say something but couldn’t. I used to talk to him sometimes, I remember. I wanted to get to know him. A friend of the family used to come for tea sometimes. I was always told I must not stare at him, but I always did. I could not stop myself. His face and hands were horribly scarred. I knew he had been shot down in the war and suffered dreadful burns. Here’s what the war did. It burned flesh. It killed my uncle. It made my mother weep. So I grew up with the damage of war all around me. I learnt that buildings you can put up again, but that lives are wrecked for ever. And why are the books sad, you asked? Because, believe me, war IS sad.”
I know this not just because of my own experience as a child growing up after a war, but also by talking to those who fought in war. The first book I ever wrote about war, some 20 years ago, was War Horse. The chance discovery of a painting of British cavalry charging up a hill into barbed wire in 1914, and a conversation in my local pub with an old soldier who’d been to that war as a trooper in a cavalry regiment, gave me the idea of how I might tell a story of the universal suffering of all sides in that war seen through the eyes of a horse. Joey, a farm horse, trained to the plough on a Devon farm, would be sold to become a British cavalry horse, captured by the Germans to pull ambulances and guns, would winter on a French farm, and all the time would get to know those who trained him, rode him, abused him, looked after him, loved him. We would see them and the war through his eyes and his ears. So I could tell my story not from one side or the other, but from all sides. This November 11, 90 years after the beginning of that “war to end all wars”, the book has been newly designed, and illustrated by the great French illustrator François Place to celebrate the simultaneous publication in French, German and English of a book about war but also about a yearning for peace and reconciliation.
But of all my books that touch on war Private Peaceful might seem the one that is too harsh, too painful for a young audience. I wrote it because I discovered on a visit to Ypres that more than 300 British soldiers were shot by firing squad in the First World War for cowardice or desertion. Trials for a man’s life were brief, sometimes less than half an hour. Witnesses were often not available. At best it was rough justice, at worst not justice at all. I read of one young man of 18 who had fought through the Somme. In rest camp one day with the guns still firing he turned to his friend and said that he “couldn’t stand the sound of the guns any more, that he was going home”. He was arrested, tried and condemned. Men from his own company were obliged to make up the firing squad. In protest they stood over his grave till sunset. I wanted to write that young soldier’s story.
In Private Peaceful I become Tommo Peaceful, a young soldier sitting in a barn in Belgium waiting for dawn. To make the night as long as my life, I don’t want to sleep it away or dream it away, I try to remember as much of my life as I can. I am five. It’s my first day at school. I am dreading it. but my elder brother Charlie is with me. He’ll look after me. And Charlie does look after me all the way through his short life, right to the very end. The reader, young or old, can grow with Tommo through his childhood and his adolescence, can go to war with him, can become a man with him, can live that last night of his life with him, the watch ticking away the minutes till dawn.
Simon Reade, artistic director at the Bristol Old Vic recently adapted the book brilliantly for the stage, a one-man show, with Paul Chequer as Tommo. When the play ends with a volley of shots and an empty stage, we hear the last few chords of Thomas Tallis’s Spem in Alium. Then there is absolute darkness and silence. Child and adult in the audience have gone with Tommo to his death, to his darkness, to his silence. Age difference means nothing, absolutely nothing. I hope it is like that with the book.
© Michael Morpurgo October 2004
The author’s visit to the First World War battlefields will feature on the Remembrance Sunday special of Go For It, BBC Radio 4, on Sunday at 7.15pm. War Horse is published by Egmont, £7.99. Private Peaceful is published by Collins, £5.99.
DEBATE
How much should we tell children about war? E-mail debate@thetimes.co.uk
DADDY WON’T DIE
RUTH COPPARD
Child Psychologist
Barnsley NHS Trust
CHILDREN tend to absorb what they are ready to learn and dismiss the rest. If a child is very keen to sit and watch the news with you, then let them, and answer their questions afterwards. But don’t say, ‘Come and sit with me’. If a child asks a question then they are ready to hear something about that subject, but you need to be careful what you say. If a child asks, ‘Is Daddy going to die?’ then (assuming your family is not in the military) you should start out by saying, ‘Daddy isn’t a soldier.’ Then you might say that one day Daddy will die — so will everyone — but hopefully not for a long time. Help children to be realistic. Get out a map and point out that Iraq is far away. You might tell them how long it would take to get there. But children may not be as anxious as you think. Last year I gave two classes of 9 to 10-year-olds a series of questionnaires on the Iraq war. I thought they would have more anxiety and dreams as the weeks went on, but only a couple of children showed heightened sensitivity. Like the rest of us, they knew that it wasn’t going to affect them directly.
