Authors: Michael Morpurgo

Private Peaceful (14 page)

I was on my way to Ypres with Clare, my wife, on a research trip, already intent on writing a novel about one of the soldiers in the British Army who had been executed for cowardice or desertion during the First World War.

But I still had no name for my fictional soldier. We stopped by chance at the Bedford Cemetery a few miles outside Ypres, simply because we always made a point of paying our respects at one of the many Commonwealth War Grave Cemeteries in or around Ypres.

Walking down the line of Portland-stone headstones, Clare bent down to look more closely at one of them. “I think maybe I’ve found your soldier’s name,” she said. The stone read: ‘Private T. S. H. Peaceful Royal Fusiliers 4th June 1915’.

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF MAXINE KEEBLE

I knew at once that Peaceful had to be the name of my soldier, that it was absolutely the right name for this young farm boy brought up in the peace and tranquillity of the Devon countryside, who finds himself alongside his brother marching off to war in 1914, and living through the horrors of trench warfare.

Years later, through the kindness of his great niece, Maxine Keeble, I was to discover much more about the family of the real Private Peacefull (his name was mis-spelled on the headstone). Where he came from, how he had been a van boy in London, joined up at the outbreak of war, and died of his wounds in 1915; how Henry James Percy Peacefull, a brother of his, had been killed on July 1st 1916, the first day of The Battle of The Somme, when the British Army suffered over 60,000 casualties in one day; how another brother, William Arthur Peacefull, had been caught on barbed wire and taken prisoner of war; and how yet another brother, Lewis Percy Peacefull, had survived the war and served in the RAF in the Second World War. This was a family, like so many others in towns and villages all over the land, who had suffered terrible and irreplaceable loss.

Years later, after the book of
Private Peaceful
had been published, I found myself in another cemetery near Ypres. We were almost entirely on our own there, until a bus drew up, and dozens of teenagers – from a school in Epsom, as I later discovered – came into the graveyard, their natural boisterousness silenced almost at once by the sense of overwhelming sorrow we all feel in such places. I got talking to their teacher, who told me they were on a school trip around the battlefields of WW1, as part of their history studies, and had just visited the Bedford Cemetery where they had found the grave they had all been looking for, the grave of Private Peaceful. They had been studying the book at school prior to the visit, and in a way had chosen him as their ‘Unknown Soldier’. They had made a wreath for him, written him messages and left them by his stone.

Going that way later that day we went to look. There lay the wreath and the letters, each in a rain-spattered plastic envelope, messages of gratitude and of sadness. And very recently, on my last visit, I found several poppies on his grave. I hope both he and his family do not mind me borrowing his name, and take some comfort from the fact that for so many young people, the Private Peaceful in the Bedford Cemetery has become not their Unknown Soldier any more, but a soldier they know, and care about.

Michael Morpurgo

About the Author

MICHAEL MORPURGO OBE is one of Britain’s best-loved writers for children. He has written over 100 books and won many prizes, including the Smarties Prize, the Blue Peter Book Award and the Whitbread Award. His recent bestselling novels include
Shadow, An Elephant in the Garden
and
Born to Run.

Michael’s stories have been adapted numerous times for stage and screen, and he was Children’s Laureate from 2003 to 2005, a role which took him all over the country to inspire children with the joy of reading stories.

Loved Private Peaceful? Why not try

Shadow

Farm Boy

An Elephant in the Garden

With my thanks to Piet Chielens of
In Flanders Field Museum in Ypres

Other titles by Michael Morpurgo include:

Outlaw – the story of Robin Hood

Little Manfred

Shadow

An Elephant in the Garden

Running Wild

Kaspar

Born to Run

The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips

Farm Boy

The Butterfly Lion

Sparrow - the story of Joan of Arc

Alone on a Wide, Wide Sea

Although the title was inspired by the name on a gravestone in Ypres, this novel is a work of fiction. Any references to real people (living or dead), actual locales and historical events are used solely to lend the fiction an appropriate cultural and historical setting. All other names, characters, places and incidents portrayed in this book are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright

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Michael Morpurgo assets the moral right to be identified is the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN:9780007150076
Ebook Edition © July 2013 ISBN: 9780007477838
Version: 2013-07-26

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