Spring by Michael Morpurgo: Salute to spring by our most beloved children's author
SPRING: THE STORY OF A SEASON by Michael Morpurgo (Hodder £16.99, 160 pp)
Spring is available now from the Mail Bookshop
Springtime is a delight for everyone after the dark days of winter, a season of excited birdsong and the bright colours of primrose and celandine, of powerful rebirth.
‘Nature renews and repairs herself every spring, helps herself, and we must not hinder her anymore.’ So writes Michael Morpurgo, the children’s author behind such classics as War Horse and Private Peaceful.
And it’s the English countryside that has inspired his writing as much as anything, especially the lovely rolling hills and fields, woods and rivers of that part of Devon, ‘between Dartmoor and Exmoor’, that has been his home for nearly 50 years.
Here he lives with his wife in an endearingly modest two-up, two-down farm worker’s cottage, with cob walls of mud and straw and, so he has been told, a dash of pig’s blood for extra stick and durability.
In his latest book, aimed at adults this time, he writes of Spring – when nature annually and magically renews her own childhood and youth. But there’s nature in the raw too, with both life and death ever present. One morning he sees a sparrowhawk pluck a blue tit straight off the garden birdfeeder – for ‘sparrowhawks, like blue tits, have to feed to live’.
This being pastoral and livestock country, there’s the joy of lambing but also the huge anxiety newborns might succumb to the fox or the cold. Nevertheless, the thrill of seeing them suckling, doing their vertical take-offs or one ‘standing up there on his mother’s back, surveying the field about him’, makes it all worthwhile.
Countryside lover: Morpurgo bastions the English countryside and all it has to offer to the wildlife that inhabit it
The other great feature of Morpurgo’s locality is the River Torridge – the home of Tarka the Otter, and much of Ted Hughes’ poetry. There Morpurgo sees the great grey shape of a heron as ‘it lifts off prehistorically,’ most pterodactyl-like of birds. Nor is he too fastidious to stoop down and identify the tarry stain of otter spraint, ‘black and fish-smelling on my fingertips’.
But alas the Torridge is in a bad state. Yes, even in wild high-rainfall Devon, our rivers are shamefully polluted and inimical to much wildlife. Morpurgo writes of this national disgrace with a quiet anger.
He and his family used to swim in the Torridge, but no longer. However, this is far more a celebration than a lament, and something of a wry self-portrait, too.
Quintessentially spring: the first spring lambs of the year call in the changing of the seasons
He admits to being a literal tree-hugger, loves the sense of connection, needs nature as much as simply appreciates it. He knows every field name on his farm: Innocents’ Close, Burrow Brimclose and Candlelight Meadow. Pure poetry.
And he relishes the humble, routine tasks of country life, like kale-picking in the morning in his wellies and pyjamas or seeing those constant companions of the traditional farmyard.
For all his sorrow at the damage we have done to our countryside, Morpurgo is an optimist and Spring is a gentle and joyous book.
Scattered throughout are some of his own poems and delightful illustrations by artist Charlotte Whatmore.
