Author Michael Morpurgo says his writing about war shows “reconciliation is the only solution”

But I wanted, also, to weave into my island adventure story the times into which I had been born, to set the story in the shadow of that war and of the atom bombs dropped on Japan that ended the conflict but has overshadowed the life of the world ever since.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, of course, the advent of the nuclear age, the age mankind has created, the consequences of which we and our children still live with and fight wars about today. So, I reasoned, our children sooner or later have to understand how and why that age ever began. But how to tell such a story without traumatising the young reader?

I decided I would be Michael, a boy of today cast adrift somehow, meeting an ancient Japanese soldier self-marooned on the island, and having to share the island with him. I wanted to be there at the heart of the story, to live it as I wrote it.

This would be an adventure story for young readers, but I hoped it would go deeper. So, it would turn out that the Japanese soldier and his family had lived in Nagasaki. Michael hears from the old man about the terrible destruction wrought on his city and the loss of his family.

There has always been a tendency, a temptation, in children’s books and films, to shy away from darker, more difficult issues. I’ve found that to look the child in the eye as I tell the story is key, never to patronise, but rather help them to come to know themselves and the world about them, to know their history, where they and others come from, so that they can better understand the world of today, the world that they are having to come to terms with.

To learn of sadness and loss is part of growing up, as is an understanding of the turbulent history of ourselves and other peoples and cultures. I believe strongly that books and film and theatre can play an important, even essential, part in developing this knowledge and understanding.

Children have to know of war. They see snatches of war and suffering often enough on their screens, witness the horror and destruction of it. They can switch it off, change channels, but they do not forget.

The wonderful screenplay for Kensuke’s Kingdom, written by Frank Cottrell-Boyce and produced by Lupus Films, deals with the subject of war with great integrity and sensitivity, without patronising, without minimising the enormity of the tragedy, or the shock or the long-term suffering caused by conflict.

I have written often enough about war because I grew up during and after it, lost family I’ve never known in it, played war games in bomb sites. That is why, like most of us, I am passionate about peace. And that’s why I write about war, as Tolstoy, of course, did before me.

The Mozart Question, a novella published in 2007, was set both in today’s Venice and at the time of the Holocaust. The protagonist, the son of a barber who finds a violin hidden away in his parents’ bedroom, discovers that music and a love of music is stronger even than man’s inhumanity to man. I knew, as I was writing, that it would very probably be the first time that some children reading it had ever heard of the Holocaust. Yes, they have to hear of it sometime, have to know the depths to which mankind can sink.

In many of my stories about war – from War Horse and Private Peaceful [First World War] to In the Mouth of the Wolf [Second World War], Shadow [Afghanistan] and The Kites Are Flying! [the West Bank] – I do not shy away from the issues around war, but the mind of a child is fragile. In every one of these stories there is always hope, not happy-ever-after-hope, but the belief that reconciliation is the only solution and is always possible.

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