How my War Horse won its' spurs with Steven Spielberg
Sometimes, if you're lucky, you get lucky.
So many writers, even some of the great writers, struggle to get some recognition, and it just never happens, or it happens after they're dead and gone.
I got lucky. I began writing as a hobby. I was a teacher in a primary school trying to engage my children with stories - I used to try them out orally in the classroom first.
Then one day I wrote one down, and a fellow teacher sent it off to an educational publisher who asked me to write five more and said they'd pay me £75.
I was ecstatic. Roald Dahl, eat your heart out, I thought.
Stage hit: A scene from War Horse at the National Theatre. The production will celebrate its millionth theatre-goer later this month
My early stories, written while I was teaching, were centred on children and family, well within the comfort zone of my own experience.
When Clare, my wife, and I decided to move down to Devon in 1975 to set up our charity Farms for City Children, we knew it would hugely widen our horizons as teachers but I had no idea that it might also transform me as a writer.
As we prepared for the first group of city children to come down for their week on the farm, I went out to work alongside our partners in the charity, the Ward family.
Finding out as much as I could about working on the land and the lives of farmers, I wrote a diary and called it All Around The Year.
I turned this into a book, in collaboration with the poet Ted Hughes, who lived nearby and fished in the River Torridge (Tarka the otter's river), which ran through the farm.
Ted's poems and James Ravilious's photographs punctuated the book.
At about this time the first children arrived, 25 of them from Birmingham.
Then it was school after school, about 30 a year, from all over.
We were soon immersed in the project, in this new life, in the life of the village, the first real community we had ever belonged to.
Then War Horse - which will celebrate its millionth theatre-goer later this month - happened, but only by happy accident.
I was up in the pub one day, The Duke of York in Iddesleigh, and chatting over a pint with an old man who was often there.
I had been told he was one of the men of the village who had fought in the First World War.
I happened to ask - I've no idea why - which regiment he had served in.
'The Yeomanry,' he said. 'I was there with horses.'
He took me back to his cottage and showed me one or two things he'd brought back after the war - his trenching tool, a button, some medals - and he talked about living through the war, enduring it.
Back at home I sought out a half-forgotten picture left to Clare by her father (Allen Lane, who had founded Penguin Books) of British cavalry charging into barbed wire, some of the horses already caught up in it.
A dreadful picture. I rang the Imperial War Museum and asked how many horses had been killed in the war.
'About a million,' came the answer, 'and that was only on our side.'
So I extrapolated and worked out probably ten million had died on all sides: about the same number as soldiers that died.
Unable now to get this war, the statistics of it and the images of those horses out of my head, I went down the lane to see another old soldier, Captain Budgett, who I knew had been in the cavalry in that war.
He told me how he used to go up the horse lines at night and talk to the horses, tell them his hopes and fears, and how they seemed to listen.
He lent me books, and talked, and I listened.
Afterwards I went up to the village and spoke to another man who had been just too young to go to war but remembered the Army coming to the village to buy horses.
I think I was aware even then how privileged I was to have this living connection to that war.
I was beginning to realise there was a story to be told but I wasn't at all confident that I could do it.
I did know already I had to write a story of the universal suffering of the First World War.
It had to be somehow the story of the soldiers of all sides.
I read countless histories of the conflict, dipped back into the great war poets, reread All Quiet On The Western Front.
And out of all of this I concluded that there was only one way to tell my story of this war.
It would be the story of a farm horse sold to the British cavalry and taken off to France.
The horse would be captured in the first cavalry charge of the war, and then used by the Germans to pull ambulances and guns, and he would winter on a French farm.
So this horse (I called him Joey after a foal we had on the farm) would witness the war on all sides, get to know Tommy and Fritz, and a French farming family, all of them enduring the horror of it, the pity of it.
It would be the horse's-eye view of the war, and best told by the horse himself.
Here was my greatest anxiety. For this to work, the reader would have to suspend disbelief instantly.
Get it wrong and it simply wouldn't work.
I had to believe not in the notion that horses could talk or write, of course, but that there could be real empathy between horse and man.
I remembered from Captain Budgett how attached the soldiers had become to their horses, how they had confided in them and would talk to them as best friends.
But never having witnessed this myself I couldn't quite believe it. I still thought it might be perhaps just an old soldier's sentimental notion.
Then an extraordinary thing happened, the spur I needed to believe in the story, all I needed to enable me to write it.
We had another school from Birmingham staying on the farm.
When they arrived, the teacher warned me that Billy (I call him that although it wasn't his real name) was a very withdrawn child with a serious speech impediment, a stammer, and that he'd hardly spoken a word in two years.
She warned me that if he was obliged to speak up he might do a runner, so please could I not ask him any questions.
I did as she asked. But I kept my eye on Billy. He didn't speak, but I noticed that as soon as he was with animals his confidence soared.
