Singing for Mrs Pettigrew: A Story Maker’s Journey by Michael Morpurgo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
When I was first getting into children’s literature as a field, as a topic, as a thing that I wanted to do properly and seriously and forever if the planets aligned, I began to spend my lunchtimes in a library close to where I then worked and I read his entire back catalogue over a number of weeks. I was often the only person in this part of the library and I broke the rules (sorry lovely librarians) by furtively eating my lunch as I turned the pages and kept going in this sort of literary pilgrimage of mine. I read everything that he had published until that point and then when I had done that, I knew that I had built my foundations and I understood where I wanted to be and I think that I even understood how I would get there.
Singing for Mrs Pettigrew is a book which hinges on this ideas of journey, of knowing where you have been in order to know where you are going, and it is a very charming thing. If you are a completionist then some of the material will already be familiar to you (such as The Mozart Question and Meeting Cezanne) but the accompanying essays are, I think, where the magic happens. Morpurgo talks about his journey towards becoming a storyteller and discusses his influences and the impact of his mentors (one of which is Ted freaking Hughes which is quite the name to drop). It’s in this discussion of his mentors that Morpurgo loses some of his self-consciousness, a typical thing of autobiography, and becomes something rather wonderful His essay on another of his mentors, Sean Rafferty, is worth the price of entry alone.
Morpurgo is a wonderful, classy writer and this is just foundational stuff.
(Pausing mid-bite to stare at the final pages of Waiting For Anya, crying in the stillness of the library, feeling it deep down inside, knowing that this is it, this feeling is what I want to understand, to create-)
