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why did michael morpurgo write war horse

20 de outubro de 2020 , por

For they are integral in animating this heart-rending story, which has become so well loved by millions. I was learning what war did. It’s powerful. Ten years on, after seven million people have seen it worldwide, from Belgium and China to America and Canada, and from Australia to Japan and Germany, the play returns to tour the UK again this autumn. But I did.

Clare agreed.

He was a war baby, born in 1943 and with the devastation of the Second World War looming large over his childhood – his mother’s brother Pieter, an RAF pilot, was shot down in 1940, and Morpurgo grew up playing in the bomb sites of post-war London. We used to see an old soldier, with his medals up, sitting on the corner of Philbeach Gardens, with his dog. It’s important that you’re not somehow moving away from it because it’s for kids, or it’s told by a horse.

The right person was Clare, the daughter of Penguin publisher Sir Allen Lane, whom he married at 19. For all of us on our way to school through foggy streets, there were bomb sites everywhere. “I never thought about it being a film when I was writing it.

He had been in the Fleet Air Arm. In the classroom I couldn’t do that and the very children who needed it most weren’t getting it.

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It also explains why he might have a penchant for treading the boards, albeit in a very modest way. They fought and died the same way. But the rule I developed as a teacher was to talk to them straight and tell them how you see the world. The story of one of the one million horses taken to Europe by the British Army in the First World War, War Horse is told from the neutral point of view of Joey, who goes to the front as a cavalry horse, is captured by the Germans and is used to pull ambulances and guns. “I was away at school from a very early age and grew up fairly fast in terms of being able to survive, but less fast emotionally.

Thousands of children have taken part in the scheme, and in 1999 the couple were awarded MBEs in recognition of these services to youth, with Morpurgo later elevated to OBE for his services to literature. He was 21, a Rada-trained young actor before he put on a uniform.

“I couldn’t visualise at all how they could make something as serious as this story should be if puppets were a part of it.”.

“I never sit down and write a book for children as I don’t know how to do that – all children are different. A wonderful doctor called Dr McIndoe had patched him up in hospital.

“I only came into the joy of writing through the power of stories.

Already have an account with us? Then he becomes indignant: “Michael Gove recently said he didn’t want people with third class degrees to be teachers.

Well, his publicist.

“What war does to people and buildings affected me a lot and it stayed with me.

Save up to £497* a year -Compare Lots of Deals - Switch in Minutes. I get a sense of belonging and I love the camaraderie of the theatre, being involved in storytelling.

War Horse author MICHAEL MORPURGO — one of the judges of a new Government history prize — explains why the derring-do of British heroes fired his imagination as a boy. Video: Meet Joey, the equine star of War Horse. To know these great men of literature was wonderful for a young writer; to sit at the feet of such wisdom around the table.

The other writer I really admire is Robert Louis Stevenson, for his gift of narrative. It occurred to me then that I might try to tell the story of that war, of the horror of it, of the universal suffering, through the eyes of a horse, a farm horse sold away from my village in Devon as many were, a beloved horse of a farm boy who joins up, as many did, but this one joins up to find his horse, his Joey.

From talking to them I came closer to war than I ever had before: the fighting, the fear, the courage, the camaraderie, the suffering, the dying and the grieving. He lives for a time of blessed peace on a French farm not far from the front.

It made me terribly proud.

The author has just finished another novel set during the Great War period.

Respite came, however, when he was sent away to boarding school, in Devon and later in Canterbury, where he survived by being good at sport and marching up and down the parade ground in the school’s cadet corps. You could ignore the cold dormitories and occasional beatings because it happened to us all,” he says.

Only 65,000 came home.

He has great vision and there are many things I love about the film, but for me the play’s the thing. “Clare would come down to Iddesleigh and stay with friends at the Duke of York pub in the village and spend her days wandering the lanes and fields of the remote Devon countryside, riding her favourite horse, Captain.

Fast forward through the years, to a meeting with an old soldier in our local pub in Devon, not from the war that had so overshadowed my early life, but from the war before that, the First World War, which I now knew was at least in part responsible for the rise of Fascism in Germany and the Second World War. Morpurgo believes the story appeals to children because the central character is a boy whom they can relate to.

From him I learnt of the deep bond of affection and trust and respect between horse and soldier. War Horse author Michael Morpurgo on his influences As his equine hero Joey takes to the Scots stage, writer Michael Morpurgo recalls his own history of war and wonder.

He’s made many trips to Scotland over the years, and has strong views about its connections to its larger, more powerful neighbour. You learn quickly that you can’t. That kind of confidence can tip over into arrogance and not wanting to empathise. I saw it once, memorably, this great anthem to peace and reconciliation, in Berlin, in the very theatre where the Kaiser had once sat, and Hitler too. That’s what war does, historically: it begins other wars. As the song in War Horse goes, they are “only remembered for what they have done”. That has real power right the way through – 36 people working their socks off in a carefully woven patchwork, live, and that’s completely convincing. We have great debates about the future. “But it turned out we had this father out in Canada. He’s had plenty of practice, with 120 books to his name since he started writing in 1974. “We’re just going past a bus with a War Horse poster on it,” he laughs. But you believe it.

And I thought as I watched the play and heard German actors singing English folk songs in German that my uncle Pieter, my actor uncle, who had died so young in the war that followed this “war to end all wars”, would have loved this, as would the three old men from my village who had told me their stories, as would the old soldier with one leg sitting on the street corner, as would Eric Pearce, so scarred by war. War Horse study guide contains a biography of Michael Morpurgo, literature essays, a complete e-text, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. He’s the greatest author in the English language, one of those rare writers who does character and dialogue so well. Never talk down to them.”. “I then decided to go and talk to one of the other men and he told me how he had worked with horses during the war and the relationship they developed and how they relied upon each other. “I was born in 1943 so grew up in a post-war period, a time when London had been bombed and people were reeling from it,” he says.

There can’t be a schoolchild in the country who hasn’t read or listened to one of his tales, often featuring animals, and he has won the Smarties Prize, the Whitbread Award and the Blue Peter Book Award, and was Children’s Laureate from 2003-2005. Van Bridge emigrated to Canada.

“What I did feel when I left school was supremely confident.

I got lucky and met the right person and got drawn back from the brink.”. It was a battle in which half a million young Uncle Pieters died on all sides, men who live on, most forgotten now, in faded family photographs, on war memorials, on gravestones.

If only horses could talk. I think it’s a retrograde step to be separating into different countries because we live in a world where we should be joining together.

And now as the country marks the centenary of the start of the Great War, Morpurgo hopes War Horse will help young audiences understand more about it. The only horse puppet I’d seen was a panto horse.

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