The good fortune of growing older

Also this week: City kids on country farms, and keeping on lurruping

If we’re not careful, age can be wasted on the old. For me at almost 82 it’s the young that make life worth living, keep me cheery, keep me lurruping on – or trotting on, if you like, like an old horse. And aren’t I a lucky old horse! I’m still here for a start. I’ve so many children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren that I’ve stopped counting. But it’s not the numbers that count anyway, it’s being around to get to know them, see them grow, hear the music in their laughter.

I learned recently that a bypass is not a road around a town. It’s a lifesaving operation that helps you to go lurruping on – a word of my creation. I was saved by an observant NHS doctor, by the skill of a great surgeon, and through the endless kindness and patience of Clare, my wife and life-companion, and our family. The time has come, I thought while recovering, to write about my perspective on life and love, on the world as I’ve seen it and known it. I’ve told hundreds of stories, mostly fictional tales for children. Maybe it was time to come clean, speak truth, not the half-truth of fiction. I called my book Funny Thing, Getting Older.

Old age is not all funny, of course. For too many it is mired in loneliness or poverty, pain or depression or anxiety – not funny at all. But I have had the great good fortune to have discovered that the secret of enjoying and enduring the slings and arrows of older age is to remain in contact as much as possible with the young, to live as close to the sunlight of hope that they can and do bring to our lives.

Farm life

Yesterday on my regular walk down to the river I met a group of children from Prior Weston School in London who had come down for their week on the farm. Their school has been coming down to the farm now for nearly 30 years. It was Clare’s idea to set up a charity 50 years ago now – Farms for City Children, we called it – down in her beloved Devon, to enable city children to spend a week of their young lives in the countryside.

Some 100,000 urban children have since come down to one of the three farms the charity runs, here in Devon, in west Wales and in Gloucestershire. For us, the sound of children’s laughter and chatter out in the fields is as familiar as the bleating of sheep or the lowing of cattle or the wind in the trees. Those Year 6 Prior Weston children were full of the joys of being here; of tramping through the mud and leaves, loving the work with the farmer, feeding the cattle, feeling useful together. I breathed in their joy in it all.

Joy of music

Only a few days ago I was in London at the Barbican on stage with the extraordinary Kanneh-Mason family performing Saint-Saëns’s “The Carnival of Animals”. I read my old poems, they played their young music. I witnessed, in rehearsal and on the night, the intensity and the joy they brought to their music-making. And the audience, like all of us living as we are through dark and dangerous times, simply lost themselves in their music, in their spontaneity, in their tenderness, in the sheer joy of their music-making.

Faith in writing

This summer I lost a dear friend who in his short life taught me – as did the Kanneh-Mason family that evening – so much about joy and hope; about living life to the full, whatever our age. Jonathan Bryan wrote a book when he was just 12. He called it Eye Can Write. Jonathan had cerebral palsy and could move only his eyes and eyelids. He used these to blink letters to his mother or carer to spell out what he wanted to write. And how he needed to write. He loved to communicate. He lived for it, and for his faith.

Through his writing, he spent his life doing all he could to enable others like him to be able to live fulfilling lives, not to be ignored or patronised. He had a deep faith and exuded joy every day of his life. His funeral was, as he would have wanted it to be, a celebration of hope and love. He gave both in plenty, to me and to everyone around him.

Youth power

Young people, like our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, like Jonathan Bryan, like the Kanneh-Masons, like those children from Prior Weston out on the farm, all “happy as the grass was green”, as Dylan Thomas once wrote, bring us all the joy we need – and maybe that matters especially to the old, to the lurrupers in this life. It’s the young and the joy they bring with them that keeps me lurruping on, that’s for sure.

Michael Morpurgo will appear at Cheltenham Literature Festival on 19 October. Visit cheltenhamfestivals.org
“Funny Thing, Getting Older” (Hodder & Stoughton) will be published on 30 October

[Further reading: Christopher Marlowe’s stage fright]