October 18, 2024 • 16 mins
Michael Morpurgo is a literary treasure.
The author of War Horse and Private Peaceful, he’s written around 150 books, loved particularly among children and young people.
He’s returned with yet another novel, Cobweb following a little dog heading to London in the aftermath of Britain’s triumph at Waterloo.
Morpurgo told Jack Tame that much like many of his stories, Cobweb was inspired by a friend of his who walked 250 miles from the West Coast of Wales to London on a drovers’ road.
Drovers’ roads are the paths farmers would use to bring their livestock from their farms to the market, as back before vehicles and public transport became common, walking was the only way to reach the big cities.
While researching drovers’ roads, Morpurgo realised that their stories, and the stories of drovers’ dogs in particular, aren’t well known.
“And I thought, that's a story that mostly no one knows, so why don't you tell it? Tell that tale? So that's what I did.”
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
You're listening to the Saturday Morning with Jack Tame podcast
from News Talks at me.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Michael Moore Pergo is a literary treasure. The author of
Warhorse and Private Peaceful has a back catalog of about
one hundred and fifty books and his books are loved,
most particularly by children and young people. Michael has added
to his expansive library yet again with a brand new
book called Cobweb. It follows a little dog heading to
(00:34):
London amid the aftermath of Britain's triumph at Waterloo, and
Michael is with us Skelder.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
Good morning, Good morning to you from Devon in England.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
How wonderful? How is Devon today?
Speaker 3 (00:48):
Dark? And I suspect it's raining because it often does.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Yes, Although I mean that is a beautiful coastline. You
live in a beautiful part of the world. That has
to be said.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
It's a lovely part of the world. It's quite empty
of people. It's actually very like New Zealand, except we
don't have mountains, but we do have lots of farmland
and it's mostly grassland and woods and gentle rolling hills
and rivers, you know that sort of countryside.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Now, Michael, that the main character in Cobweb is a
Corgy and Corgy is a drover. So can you tell
us where you found the inspiration for Cobweb and exactly
what is a driver?
Speaker 3 (01:28):
Yeah, I can tell you. It's like every book I've
ever written. I get luckier people tell me things, And
in this case it was a friend of ours who
decided he was going to do a two hundred and
fifty mile walk from the west coast of Wales to London,
and he was going to do it to raise money
(01:48):
for a charity we run called Farms for City Children,
which gets children from the cities here in England, London, Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester.
They come to the farm in Devon and they live
and work on this farm and two others at the
charity run. So he was going to help us by
raising money and doing this walk. I said, why are
(02:08):
you doing this walk? And you know what road would
you be taking? He said, well, I'm going on the
drover's road. And I didn't know what a drove all was,
but I had no real idea that you could walk
the same route at all. But he had researched it
extremely carefully and he set off. This was last year,
walking all the way from Pembrokeshire in South Wales up
(02:30):
to London, which was the route followed by the drovers
of old who for thousands of years, and I mean
literally thousands of years, it was the only way to
get your animals to market. So your cows and your sheep,
even your geese, everything that you grew on the farm,
raised on the farm had to find a market. And
(02:51):
where were the markets. They were always in the big cities,
the big towns. No lorries, no trains, no other way
of getting them except to walk them there. And so
what they did. They would set off with say two
hundred and five hundred sheep, and they'd have a dog
or several dogs, depending on the side of the flock,
and all these animals would have been gathered from the
(03:13):
farms all around and they set off on this incredible
journey of two hundred and fifty miles twenty miles a day.
They'd go, staying in inns on the way, but the
problem was that the dogs really didn't go in the
inns much. They would be left outside guarding the animals
against rustlers anyone who would like to steal anyone, and
(03:34):
they'd cattle themselves and the sheep. They'd be grazing the
grass and there would be a river or a pond,
so they were very specific where they should be these inns.
