Michael Morpurgo: War Child to War Horse. Maggie Fergusson
Michael’s house was Galpin’s, Norman in origin. It was bordered on one side by the old pilgrims’ lodgings and on the other by the thick, flint city walls round which a night-watchman walked in the dark. He came right past Michael’s dormitory window, intoning ‘Twelve o’clock, fine night and all’s well’ as the great cathedral bell chimed midnight.
Canterbury Cathedral, soaring into the sky in Romanesque magnificence, seems to keep the school tucked beneath its wing. The public generally enters it by the massive Christ Church Gate, but the pupils of King’s slip in through a side door, which opens straight into what they call ‘the martyrdom’, where Thomas Becket was murdered in 1170. ‘There is a cathedral in the school grounds,’ a new boy once wrote home to his parents – King’s pupils feel that Canterbury Cathedral is theirs. Standing in the nave on a Sunday morning, staring up into the fan vaulting, with the organ thundering and the voices of 650 boys singing ‘All People that on Earth Do Dwell’, remains for Michael ‘one of the most extraordinary experiences on God’s earth’. And even more moving were the early-morning Communion services held in the candle-lit dimity of the cathedral undercroft, in the Chapel of Our Lady, next to Thomas Becket’s original tomb.
Michael at King’s School, Canterbury, 1959.
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.’
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.