His own best story

A biography that is also a collaboration with its subject is something of a novelty. Here, Maggie Fergusson writes the life, while Michael Morpurgo contributes seven stories, each springing from the subject matter of the preceding section.

Fergusson has previously written an excellent biography of George Mackay Brown, so has now moved from a detached consideration of a person no longer alive to work on and with someone very much around and active (who had himself proposed the idea of the book). In other words, this is a very different sort of project— and it could be said right away that this is no hagiography. Fergusson is much too subtle a writer for that, and what she has done is to present, with tact and insight, a man who is clearly complex, ferociously energetic, idealistic, not always easy to get on with, but — at least in the words of his friend Philip Pullman — ‘a truly good man’.

Morgurgo likes to think of himself as a storyteller rather than a writer, and stresses the affinity with the theatre and love of being on stage: ‘It’s what I feel I should be doing.’ His mother, Kippe (somewhat oddly named after a Belgian hamlet), had been to Rada and then in repertory before being swallowed up by motherhood and a suffocating marriage. His father — as opposed to his stepfather, Jack Morpurgo, whose name Michael was given as a child — was a professional actor. His grandfather was a Belgian poet — ‘Belgium’s Rupert Brooke’ — hence the Belgian hamlet, of patriotic significance in the first world war.

So the stage connection is there, within the family, and along with it a family story that upstages most others — callous, self-sacrificing and sad.