Maev Kennedy 

First world war veterans in Devon pub led to Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse

Author reveals that fireside conversations at the Duke of York in Iddesleigh inspired him to write his bestselling novel
  
  

Joey, the puppet star of the stage version of War Horse, visits Iddesleigh
Joey, the puppet star of the stage version of War Horse, visits Iddesleigh, where Michael Morpurgo was inspired to write his novel. Photograph: Sam Frost Photograph: Sam Frost

Fireside conversations with first world war veterans, some speaking of their experiences for the first time, in the pub of a tiny Devon village inspired Michael Morpurgo to write War Horse, his bestselling novel which has become a much garlanded play, the author reveals in Saturday's Guardian Review.

The origins of the book lie in stories Morpurgo was told when he moved to Iddesleigh and the Duke of York became his local. Born in 1943, until then his knowledge of the war was largely confined to its poetry, including the work of his Belgian grandfather Emile Cammaerts.

In the pub, however, Morpurgo writes, he fell into conversation with a veteran, Wilf Ellis.

"He began telling me all about it, which was extraordinary because I don't think he'd ever spoken to any one in any depth or detail about his time in the trenches until he met me. He was a young man of 17 or 18 at the time, and he recounted, beside the fire in the Duke of York, what it was like to be there, to fight, and to be wounded and gassed … I didn't know him well, but he was confiding to me things that he had not wanted to speak of to his wife and family."

Another man in the village, Captain Budgett, had been with horses in the war.

"It was he who told me of the closeness, respect and love that there was between a man and his horse under such circumstances. At night he would go to the horse lines to feed and talk to his horse. He would tell his horse so much that was in his heart, perhaps his longing for home, his fear of tomorrow. He would put his hand on the horse's warm neck as he talked, and he told me that the horse listened - and Captain Budgett was not a sentimental man."

Another villager, Albert Weeks, contributed the last piece of the jigsaw. He remembered a sale on the village green when the army came to buy horses, and he was there when only some of the boys who left to join up came home.

When Morpurgo realised that seven of the boys who had left the tiny village had never come back, he knew he had to write. "I thought through the horse's eyes we could see the conflict from all sides, and tell the tale of the universal suffering in that war, and indeed all wars, and make it, above all, not simply a story of fighting, but of reconciliations."

"I thought: people have written about this war almost always from one side or the other - British, German, French, American or Canadian. I wanted to tell the tale from no side - from the point of view of a horse who leaves the farm in that Devon village, is sold, trained as a cavalry horse by the British, is soon captured by Germans, is used by them to pull ammunition cars, ambulances, guns, and who spends the winter on a French farm."

Morpurgo has written more than 120 books. He has said that War Horse is not his favourite, and thatin the past that he had feared his epitaph might read "Michael Morpurgo wrote Steven Spielberg's War Horse".

The book, originally published in 1982, did not initially sell particularly well, and Morpurgo spent years trying to turn it into a script before deciding that a tale which moves from rolling Devon farmland to tank battles on the Somme could not be adapted. Spielberg's 2011 film was disliked by many critics, but the National Theatre's stage adaptation is still touring the UK and the world in separate companies, and looks set to continue long beyond the centenary commemorations.

 

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