Clare Morpurgo's Reading List

"The one I particularly loved as a child was Seashore Life and Pattern , by T A Stephenson. It’s a King Penguin . The book is largely made up of the most beautiful illustrations of sea urchins and sea anemones. The one I loved was the cowrie shell. I’m not sure whether they’re lithographs—they probably are. During the war, we’d slip past the submarines to the Scilly Isles, collecting cowrie shells on the beach. I’m looking here at an illustration of a kelp fruit, with an ascidian and a cowrie. It’s just a beautiful picture for me; it speaks of the seaside and shells and seaweed. You can almost smell it off the page. The next one is periwinkles on seaweed, with gorgeous colours. It’s not even a guide. I think the author just loved seaweed and sea urchins—all of sea life—and did pictures of them. It’s not even an information book; it’s about a passion. The author was more of a designer than a biologist. It’s an arty book, really. It was published in 1944; I must’ve had it around all my life. My father had all the Penguins in a library at home. I could just go and take them off the shelf. I was always taking this one out to peruse, and I still love it. It’s beautiful."

"My edition has a lovely frontispiece with people toasting each other with a glass of wine. There’s a château behind them, and a great haunch of ham and artichoke. This seemed so attractive to me because this was just after the War, when we had really quite miserable food. People didn’t really know about cooking. This book really gave me a kind of an idea about how cooking could be. And I think most of the cooking that I do now has come from reading these kind of books. Elizabeth David is rather a good writer, so, as well as being good cook books, they are readable. Also, she didn’t make us scared. Lots of cookery books, I find, are concerned with all manner of measurements, making sauces very carefully in double saucepans and all that kind of stuff. Elizabeth David never talks about that; she just talks about the basic things that you need to make things delicious. And she suggests the things you might serve with it, which are not to do with sort of rows and rows of different ingredients, but just the basic things that you really need to make delicious food. The one recipe of hers that inspired me to begin with was her cassoulet. Absolutely, and loads of other things too. Because, just looking through it—I’m skipping through it now—it makes your mouth water, doesn’t it? And it’s just so funny and charming. In her time, Elizabeth David inspired people. She inspired people to cook for fun, and not take it too seriously. This book appeared when I was growing up in the 1940s. Things were tough—in the 1950s, it was all a bit grey. She brought a spark of sunlight into people’s houses and into people’s homes. I think she was very essential to our recovery after the War."

"I didn’t need to re-read this book, as I remember so much about it. I must have read it countless times in my life. It had an enormous effect on me growing up. It made me realize how important to have the natural world is for every child. In fact, now we have an autistic grandson and he responds so positively to being in the countryside with us. In the city, he finds everything difficult to cope with, and it makes him unhappy. When he comes to Devon, he can go out and just wander round, and not be stopped going through gateways and such. He just calms down completely. It is a very, very healing place for him. I must have recognised something in the book that I really responded to—something about the healing quality of nature, the changing seasons, growth, and constant renewal. These are huge symbols of life for everybody, which is probably why so many people love gardening. I grew up with a garden that my mother absolutely adored tending, so I could really relate to the book and subject of the book. It’s an optimistic story with a sweet ending. I think it’s a lot of people’s favourite book. Certainly, it is mine. This and Black Beauty , which I haven’t chosen here, but is also a book I could talk forever about."

"Ariel was the very first Penguin paperback book. On the cover, it says ‘The Bodley Head’: the first Penguins were published under the aegis of The Bodley Head because my father still worked for them at the time. It’s a fascinating book because it’s by a Frenchman—who obviously was a great Anglophile, but he was still a Frenchman—writing about a very English poet: Shelley. Percy Bysshe Shelley had this ghastly education that began with him going to Eton. It was the terrible kind of education schoolboys had in 1800. It is also about the rather sad love life that he had. He had a desire always to see the good in everything, and to make good things happen. He was always running out of money trying to improve the world his way. Shelley didn’t believe in any of the kind of things that society at that time believed in. For instance, he didn’t believe in marriage. And although he did get married—I think three times—two of them ended disastrously. “I imagine Shelley was a lovely man but at the same time really quite impossible.” Shelley had an idea that he could make people good, not by religion—he was very much against religion—but just by making them purer and less constrained by society. He struggled all his life to achieve this. I imagine Shelley was a lovely man but at the same time really quite impossible. It is also a novel that explores what England was like at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It’s an extraordinary book, very accessible. And still a good read today."

"This book is about England as it was just before the First World War, and how it has changed. It is especially revealing about how our conception of the countryside has changed. In this way, it is like The Secret Garden . I love another one by Mary Webb called Precious Bane . Mary Webb was incredibly popular at the time that my father published her. I think she was first published in 1917, and my father published her in 1935—so her books were among the first ten Penguin titles. Mary Webb is a bit like Thomas Hardy . There are elements about the wildness of the countryside, rather like Tess of the d’Urbervilles or The Woodlanders , both of which I absolutely adored. Yet it’s a very strange, unique book. It’s the story of an uneducated wild girl, growing up with her father – he makes coffins, and she makes the wreaths for funerals. And they both sing. They’re great singers. She’s incredibly beautiful but completely unaware of her beauty. And she loves everything wild. She has a wild fox that she takes with her everywhere. She doesn’t really want to be tamed. She wants to be a free person. “Mary Webb is a bit like Thomas Hardy” At the point the book opens, two men fall in love with her: the vicar and the local squire. He’s a randy old squire—as they should be!—and the vicar’s pure as driven snow. It’s really, really good, by which I mean it’s very readable. I won’t tell you the ending, because that would give it all away. It’s very evocative of that particular time; there are lovely descriptions of wild animals and countryside. I think it’s set in Shropshire. You read on just to find out what she’s going to say next. It also has a very funny foreword to it by John Buchan. I’m not sure if he liked it too much, but in the final line, he does say, “If this is not true magic, I don’t know where to look for it.”"