They had to be where animals could be safe and
safely grazed. And the next day they'd set off again
and they would do twenty miles a day, twenty miles
a day, and end up in London. And what I
discovered was remarkable is that in the South Wales the
(03:58):
dog they used was a corgy. The corgies in this
country are generally known as the pet which used to
be adored by our late Queen, Queen Elizabeth, who I
think had about seven of them, so they got very
well known in the country, and they were pretty well
known anyway. But hundreds of years ago, these were little
droving dogs and that's what their job was. They would
(04:20):
go all the way to London. And the really special
thing about the whole story, which his man told me,
was was this that when they got to London, the drovers,
who were pretty tough guys bandage, wanted to do the
business they had to do, which was the selling of
the animals, which of course belonged to other farmers. They
were just doing the droving, but they had to sell
(04:42):
the animals and do the business, get the money, and
I expect they want to have a good time in
London or Bermei or wherever it was. And here's the thing.
They would turn around to the dog and say go home.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
Anymore, and he would go home, and the.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
Dog would go back two one hundred and fifty miles
to where it came from, just like a swallow, just
like a salmon. And they had this ability. But the
interesting thing is it was sort of encouraged in a way. Yeah,
because at each of the ends on the way down
the drover had left some money so that as the
dogs went by the same route, there was food to
(05:24):
feed them all the way back to Wales. And I
thought that that's a story that mostly no one knows. Yeah,
so why don't you tell that tale. That's what I did.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
That is extraordinary. That really is remarkable, isn't it. And Michael,
you've said that this book has what you think is
the best surprise ending that you have ever written, which
is I mean extraordinary given how many books you have
produced over these I think we're one hundred and fifty
books in So do you go about writing an ending
(05:54):
before you before you lay out the structure of the book,
How does that ending come about in your process?
Speaker 3 (06:01):
Well, I'm a very instinctive, spontaneous writer. I don't plot
and plan very much. I mean, with this book, for instance,
I knew obviously the first part of the book was
to create the place where this dog lives, and I
wanted to have some kind of connection with someone there.
So there's a girl on the farm in which the
dog is brought up of adors the dog. The dog
(06:22):
gob where adores the girl, and they get split up.
Doesn't matter why, we can read the book for that,
but they get split up, and the person who splits
up the relationship between this girl and this dog is
also responsible for selling the dog to a drover, and
off the dog goes, therefore pretty much on his own
in the big wide world, except he's got lots and
(06:43):
lots of cows and sheep to look after, and you
follow him all the way to London. What I didn't
know what to do, and I like this really is
I didn't know how to continue the book after I
got the dog to London. And I'm very often like that.
I start something and off I go on a journey.
And what I'm always hopeful is that something, something will
(07:05):
lead me towards an end in which in fact the
reader isn't expecting. And I'm not going to I can't
tell the end the silly book. But what I what
I would I did do was to find out. I
found out that historically all the droving ended about nineteen hundred,
(07:27):
so I had to set my book back from that,
and I did when I was at school. I'm now eighteen.
And when we learned history at schools in this country
all those years ago, you really only learned one way,
and that was through dates. You had to learn dates,
the dates of this and the dates of that. And
I remembered all the way through to my eighties. And
(07:48):
I learned it at the age of seven. Two dates
in English history from the nineteenth century. One was the
Battle of Trafalgar, Nelson's great victory, that was eighteen oh five,
and the other one was the Battle of Waterloo eighteen fifteen.
(08:09):
And I did know because I have studied a bit
military history, and I knew that apart from the terrible
losses on all sides and the slaughter of that battles,
or usually portrayed on film with beautiful uniforms, and it's all.
It was the ghastly, ghastly affair, like all wars anyway,
what I did know is that when the soldiers came
(08:31):
back to this country, to England where I live, after that,
having won this great victory and the country ringing bells
and celebrating in lots, when the soldiers came home there
was nothing for them. There was no work, there was
no money, and many of them starved in the streets
of London begging. And I thought to myself, if one
(08:53):
of these returning soldiers from that battle should meet up
with the dog, and that returning soldier had nowhere to go,
and the dog did know where to go, that might
be an interesting journey back. So that's the kind of
thing that happened. I linked up a historical fact. I'm
(09:16):
very keen on historical facts in my novels. That it's
the truth that interests me, revealing more truth through fiction.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
And it is a truth that rold All told you
that children don't like history.
