Michael Morpurgo Meet the Author

meters are welcomed by consumer groups. Now it is time for Meet the

Author. My guest today describes himself

as oldish, married with three children, and a grandfather

eight times over. But there is far more

to his story than that. Michael Morpurgo is the author

of more than 130 books, the most famous being War Horse,

which he wrote in 1982. It tells the story of

the First World War through the eyes It was later turned into a play

at The National Theatre, and since then it has become

an international phenomenon. It has been seen by more

than seven million people around the world, taken more

than ?300 million at the box office The play has run for seven

years in London. It finally comes

to an end this month. War Horse has been good

to you, Michael Morpurgo. I wonder how sorry you are

that it is coming to an end How could you be sorry after seven

or eight years of it, I shall miss it for a bit,

but then it's going on tour in a year's time around the UK,

so it will come back again, I think, and I hope it

will come back to London too. We have got some

scenes from the show. I, Albert Narracott,

do solemnly swear that we shall You must have seen those 100 times,

you'e still smiling. I wonder, what was your response

when you were first approached I mean, it came over the phone,

the conversation, an invitation really to go to London to see

the work on camera of Handsspring It was Tom Morris, who was creative

director at The National Theatre, I have to say, I thought it was not

a good idea to do it with puppets. I would love to be able to say,

yes, I was right behind it I was behind the fact

it was The National Theatre, because they had done wonderful work

with Philip Pullman's book They had done these wonderful shows

which reached out to a new audience. So I was flattered they wanted to do

it with War Horse. Then they said they were going to do

it with puppets, and I thought, Puppets, the First World War,

how is that going to work?" So I did not have faith

until I saw the puppets, and in fact I saw a giraffe

which these Handsspring Puppets people had made, walking

across a studio floor, I was thinking, excuse me,

this is not even a real giraffe, Somehow, it was so extraordinarily

moving, this kind of connection But even then, I still couldn't see

how they were going to weave And the rest, as they

say, is history. Let us take you back to the early

80s, when you wrote this book. I moved to Devon with my family,

and got to know people Among them were three old men, then,

who had been alive at the time And I got talking to them,

and one of them told me one day The conversation went on and on,

and it then became a monologue, and it was about his time

in the First World War. It was fascinating for me,

because of course I had, like so many, I had read my

First World War poets, I had been brought up

on all that stuff. But here I was, sitting

across the fire side at my local pub, talking to someone who had

actually been there. I was just blown away,

is the modern expression, I think, by, I suppose,

the simplicity of what he said, the seriousness of what he said,

the cruelty of it all. The futility, as

Wilfred Owen put it. I just went home and I could think

of nothing else and could any of nothing else, and then rang up

the Imperial War Museum and asked many horses had gone

to the First World War. They said about a million from these

shores, and I said how Because I had already had the idea

in the pub of writing this story I absolutely wanted this to be

a story of thes First World War told through the eyes of a neutral

observer, connected to the British, connected to the Germans,

connected to the French and Belgians over whose land the war

had been fought. I thought that was the way to tell

it anew, and also to bring it to young people, so they could have

some kind of way of being introduced Because it's easy to forget,

isn't it, that when the book first came out it wasn't reviewed very

widely, and when it was, No, it took The National Theatre

to come along, and 25 years later for goodness sake,

and that is because it suited what Tom Morris

at The National Theatre was looking for, which was a story which had

at its heart an animal, so that he could use both the great

stage at The National Theatre and Handspring Puppets -

and they're wonderful puppets - I don't know what to call it -

a play, a musical, a show. It's a theatrical

phenomenon, really. He and Marianne Elliott

and Nick Hytner, they wove This was one of your earliest books,

you have written dozens since then. How comfortable do you feel

with the fact that this is the book For goodness sake, to be defined

by a book, it's as good as anything. Actually, so many of the books

that we know and love and we grow up with - you know, Wind

in the Willows, you have to think twice before you remember who wrote

it, do you know what I mean? All right, I know,

but you do have to think. That's what really counts

and it is the book. What's really lovely

is there have been other books. This is my wife's favourite book,

and that irks me, because she always said it was good, and her favourite,

and she still says it's the best book I have written,

and that is some 80 books later. Apart from that, it is just

wonderfully lucky it Your wife's favourite book,

is it your favourite book? No, the sequel of it,

which is called Farm Boy, It's much shorter, it's more

intense, and it's about what happens to the horse when the horse, Joey,

comes back to the farm at the end It's set on the farm where live,

as indeed is War Horse, but I don't know, I was more

connected to the countryside then and to farming and the way of life,

and so I wrote it, I think, I mean, I like War Horse,

don't get me wrong, but there have But if you were to go back to it,

Michael, would you change it? You know, it's not holy writ -

a story is a story is a story. What's good is I think

I got it almost right, and what I love about a play,

and indeed I love about a film and a concert is the way it shines

a new light on the story and tells it differently, and

that is fine by me. I wouldn't want anyone to sort

of trim it down by 20,000 words and just keep in the best bits

about the horse, no. War is a recurring theme

in your novels, why is that a subject that you return

to time and time again? Well, writers have to write

about what they care about, what they know about,

what they feel they understand. All my books about war are finally

about our longing for peace If there is a message,

which I'am not trying to do, I'm trying to tell a story,

but the message inside me is the shaking of the hand

between the German soldier and the Tommy soldier in no-man's

land in War Horse. It's about people coming together,

and out of the ashes of war, Michael Morpurgo, it's been lovely

to talk to you, thank you. A lad of dry weather in the week

ahead and it