Not Bad for a Bad Lad (7 page)

As for Miss West, she wrote to me a few months ago, out of the blue, after she’d seen a picture of me in the paper. She’s in a home now, in Sussex, but still hale and hearty at ninety-three. We go and have tea with her, your Grandma and me, and talk about the time when I was Drum Cupboard Monitor. I always
feel about ten years old when I’m with her. Funny that. I feel so lucky that we found one another again after so long.

All in all, I’ve been a lucky lad, luckier than I
deserve
, that’s for sure. I’ve had my children and my grandchildren, and I’ve had Grandma with me all these years. It’s her that’s kept me going. She bucks me up when I need it, and I’ve needed it a lot, needed her a lot. Sometimes she says I still love Dombey more than I love her, which is not true.

But it’s a close thing.

Michael Morpurgo is, in his own words, “oldish, married with three children, and a grandfather six times over.” Born in 1943, he attended schools in London, Sussex and Canterbury. He went on to
London
University to study English and French, followed by a step into the teaching profession and a job in a primary school. It was there that he discovered what he wanted to do:

“We had to read the children a story every day and my lot were bored by the book I was reading. I
decided
I had to do something and told them the kind of story I used to tell my kids… I could see there was magic in it for them, and realised there was magic in it for me.”

In 1976 Michael and his wife, Clare, started the
charity
‘Farms For City Children’ (FFCC), which gives young children from inner city and urban areas an opportunity to work on farms in the heart of the countryside. They now have three farms and Michael is patron to many, many more charities.

Michael divides his time between working with
children
on the farms and writing. “For me, the greater part of writing is daydreaming, dreaming the dream of my story until it hatches out – the writing down of it I always find hard. But I love finishing it, then… sharing my dream with my readers.”

Michael Foreman grew up during the Second World War in the fishing village of Pakefield in Suffolk. As the beach was sprinked with mines and covered with barbed wire, bombsites became his playground. His mother ran the Pakefield newsagent and it was during his daily paper round that Michael met a teacher from Lowestoft Art School who encouraged him to attend his Saturday art class for children. Michael’s talent was obvious, so his teacher suggested that he come to the art school two afternoons a week, eventually
attending
the art school full time.

Michael’s first book,
The General
, was published while he was still a student at the Royal College of Art in London. Since that first book, Michael has
become
one of the greatest creators of children’s books of recent times. A great traveller, he has illustrated
collections of fairytales and legends from all over the world, as well as the works of Dickens, Shakespeare, Roald Dahl, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis
Stevenson
and many others. His most famous,
award-winning
collaboration is with Michael Morpurgo. This book is their twenty-third book together.

Michael has also written and illustrated an amazing collection of books himself, many based on personal experience, including the autobiographical
War Boy
, which won the Kate Greenaway Medal, and
War Game
, which won the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize.