麻豆社

Where can we escape to at times when we are cooped up, locked down, trapped indoors? Some people recall a a real location, others find a refuge deep in the imagination.

In these exceptional times, Radio 3 has commissioned major writers to share their special place.

8. The much-loved writer for children, Michael Morpurgo, recalls escaping bombed-out London for the Essex coast, when his family moved to an old Tudor house in Bradwell-on-Sea. There, he, his brother and their beloved dog, Prynne, were free to roam:

"There were often larks rising over the fields, and house martins and swallows flying so low overhead, so close I thought they might get caught in my hair. We鈥檇 haul our bikes up onto the sea wall and would sometimes have to walk then, because the wind from the heaving brown North Sea gusted so hard that we鈥檇 be bound to fall off if we ever got on. We leant over the handles of our bikes into that wild wind as we walked along the sea wall, and it blew our breath away."

But this pre-Lapsarian existence came to an abrupt end when they were sent away to school. Returning for the holidays, the local children refused to play with them, Prynne had been given away, and there were plans afoot for a nuclear power station down on the creek.

Michael has returned there, though, not only in his imagination but also in reality:

"In 2018 the whole family went back to celebrate what would have been my mother鈥檚 100th birthday. All of us there, we looked over the wall into the garden of New Hall, walked out past the school and where the American air force base had been, and went out to St Peter鈥檚 chapel. We sat in the sun for a while, our backs against the sun-warmed stone, each of us deep in our own memories."

Producer Beaty Rubens