Speaker 3 (09:31):
Yes he did. And I had a book called Warhorse,
which was the first book I ever had that years
and years ago, and I'm talking forty to fifty years ago.
This book was shortlisted for a big prize in this
country called the Whipbread Prize, and here was the chair
(09:51):
of the judges on this prize. And I went up
to London, and my publishers are enthusiastic, and they thought
I was going to win, and lots of people that
I was going to win. And I didn't win. Someone
else won, it doesn't matter who. But as I was
feeling a little bit low during the ceremony, I was
sitting there sipping my wine when Rol Dahald stood up
(10:16):
and kind of beckoned me over to the judge's table.
So I went over and you had to go where
he said, you know, he was god, so to speak.
So I walked towards him and he was very nicely
shook my hand and he said, yes, yes, good book,
good book. But you do know, don't you that children
don't like history, And having been a teacher for eight years,
(10:40):
I did know this was rubbish. And there's an awful
lot of things children don't like. Generally it's because they've
not been taught very well, or the story hasn't been
told very well. And you can teach history really well
and pass that on all the stories of history, which
are very important to all of us. You can do
that if you tell it well. I didn't like to
(11:02):
argue with him, because, as I told you, he was God,
and anyway, I didn't feel like arguing. But I've always
remembered it as the reason probably I didn't get the
prize is that he and maybe some other judges thought, well, actually,
why should children be interested in the First World War anymore?
And I think actually they had a point then, and
(11:23):
that is that a lot of people could get almost
nostalgic about the First of all War. There were a
lot of songs, there was oh what a lovely war.
There was lots and lots of sort of around it.
There was this glow well you know, we one type thing.
Well we know and New Zealanders know, Australians know, everyone
know that it was not like that at all. This
(11:44):
is people coming across the seas to fight this war
against an enemy and most of them didn't even know,
and it was it was dreadful. So I don't know,
I sort of feel that it's they were right to
think that if this was another book that was going
to join that kind of thinking. Well, it isn't. Actually,
it's a book which is about loss, and it's about
(12:04):
finding someone new and longing for that one to be
joined up with someone you love, which is what happens
to all families, and indeed horses, and it's about a
horse and a boy, and the boy going off the
wall to look for his horse, which has been sold away.
So I think he was wrong, but in a sense
I can understand why he said it.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
Finally, Michael, I know we have to let you go
in a moment, but you mentioned farms for city children,
and I know a lot of our listeners will be
really interested and it. Can you just tell us how
it works?
Speaker 3 (12:33):
Sure? Yeah, Well, my wife takes the credit for it.
Claire started the charity with me about it's almost fifty
years ago now and since then we've had one hundred
thousand kids from the cities all over this country. And
what happens is they come with their teachers from primary schools,
about thirty five forty at a time, with their teachers
(12:54):
and come down first of all to Devin. That's where
we started the first farm where I'm speaking to you
from in Italy, in the middle of nowhere, North Deven
and they come down from inner city London in the
first place, and they come down and they'd stay for
a week. And they wouldn't just look at the countryside
the how nice and count the eggs and count the sheep. No, no, no,
(13:17):
they worked alongside real farmers. The farmer on the farm
would take them out every single day. I would gout
with every single day and we will milk the cows,
and we'd move the sheep, and we'd feed the pigs.
We'd do everything that needed doing within a working farm.
The idea was really that as a teacher, when I'd
been teaching and my wife had been teaching, we realized
(13:40):
that an awful lot of children in this country I
don't know about New Zealand suffer from a poverty of experience.
They live in a tiny flat. They look out of
the window on concrete and tarmac and planes flying overhead.
