Singing for Mrs Pettigrew

I have just finished reading Michael Morpurgo’s book Singing for Mrs Pettigrew. It is a lovely compilation of short stories and chapters about his life. Sometimes it is hard to tell which are stories and which autobiographical chapters.  He also gives a little bit of background into how he writes his stories.

I love Michael Morpurgo books because he is a master of the art of writing for children.  He says: I am a grower of stories. I farm them as surely as a farmer does his corn. I am a weaver of dreams: a teller of tales. I have, through my mother reading to me, through my own reading, through inspired teachers, through my great mentors, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ted Hughes and Sean Rafferty, through years of practice, discovered my way of doing it.

He certainly has. His books are so good that adults and children alike can enjoy them.  He can take a simple story and draw you into the event so completely that you are living it with the people. It feels like your life and theirs have become entwined.

The short story Singing for Mrs Pettigrew is a simple tale of the effect of building a nuclear power station on the village of Bradwell in Essex and the devastation it had on Mrs Pettigrew who was evicted from the railway carriage where she lived so that the power station could be built on that land.

Mr Morpurgo generates a great deal of sympathy for Mrs Pettigrew along with her supporters, the young Michael Morpurgo and his mother. You feel anger as one after another of the villagers who had initially opposed the building gradually come to support it and oppose Mrs Pettigrew. Finally you feel intense frustration that after building the nuclear reactors, they have all too quickly become redundant. Nevertheless the huge monstrosity will stand for centuries right by the sea, scarring the landscape because a nuclear power station can never be demolished.  The reactors have to be entombed in concrete for centuries till they are no longer radioactive.

What made the story all the more poignant for me is that I can recall the building of the Bradwell nuclear power station.  I went to a youth camp on the marshes nearby and remember being in awe of the enormous building and slightly frightened by the constant ticking noises it made.

Bramwell nuclear power station on the coast of Essex

I grew up in the era just after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.  We had seen the devastation that the bomb had caused not just to the landscape but the effect of radioactivity on survivors. My mother took me see The War Game at our church hall. It is a short film about the immediate aftermath of a nuclear bomb.  It was a shocking experience for a teenager in those days, already traumatised by the newly released daleks from Dr Who.

Nuclear energy was frightening, unpredictable and what if the nuclear reactor blew up?  Not only would I be wiped out but half of Britain as well. These were my fears most of which were groundless but as more recent events in Chernobyl and Japan have shown – nuclear power can be dangerous.

So I found great empathy with Mrs Pettigrew who is the one small voice silenced and overthrown by the march of new ideas and developments which in turn prove not be as amazing and ground breaking as at first thought.

Time and again, Michael Morpurgo has the genius of being able to write about great events from the perspective of just one small individual or animal whether that is Mrs Pettigrew, Joey the horse from War Horse or Sofia caught up in a massacre at her village in Bosnia or Adolphus Tips the cat left behind in the evacuation of his village in the Second World War.

Michael Morpurgo has written over 100 books. Which one is your favourite?