Michael Morpurgo
- Name: Michael Morpurgo
- Date of Birth: 1943
- Place of Birth: St Albans
- Featured Title: Alone on a Wide Wide Sea
- First Book Published: It Never Rained (1974)
- Favourite Subjects: Rugby, Cricket & Geography
- See all titles from Michael
I am going to tell you about a book I've always loved, The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono. A young man backpacking around the hills of southern France in the years before the First World War comes across an old shepherd living on his own high in the mountains. It's an arid place of dust and wild winds. No birds sing here. The shepherd gives him shelter and food. Over supper the young man notices the shepherd counting acorns into a sack. When he goes off with his sheep early the next morning the young man goes with him. As the sheep graze all about him, he watches the old shepherd planting his acorns all over the hillside. He does this day after day, never saying why. After a while the young man goes off and then returns some years later to see if he can find the old shepherd again. The whole place has been transformed. The hillsides are green with trees. The old shepherd has turned a bleak wasteland into a paradise where birds sing, where flowers grow.
It is a fairy story I know, but the point is that as I read it that first time I believed it absolutely. I felt it was true, completely true, that I was the young man in the story. And even now, having read it again and again so often, I know it is true, not true in a literal sense of course. Each of us in our own way can and must try to leave the earth a better place than we found it, that we must leave a gentle footprint behind us, that we are remembered for what we have done, and only remembered as long as our story is told.
The book I've just finished Alone on a Wide Wide Sea is the story Arthur Hobhouse tells so that his children and his grandchildren should know he was there, that he was a happening. It's a story about how each of our stories of our lives affects other people's lives, that no man is an island, that each of our lives is a journey, always unpredictable, full of joys and sorrows, but that we have to live life to the full, and in hope. We have to believe that we can make things just a little better for those who come after us. It's what the old shepherd did in The Man who Planted Trees, and in his way it is what Arthur Hobhouse does in Alone on a Wide Wide Sea. I hope his story, which is my story, will stay with you as long as Jean Giono's old shepherd has stayed with me.
Michael Morpurgo is the author of many books for children, five of which have been made into films. He also writes his own screenplays and libretti for opera.
Born in St Albans, Hertfordshire, in 1943, he was evacuated to Cumberland during the last years of the war, then returned to London, moving later to Essex. After a brief and unsuccessful spell in the army, he took up teaching and started to write. He left teaching after ten years in order to set up 'Farms for City Children' with his wife. They have three farms in Devon, Wales and Gloucestershire, open to inner city school children who come to stay and work with the animals.
He is also a father and grandfather, so children have always played a large part in his life. Every year he and his family spend time in the Scilly Isles, the setting for three of his books.