That's the connection very often with the world outside. And
we thought, because we both had a wonderful opportunity and
(14:01):
a younger being in the countryside, growing up in it,
both of us, and we thought, well, this is the
right of every child to have a connection with the
world about them. This is their world. It's their world
to look after. It's the world that provides their food
and it's a place they've never been, so that was
(14:21):
the idea to give them a sense of what there
is out there for them, so they will value it
and understand much more about farming and about the countryside
and nature, so that when they go out walking down here,
they go on and green fields down to the river,
they see a salmon jumping, they might see a spray
that an otter is left behind. They see a heron
lifting off the river, they see buzzards eagles up in
(14:45):
the They hire in contact with nature, and since they
are part of nature, we thought that was pretty important educationally.
So that's what we've been doing all this time with
one hundred thousand children, and the charity goes on. It's
had a struggle or two because you know COVID and
all all sorts of things, but COVID has been the
main stop. We had to stop for a good year
and a half that because the kids couldn't come down,
(15:07):
but we started up again and on we go. And
as I speak to you in Devon, there's a group
of children, thirty five of them just come down yesterday
from London.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
Ah how wonderful. Hey, Michael, thank you so much for
giving us your time. There's such a great pleasure to
speak with you. And you know, I, yeah, I'm thinking
for myselfie, but I know there is a seven year
old in our house who's going to be just delighted,
absolutely delighted with Cobweb. So thank you so much.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
That's really good. It's very nice to speak to you
in New Zealand. I wish I was there last time,
as I went a wonderful place called Russell. Yeah, I've
never forgotten that I had the most extraordinary time. So
I have a great deal of time for New Zealand.
Except that you play rugby far too well.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
Well we'll see the Northern Tour is coming up. But
thank you so much Michael. We'd love to have you
back again sometime soon and have a great day.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
Be great, all the best then bye bye.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
That is Michael Moore Pergo. His latest book is Cobweb.
Someone on the Texas saying Jack would be able to
ask the age range. It's it's really from eight up.
But it is a beautiful book. So if you've got
anyone younger than eight, I reckon you could read it
to them. But for young readers who are looking to
read themselves. Eight plus Jack, I grew up with Pet
Corgy say are the best family dog heroes on Little League,
(16:20):
says Jay. If you want to send us a message,
ninety two ninety two is the text number. This morning,
we'll have all the details for Michael Moore Purgo's Cobweb
up on the Newstalk's EDB website.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
For more from Saturday Morning with Jack Tame, listen live
to News Talks EDB from nine am Saturday, or follow
the podcast on iHeartRadio
You're listening to the Saturday Morning with Jack Tame podcast
from News Talks at me.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Michael Moore Pergo is a literary treasure. The author of
Warhorse and Private Peaceful has a back catalog of about
one hundred and fifty books and his books are loved,
most particularly by children and young people. Michael has added
to his expansive library yet again with a brand new
book called Cobweb. It follows a little dog heading to
(00:34):
London amid the aftermath of Britain's triumph at Waterloo, and
Michael is with us Skelder.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
Good morning, Good morning to you from Devon in England.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
How wonderful? How is Devon today?
Speaker 3 (00:48):
Dark? And I suspect it's raining because it often does.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Yes, Although I mean that is a beautiful coastline. You
live in a beautiful part of the world. That has
to be said.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
It's a lovely part of the world. It's quite empty
of people. It's actually very like New Zealand, except we
don't have mountains, but we do have lots of farmland
and it's mostly grassland and woods and gentle rolling hills
and rivers, you know that sort of countryside.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Now, Michael, that the main character in Cobweb is a
Corgy and Corgy is a drover. So can you tell
us where you found the inspiration for Cobweb and exactly
what is a driver?
Speaker 3 (01:28):
Yeah, I can tell you. It's like every book I've
ever written. I get luckier people tell me things, And
in this case it was a friend of ours who
decided he was going to do a two hundred and
fifty mile walk from the west coast of Wales to London,
and he was going to do it to raise money
(01:48):
for a charity we run called Farms for City Children,
which gets children from the cities here in England, London, Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester.
