Michael Morpurgo: How Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories became music to my earsJust So Stories was the first book that Michael Morpurgo loved as a child. As a writer for children himself, he marvels at the inventiveness and ingenuity of the stories

 'Come hither … and I'll whisper' … An illustration by Niroot Puttapipat for the Folio Society's limited edition of The Elephant's ChildMichael MorpurgoFriday 4 January 2013 09.00 GMTLast modified on Friday 4 January 201314.53 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jan/04/rudyard-kipling-just-so-stories-ears

My copy of Just So Stories, in its brick-red cover with the Elephant's Child straining away with all his might to escape the jaws of the Crocodile on the banks of "the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River", the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake in close attendance, was the first book I truly loved. My mother was an actress, who had performed in rep all over the country, including a season or two at Stratford. But by the time I was born, my mother had stopped acting to become a full-time mother. So my elder brother Pieter and I were for a while, for that critical time when reading to children in bed is so important, the only audience she had. She just had to open the book and she would become by turns every character inside those pages: she was Rudyard Kipling telling the tale; she was the Camel acquiring his hump, the Rhinoceros getting his skin,

the Elephant's Child growing his trunk – by Crocodile means – and she was the Cat that Walked by Himself.

She played the whole orchestra, every instrument from the kettle-drum to the piccolo; she was the conductor and the composer. And because all these stories are "told" as opposed to "written" (although the writing is sublime; it is what makes the stories feel so wonderfully "told") every one of them felt personal, and as if newly invented by my mother each time she told them to us. She made the words (how Kipling loves to play with the sounds and rhythms of words) sing on the air, and she made them laugh too. The poetry of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear – both also great favourites of my mother for our bedside reading – had the same effect on me. But compared even with them, Kipling was always the master of laughing words.

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She would read us Just So Stories so often that we knew them almost by heart. And it was the story of "The Elephant's Child" that we clamoured for most. So why did this story resonate so particularly for a boy of five or six? Perhaps because there were so many different characters to play. She became in voice, in gesture, each of the parts of the Elephant's Child's family: his broad aunt, the Hippopotamus, who spanked him for his "satiable curtiosity", spanked him "with her broad, broad hoof"; his hairy uncle, the Baboon, who spanked him "with his hairy, hairy paw". I looked forward eagerly to the Kolokolo Bird's mournful cry in answer to the Elephant Child's perfectly innocent question about what the Crocodile has for dinner. With a trumpeting voice reminiscent to me at the time of all the

ancient aunts I knew, my mother would point dramatically towards Africa, and intone: "Go to the banks of the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees, and find out." So off goes the Elephant's Child, eating melons and throwing the rind away because, at the time, he has only "a blackish, bulgy nose" and can't pick it up.

When finally the Elephant's Child does meet the Crocodile somewhere "in these promiscuous parts", and asks the question he's been longing to ask all this time and that no one will answer, the Crocodile tells him: "Come hither... and I'll whisper." This is the moment we were waiting for. At the point when he lowers his head closer to the Crocodile's "musky, tusky mouth", my mother would become the Crocodile. Suddenly, she had Crocodile eyes, Crocodile hands, Crocodile voice, and every word was spoken between clenched Crocodile teeth, unless, of course, she was speaking as the Elephant's Child. Then she would hold her nose and squawk loudly as only elephant's children do in such circumstances. "Led go!" she would cry. "You are hurtig be!"

From the start the story is intimately told. Kipling talks to us like an uncle reading to us at bedtime, calls us "Best Beloved". We feel he means it; he's at once on our side. He takes us on an adventure to the wilds of Africa, sets his tale among a family of all kinds of animals, creates a world where they all grow up together in harmony – well, a sort of harmony, much like any human family. In Kipling's day, children were spanked quite frequently, the elephant's child is spanked hard and often for asking too many questions. Ostrich, Giraffe, Hippopotamus, Baboon, Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake, they all spank him to shut him up. But he won't be put off. The wonderfully satisfying denouement is the ending all children long for – as the Elephant's Child gets his own back. With his newly elongated nose, he returns home. As usual he is ever so polite to his family: "How do you do?" he says. "What have you done to your

nose?" they say. "I asked [the Crocodile] what he had for dinner, and he gave me this to keep." And then he proceeds to spank "all his dear families for a long time, till they were very warm and greatly astonished". No ending of any story was ever or could ever be more gratifying to a child.

