His unhappy experiences at boarding school would later inform his novel The Butterfly Lion. During this period Morpurgo developed a stutter. The school was very strict and the boys were beaten frequently.
The family later moved to Bradwell-on-Sea in Essex, where Morpurgo would live during the school holidays, having been sent to boarding school in Sussex when he was seven years old. Morpurgo went to primary school at St Matthias, Earl's Court. After returning to London, the family lived in Philbeach Gardens, Earl's Court, where the children played on nearby bombsites. Morpurgo and his brother were evacuated to Northumberland when they were very young. Towards the end of her life she was an alcoholic and a drug addict. Morpurgo's mother was frail, having suffered a breakdown when she was 19, and grieving the loss of her brother Pieter, who was killed in the war in 1941, for the rest of her life. He has two younger siblings, Mark and Kay. Morpurgo's older brother, Pieter Morpurgo, later became a BBC television producer and director. Although they were not formally adopted, Morpurgo and his brother took on their step-father's name. When Van Bridge returned to England in 1946, he and Cammaerts obtained a divorce and Cammaerts married Jack Morpurgo the same year. While Van Bridge was away at war, Kippe Cammaerts met Jack Morpurgo (subsequently professor of American Literature at the University of Leeds from 1969 to 1982 ). When Morpurgo was born the following year, his father was stationed in Baghdad. Morpurgo's brother Pieter was born in 1942. They were married in 1941 while Van Bridge, having been called up in 1939 and by then stationed in Scotland, was on leave from the army. His father came from a working-class family, while Kippe came from a family of actors, an opera singer, writers and poets.
Both RADA graduates, his parents had met when they were acting in the same repertory company in 1938. Morpurgo was born in 1943 in St Albans, Hertfordshire, as Michael Andrew Bridge, the second child of actor Tony Van Bridge and actress Kippe Cammaerts (born Catherine Noel Kippe Cammaerts, daughter of writer and poet Émile Cammaerts). Morpurgo became the third Children's Laureate, from 2003 to 2005, and he is also the current President of BookTrust, the UK's largest children's reading charity. His work is noted for its "magical storytelling", for recurring themes such as the triumph of an outsider or survival, for characters' relationships with nature, and for vivid settings such as the Cornish coast or World War I. Sir Michael Andrew Morpurgo OBE FRSL FKC DL ( né Bridge 5 October 1943) is an English book author, poet, playwright, and librettist who is known best for children's novels such as War Horse (1982).
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