They come to the farm in Devon and they live
and work on this farm and two others at the
charity run. So he was going to help us by
raising money and doing this walk. I said, why are
(02:08):
you doing this walk? And you know what road would
you be taking? He said, well, I'm going on the
drover's road. And I didn't know what a drove all was,
but I had no real idea that you could walk
the same route at all. But he had researched it
extremely carefully and he set off. This was last year,
walking all the way from Pembrokeshire in South Wales up
(02:30):
to London, which was the route followed by the drovers
of old who for thousands of years, and I mean
literally thousands of years, it was the only way to
get your animals to market. So your cows and your sheep,
even your geese, everything that you grew on the farm,
raised on the farm had to find a market. And
(02:51):
where were the markets. They were always in the big cities,
the big towns. No lorries, no trains, no other way
of getting them except to walk them there. And so
what they did. They would set off with say two
hundred and five hundred sheep, and they'd have a dog
or several dogs, depending on the side of the flock,
and all these animals would have been gathered from the
(03:13):
farms all around and they set off on this incredible
journey of two hundred and fifty miles twenty miles a day.
They'd go, staying in inns on the way, but the
problem was that the dogs really didn't go in the
inns much. They would be left outside guarding the animals
against rustlers anyone who would like to steal anyone, and
(03:34):
they'd cattle themselves and the sheep. They'd be grazing the
grass and there would be a river or a pond,
so they were very specific where they should be these inns.
They had to be where animals could be safe and
safely grazed. And the next day they'd set off again
and they would do twenty miles a day, twenty miles
a day, and end up in London. And what I
discovered was remarkable is that in the South Wales the
(03:58):
dog they used was a corgy. The corgies in this
country are generally known as the pet which used to
be adored by our late Queen, Queen Elizabeth, who I
think had about seven of them, so they got very
well known in the country, and they were pretty well
known anyway. But hundreds of years ago, these were little
droving dogs and that's what their job was. They would
(04:20):
go all the way to London. And the really special
thing about the whole story, which his man told me,
was was this that when they got to London, the drovers,
who were pretty tough guys bandage, wanted to do the
business they had to do, which was the selling of
the animals, which of course belonged to other farmers. They
were just doing the droving, but they had to sell
(04:42):
the animals and do the business, get the money, and
I expect they want to have a good time in
London or Bermei or wherever it was. And here's the thing.
They would turn around to the dog and say go home.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
Anymore, and he would go home, and the.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
Dog would go back two one hundred and fifty miles
to where it came from, just like a swallow, just
like a salmon. And they had this ability. But the
interesting thing is it was sort of encouraged in a way. Yeah,
because at each of the ends on the way down
the drover had left some money so that as the
dogs went by the same route, there was food to
(05:24):
feed them all the way back to Wales. And I
thought that that's a story that mostly no one knows. Yeah,
so why don't you tell that tale. That's what I did.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
That is extraordinary. That really is remarkable, isn't it. And Michael,
you've said that this book has what you think is
the best surprise ending that you have ever written, which
is I mean extraordinary given how many books you have
produced over these I think we're one hundred and fifty
books in So do you go about writing an ending
(05:54):
before you before you lay out the structure of the book,
How does that ending come about in your process?
Speaker 3 (06:01):
Well, I'm a very instinctive, spontaneous writer. I don't plot
and plan very much. I mean, with this book, for instance,
I knew obviously the first part of the book was
to create the place where this dog lives, and I
wanted to have some kind of connection with someone there.
So there's a girl on the farm in which the
dog is brought up of adors the dog. The dog
(06:22):
gob where adores the girl, and they get split up.
Doesn't matter why, we can read the book for that,
but they get split up, and the person who splits
up the relationship between this girl and this dog is
also responsible for selling the dog to a drover, and
off the dog goes, therefore pretty much on his own
in the big wide world, except he's got lots and
(06:43):
lots of cows and sheep to look after, and you
follow him all the way to London. What I didn't
know what to do, and I like this really is
I didn't know how to continue the book after I
got the dog to London. And I'm very often like that.
