Michael Morpurgo by Maggie Fergusson
Author:Maggie Fergusson [Maggie Fergusson and Michael Morpurgo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2013-08-30T12:00:00+00:00
Children from Chivenor School, Castle Vale, watch the birth of Poogly’s calf, January 1976.
He was not alone. As one of his schoolmates wrote:
Oh my beautiful memorys of Sweet Devon
Are like the one’s I have of heaven,
…
each minute felt like a secound each day like an hour
and how that country air gave me phsical power!
but we had to leave devon –
my pardise like heaven.
On the Saturday evening, before the children headed home, there was a disco. Flushed with joy at the success of the week Michael leapt and whooped among them in something resembling a Highland fling.
If the children had been enriched by their week, so too had everyone involved. Joy Palmer returned often in the years that followed, and what she calls her ‘Nethercott days’ instilled in her ‘a very deep sense of the significance of children’s experiences in the natural world’, propelling her from teaching into educational research, and leading, ultimately, to her appointment as Pro Vice-Chancellor of Durham University. The Ward boys – Graham quiet, intelligent, reserved; David an extrovert and a joker – found themselves, as time went by, wanting to share more with the children than just the essential farm tasks. They took them out in the darkness to look at the stars; they played football with them after tea; they encouraged them to stop talking and listen carefully to the sounds of the river, the birds, the wind in the crops. Joan Weeks not only cooked, meanwhile, but invited the children to cook with her. Some of them, she discovered, had never had a birthday cake. For children whose birthdays fell during a visit to Nethercott, she made sure there was always a huge iced sponge, and candles.
And at the centre of them all, like the hub holding the spokes of a wheel, were Michael and Clare. They were, Joy Palmer remembers, always open, keen to listen and learn, to ensure a ‘return flow of benefit’ for children, teachers, farmers and staff. ‘It was,’ says Joy, ‘a winning formula.’
Those early days of Farms for City Children were exhausting. Eight schools made bookings during 1976, but Michael and Clare’s ultimate aim was to get four times that number – about a thousand children – to Nethercott each year. On top of their farm work, they were busy writing to state primary schools in West London, Bristol and Birmingham, and following up their letters with visits to those schools that expressed interest.
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