Michael Morpurgo

Michael Morpurgo, the author of some of the nation’s best-loved children’s books of our age, has lived for fifty years on Nethercott Farm adjoining the River Torridge in Devon. With his wife Kate, he founded an educational charity called ‘Farms for City Children’, to enable urban children to experience life in the countryside and on a farm for a week. This elegy to the coming of spring is a short but beautifully written evocation of that life. Organised into ten short chapters starting in March and ending in June, Morpurgo takes us through the passage of the season, often in the company of the poets and writers who have gone before him. With him we go to ‘the river where Tarka the otter lived’, where Henry Williamson and Seamus Heaney walked, ‘and the place where I set my story of Warhorse’. We find him in Bluebell Wood, sometimes talking to the trees and sometimes to himself. He and his wife, now both in their eighties, have learnt to avoid going in and out of the porch of the front door when the wrens are making their nests there, the car gives way to the returning swallows each year and the garage doors are left open so that they can build their nests in its eaves.
As the season progresses, the author describes the March wind coming ‘in ferocious gusts, shaking trees and house alike’ and remembers being storm-tossed all night, ‘or, as Ted Hughes puts it, ‘the house was far out at sea.’’
Morpurgo’s nature writing permeates the entire book, whether it is in watching down by the river as ‘a heron lifts off prehistorically from the far shore’, or later in the year, a pair of buzzards ‘floating over the village, over the flag flying on the village green, over the red telephone box that now houses the village defibrillator’.
But above all, there is a deeply abiding sense of continuity. As Morpurgo writes: ‘The seasons are the tides of our lives’. And as the burgeoning spring reaches its climax, he adds: ‘The year’s turned round again. I know the world is troubled and sad, but when I look about me and breathe in all the wonders, I know too that all shall be well’.