I start something and off I go on a journey.
And what I'm always hopeful is that something, something will
(07:05):
lead me towards an end in which in fact the
reader isn't expecting. And I'm not going to I can't
tell the end the silly book. But what I what
I would I did do was to find out. I
found out that historically all the droving ended about nineteen hundred,
(07:27):
so I had to set my book back from that,
and I did when I was at school. I'm now eighteen.
And when we learned history at schools in this country
all those years ago, you really only learned one way,
and that was through dates. You had to learn dates,
the dates of this and the dates of that. And
I remembered all the way through to my eighties. And
(07:48):
I learned it at the age of seven. Two dates
in English history from the nineteenth century. One was the
Battle of Trafalgar, Nelson's great victory, that was eighteen oh five,
and the other one was the Battle of Waterloo eighteen fifteen.
(08:09):
And I did know because I have studied a bit
military history, and I knew that apart from the terrible
losses on all sides and the slaughter of that battles,
or usually portrayed on film with beautiful uniforms, and it's all.
It was the ghastly, ghastly affair, like all wars anyway,
what I did know is that when the soldiers came
(08:31):
back to this country, to England where I live, after that,
having won this great victory and the country ringing bells
and celebrating in lots, when the soldiers came home there
was nothing for them. There was no work, there was
no money, and many of them starved in the streets
of London begging. And I thought to myself, if one
(08:53):
of these returning soldiers from that battle should meet up
with the dog, and that returning soldier had nowhere to go,
and the dog did know where to go, that might
be an interesting journey back. So that's the kind of
thing that happened. I linked up a historical fact. I'm
(09:16):
very keen on historical facts in my novels. That it's
the truth that interests me, revealing more truth through fiction.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
And it is a truth that rold All told you
that children don't like history.
Speaker 3 (09:31):
Yes he did. And I had a book called Warhorse,
which was the first book I ever had that years
and years ago, and I'm talking forty to fifty years ago.
This book was shortlisted for a big prize in this
country called the Whipbread Prize, and here was the chair
(09:51):
of the judges on this prize. And I went up
to London, and my publishers are enthusiastic, and they thought
I was going to win, and lots of people that
I was going to win. And I didn't win. Someone
else won, it doesn't matter who. But as I was
feeling a little bit low during the ceremony, I was
sitting there sipping my wine when Rol Dahald stood up
(10:16):
and kind of beckoned me over to the judge's table.
So I went over and you had to go where
he said, you know, he was god, so to speak.
So I walked towards him and he was very nicely
shook my hand and he said, yes, yes, good book,
good book. But you do know, don't you that children
don't like history, And having been a teacher for eight years,
(10:40):
I did know this was rubbish. And there's an awful
lot of things children don't like. Generally it's because they've
not been taught very well, or the story hasn't been
told very well. And you can teach history really well
and pass that on all the stories of history, which
are very important to all of us. You can do
that if you tell it well. I didn't like to
(11:02):
argue with him, because, as I told you, he was God,
and anyway, I didn't feel like arguing. But I've always
remembered it as the reason probably I didn't get the
prize is that he and maybe some other judges thought, well, actually,
why should children be interested in the First World War anymore?
And I think actually they had a point then, and
(11:23):
that is that a lot of people could get almost
nostalgic about the First of all War. There were a
lot of songs, there was oh what a lovely war.
There was lots and lots of sort of around it.
There was this glow well you know, we one type thing.
Well we know and New Zealanders know, Australians know, everyone
know that it was not like that at all. This
(11:44):
is people coming across the seas to fight this war
against an enemy and most of them didn't even know,
and it was it was dreadful. So I don't know,
I sort of feel that it's they were right to
think that if this was another book that was going
to join that kind of thinking. Well, it isn't. Actually,
it's a book which is about loss, and it's about
(12:04):
finding someone new and longing for that one to be
joined up with someone you love, which is what happens
to all families, and indeed horses, and it's about a
horse and a boy, and the boy going off the
wall to look for his horse, which has been sold away.