Billy was the first to put his hand in under a hen to pick up a warm egg, first to volunteer to deliver a lamb with the farmer, first to want to lead Hebe, our Haflinger mare, out to her meadow in the morning.
He loved everything about the farm, the mucking out, the feeding, driving sheep from one field to another. But still he did not speak.
On the last night of their visit, I walked up to Nethercott House, where our charity was based, from my cottage down the lane.
It was a winter's night and dark. As I came into the stable yard behind the house, I saw there was a light on in Hebe's stable.
Then I heard a voice. It was Billy standing at the stable door in his slippers, stroking Hebe's neck and speaking to her, talking nineteen to the dozen.
Unseen in the darkness I listened as he told her about his day on the farm.
The words flowed freely from him. There was no stutter. And Hebe stood there taking it all in.
She may not have understood the words, but she understood, I was sure of it, the tone of his voice, understood in her own way that she had made a friend, and that this friend was in need.
Convinced now there was more than sentimentality to the notion of the men confiding in their horses, I knew I could write my story. I began it the next day.
When the book War Horse came out I had high hopes, as did my publishers, especially when it was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize.
We went off to London for the award ceremony and the publishers provided the longest limousine Clare and I had ever been in to whisk us from Paddington Station to the City.
Sad to say we didn't win. The chair of the judges told me that children didn't like history.
I made no comment then. I make no comment now. The limousine was not waiting for us afterwards, so we took the Tube and then the sleeper home to Devon.
That was that, I thought. Only it wasn't. Later that morning, after milking the cows with the farmer and a dozen children, I went home for breakfast.
The phone rang. It was our neighbour and friend Ted Hughes.
'Come out for the day,' he said. 'We'll go fishing.'
He never once mentioned the debacle of the night before until we were having tea.
Then he said: 'About last night. It's all stuff and nonsense. Don't worry about it, Michael, you've written a fine book and you'll write a finer one.'
Words I have never forgotten.
Fine book or not, War Horse languished after that on my backlist, selling better in France than in England.
Other books of mine - Why The Whales Came, Private Peaceful, Kensuke's Kingdom, The Butterfly Lion - all outsold War Horse easily.
With Simon Channing Williams, a producer friend of mine who had already made a movie of Why The Whales Came, I worked on a screenplay of War Horse.
Six years we worked on it. Simon did all he could but in the end we had to face the reality that there simply wasn't enough interest. That was that, again.
It was Tom Morris's mother who got War Horse running.
Tom was an associate director at the National Theatre and had been on the hunt for a while for a way to involve the Handspring Puppet Company in a major production.
He'd worked with them before and thought they were wondrous.
He was looking for a story in which an animal might play the central role.
So Tom's mother urged him to read War Horse. He did, and so began a sequence of events that would transform the fortunes of War Horse.
At first, I have to confess, I was sceptical. How on earth could a convincing drama of the First World War be made using life-size puppets of horses?
Pantomime horses came to mind all too easily. But this was the National Theatre. Maybe they knew what they were doing.
They came down to Devon to see the landscape of the story, to watch horses working the land.
We went to visit The King's Troop Royal Horse Artillery to discover how soldiers worked with horses and guns.
There were some tense moments during the preview nights when it was obvious that the play was too long, even clumsy in places, but working along with Nick Hytner, the director of the National Theatre, the team got it all together somehow.
Press night was a triumph - five-star reviews almost everywhere.
Two years of packed-out houses at the National followed and then the right venue became available at just the right moment: the New London Theatre, which had just about the only stage and auditorium that could cope with the scale of the production.
So War Horse trotted over Waterloo Bridge into the West End, where it still plays to full houses at every performance.
It is in its second year there now. That is not the end of the story.
The show opens on Broadway on April 14, and then in Toronto, and with a bit of luck might well travel the world.
And now, after all, there is to be War Horse the movie. Not just any old movie, but a movie directed by the great man himself, Steven Spielberg.
That too was simply a matter of luck. Spielberg's producer Kathleen Kennedy happened to be in London, happened to see the play and, like so many, was blown away by it.
She called Spielberg and within weeks he'd seen the play, met the cast, visited the Imperial War Museum and decided this would be his next film.
In the weeks that followed he worked with Lee Hall and Richard Curtis on the script, and within months the film was being made, all of it in England - in Devon, which Spielberg loved, at Stratfield Saye in Berkshire, Wisley in Surrey, and Castle Combe in Wiltshire.
While we were on the set at Castle Combe, a young actress, an extra, came up and introduced herself.
She was Vanessa Budgett, granddaughter of Captain Budgett, who had helped me so much in the writing of the book nearly 30 years before.
Full circle. The film is now being edited in America. It will be out in January.
Simon Channing Williams, who was Mike Leigh's producer and also made The Constant Gardener, would have been as delighted as I am.
Sadly he died, all too young. He thought War Horse was my best book. Clare does too.