Sir Michael Morpurgo offers tale of canine courage as Goodwoof's special guest

“I have a profound relationship with Chichester partly because I failed my first driving test there! You never forget your failures! And I know exactly what day it was. There are certain things that people in our generation remember, and I remember the day because it was the day of the assassination of President Kennedy. It was not a good day for the world.

“I've also had a long connection with the theatre in Chichester. My daddy (Tony Van Bridge) worked at the theatre. He was a Canadian actor but he came back to England to do some work and he did a one-man show on GK Chesterton at Chichester Festival Theatre.”

Michael has also had many successes on the CFT stage, perhaps particularly The Butterfly Lion: “It is always a real joy to go there for my work or perhaps for someone else’s. I always get a sense of the community and how exciting it is to have a theatre of that size in a city that size. I live near Exeter and we have nothing like that. Exeter is probably four or five or six times the size of Chichester. It has a great cathedral and a lot of shops that are all shutting down but we just don't have a theatre like that. I think the Festival Theatre is just wonderful.

“But I do also know Goodwood very well. My first married home in 1962 was in Rogate which was cheap at £5 a week. I was a teacher and from that little cottage I used to drive every single day – or I was driven by my wife because I had failed my driving test! – across into West Sussex and through Goodwood to get to the little school called Great Ballard at Eartham where I worked. It was my first teaching job, and I was at Great Ballard for about a year. I have good memories. It gave me the confidence that I could actually do it. You never know until you get in front of your first class whether the children are going to eat you alive or whether you are going to be able to cope!”

So Sir Michael is delighted to be back at Goodwood now for Goodwoof (full details on https://www.goodwood.com/goodwoof) to read extracts from his new book, Cobweb, a powerful, moving adventure inspired by the extraordinary true story of the French Drummer Boy of Waterloo. It is also the story of remarkable canine courage.

“Really it was two stories that I tumbled across by good luck and that – he says rather enormously! – I thought the world ought to know about.”

The first emerged when someone offered to walk 250 miles for Farms for City Children, Sir Michael’s charity: “He said he wanted to do this walk, that it was going to be 250 miles and that he wanted to do it for our charity and he wanted to know if that was OK. He said that he was going to follow the Drovers Way from Wales to London and that he was going to do it at the same pace that the drovers took and that he would follow the actual path all the way to London.

“Afterwards he said it was wonderful to tread the path that others had trodden and that there was a sense of opening up history. And he said what he had discovered was something remarkable, that apparently in Pembrokeshire the dogs that they used to drive the sheep and cattle were mostly Pembrokeshire corgis. That surprised me but they apparently they are brave and have sharp teeth and a sharp bark and they are very good at doing it. They had a huge job to keep the flocks and herds together and at night the dog would be outside guarding the herds and flocks against rustlers. And then six weeks later they would arrive in London, at Smithfield or wherever. But I hadn't realised that the drovers didn't just drive the animals. They did the deals, and their duty was to bring the funds back to the farmers after they had sold the animals. So before they started trying to sell the animals the drover would turn to the dog and in their best Welsh say ‘Go home!’ And the corgi would go off on the 250 miles back home. On the way the drover would have left a little bit of money at the inns along the route so that the dog would be fed as it passed by on the way back.

“I decided that I was going to write that story and it started off quite well. I like to feel my way into a story but I got halfway through and I thought what do I do now. I had no story. I just had the marvellous story of going to London and then I knew that the dog would come back but I didn't have a proper story.

“So I started thinking and I started thinking that this story could not have happened recently. It had to have happened well over 100 years ago and I thought where could I take myself back to. When they taught us history at school, it was all about the dates. It was terrifying. You had to know the dates! And there were two that really stuck in my mind. One was the Battle of Waterloo and one was the Battle of Trafalgar. I just thought ‘Waterloo, Waterloo, Waterloo...’ I was interested in Napoleon and Wellington and I thought why don't I do a bit of investigation. And I came across a marvellous story.

“I discovered that there was a farmhouse on the right wing of the British line and the farmhouse was so important. Wellington knew that if the French managed to turn his flank they would lose. So he put his best soldiers in the farmhouse, and amongst them were the Coldstream Guards. I came across a the story of a sergeant in the Coldstream Guards who had been there throughout the whole day. And at the end of the day at 6pm Napoleon and Wellington knew the Blücher (and his Prussian army) was quite close by so Napoleon wanted his infantry to attack the farmhouse and finally take it.

“In front of the infantry was a little drummer boy, a French drummer boy just coming on and coming on and getting closer. They got to the wall and the French broke down the great big door into the farmyard but the British were ready for them and it was slaughter. But the little drummer boy stood in the yard amidst all the slaughter and just kept on drumming, drumming, drumming. And the sergeant wrote that the little boy was the bravest man at Waterloo that day.”

The French drummer boy wasn't killed: “I know that much. I expect he was taken prisoner.”

And it's a tale that became part of the book Cobweb, the two stories merging: “It is the story of the meeting of this dog with this little drummer boy, the story of this dog leading this drummer boy to a new home…”

Cobweb, an adorable young corgi, knows nothing of the war. He loves being a young puppy and playing with his owner Bethan, exploring the beautiful Pembrokeshire countryside and chasing rabbits.

But, when he is taken away from Bethan and sold, Cobweb must learn to be a drover’s dog – herding sheep and cattle for hundreds of miles alongside another dog who becomes his friend on the long, treacherous journey to London. And, after the Napoleonic wars finally end with the Battle of Waterloo, Cobweb meets an unexpected stranger with an incredible tale to tell on his journey home.

Cobweb is published by Harper Collins Children’s Books.