So I think he was wrong, but in a sense
I can understand why he said it.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
Finally, Michael, I know we have to let you go
in a moment, but you mentioned farms for city children,
and I know a lot of our listeners will be
really interested and it. Can you just tell us how
it works?
Speaker 3 (12:33):
Sure? Yeah, Well, my wife takes the credit for it.
Claire started the charity with me about it's almost fifty
years ago now and since then we've had one hundred
thousand kids from the cities all over this country. And
what happens is they come with their teachers from primary schools,
about thirty five forty at a time, with their teachers
(12:54):
and come down first of all to Devin. That's where
we started the first farm where I'm speaking to you
from in Italy, in the middle of nowhere, North Deven
and they come down from inner city London in the
first place, and they come down and they'd stay for
a week. And they wouldn't just look at the countryside
the how nice and count the eggs and count the sheep. No, no, no,
(13:17):
they worked alongside real farmers. The farmer on the farm
would take them out every single day. I would gout
with every single day and we will milk the cows,
and we'd move the sheep, and we'd feed the pigs.
We'd do everything that needed doing within a working farm.
The idea was really that as a teacher, when I'd
been teaching and my wife had been teaching, we realized
(13:40):
that an awful lot of children in this country I
don't know about New Zealand suffer from a poverty of experience.
They live in a tiny flat. They look out of
the window on concrete and tarmac and planes flying overhead.
That's the connection very often with the world outside. And
we thought, because we both had a wonderful opportunity and
(14:01):
a younger being in the countryside, growing up in it,
both of us, and we thought, well, this is the
right of every child to have a connection with the
world about them. This is their world. It's their world
to look after. It's the world that provides their food
and it's a place they've never been, so that was
(14:21):
the idea to give them a sense of what there
is out there for them, so they will value it
and understand much more about farming and about the countryside
and nature, so that when they go out walking down here,
they go on and green fields down to the river,
they see a salmon jumping, they might see a spray
that an otter is left behind. They see a heron
lifting off the river, they see buzzards eagles up in
(14:45):
the They hire in contact with nature, and since they
are part of nature, we thought that was pretty important educationally.
So that's what we've been doing all this time with
one hundred thousand children, and the charity goes on. It's
had a struggle or two because you know COVID and
all all sorts of things, but COVID has been the
main stop. We had to stop for a good year
and a half that because the kids couldn't come down,
(15:07):
but we started up again and on we go. And
as I speak to you in Devon, there's a group
of children, thirty five of them just come down yesterday
from London.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
Ah how wonderful. Hey, Michael, thank you so much for
giving us your time. There's such a great pleasure to
speak with you. And you know, I, yeah, I'm thinking
for myselfie, but I know there is a seven year
old in our house who's going to be just delighted,
absolutely delighted with Cobweb. So thank you so much.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
That's really good. It's very nice to speak to you
in New Zealand. I wish I was there last time,
as I went a wonderful place called Russell. Yeah, I've
never forgotten that I had the most extraordinary time. So
I have a great deal of time for New Zealand.
Except that you play rugby far too well.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
Well we'll see the Northern Tour is coming up. But
thank you so much Michael. We'd love to have you
back again sometime soon and have a great day.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
Be great, all the best then bye bye.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
That is Michael Moore Pergo. His latest book is Cobweb.
Someone on the Texas saying Jack would be able to
ask the age range. It's it's really from eight up.
But it is a beautiful book. So if you've got
anyone younger than eight, I reckon you could read it
to them. But for young readers who are looking to
read themselves. Eight plus Jack, I grew up with Pet
Corgy say are the best family dog heroes on Little League,
(16:20):
says Jay. If you want to send us a message,
ninety two ninety two is the text number. This morning,
we'll have all the details for Michael Moore Purgo's Cobweb
up on the Newstalk's EDB website.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
For more from Saturday Morning with Jack Tame, listen live
to News Talks EDB from nine am Saturday, or follow
the podcast on iHeartRadio
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