Children love these stories as well because of their extraordinary ingenuity and inventiveness. Kipling has an Aesopian understanding of animals, of our dealings with them and our curious interrelatedness, interdependence, how we can learn about our own strange behaviour, our vanities and our foolishness, through them and through our relationship with them. Kipling, however, tends to paint us, the human species, particularly children, in a more flattering light than Aesop does. In Aesop's tale of a father and son taking a donkey to market, both are so swayed by the opinions of others as to who should or should not ride the donkey, that they end up carrying the donkey between them. They are made to look ridiculous, and stupid.

In Kipling's "How the Rhinoceros got his Skin", and "The Cat that Walked by Himself", man and woman and child are portrayed much less judgmentally. The Parsee is interrupted in his cake-making by a grumpy and obstreperous smooth-skinned Rhinoceros who proceeds first to scare the Parsee up a tree and then to steal his cake, which is "all done brown and smelt most sentimental". The Parsee is not best pleased.

Them that takes cakes

Which the Parsee-man bakes

Makes dreadful mistakes.

Five weeks later, in a heatwave, the Rhinoceros unbuttons his skin and goes for a swim. The Parsee "smiled one smile that ran all round his face two times", danced three times round the skin

and rubbed his hands. He has a cunning plan. He fills his hat with "old, dry, stale, tickly cake-crumbs" and rubs these crumbs into the Rhinoceros's skin. Out comes the Rhinoceros, puts on his skin, and of course it's rather itchy. So he goes home, "very angry indeed and horribly scratchy". Which is why "every rhinoceros has great folds in his skin and a very bad temper, all on account of the cake-crumbs inside".

With Kipling, man often plays a significant part in the Darwinian development of our fellow creatures, wild or domestic. In "The Cat that Walked by Himself" the transformation from wild to domestic is easily explained, ingeniously too. Essentially it is about the deal done between ourselves and our domestic animals — a "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" kind of a deal. The dog is seduced by the Woman into her cave by her offer of a sweet-smelling meat bone. "Wild Dog lifted up his wild nose and smelled the smell of the roast mutton." The Cat won't go with him. "Nenni! I am the Cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me." He's not going to be anyone's poodle. The dog does the deal; he gets the warm fire and the bone, and in exchange he has to hunt with the Man and guard the cave at night.

In the same way, Wild Horse is happy to wear a plaited halter and be ridden if he can eat the wonderful grass the Woman provides three times a day; and Wild Cow gives her milk in exchange for the same wonderful grass. Still the Cat will not come near the cave. He goes "through the Wet Wild Woods waving his wild tail and walking by his wild lone". It is finally the cunning of the Woman that ensnares him into the cave – it is an extremely crafty deal, during which all is explained, even why it is that dogs chase cats up trees.

And how do we come off as a species in these creation tales? Well, pretty much as we are: wise, cunning, manipulative and very clever too. Kipling's Just So Storiesare in the great

tradition of creation tales, of which, in western culture at least, the best-known of all is to be found in Genesis. In more recent times Ted Hughes echoes the primacy of God's hand in his Tales of the Early World. Kipling also acknowledges in his stories God's hand in managing creation – whether God is the Djinn in charge of All Deserts in "How the Camel got his Hump" or the "Eldest Magician" in "The Crab that Played with the Sea". He breathes on the Earth and one place "became the great Indian Desert, and the other became the Desert of Sahara, and", Kipling says, "you can look them out on the map." Every creature was created to be obedient – all but one, the Crab.

It is a little girl who noticed that, when "the beasts were being taught their plays, one beast went away naughtily into the Sea before you had taught him his play". This was Pau Amma, the Crab, who is now causing great confusion and consternation by stirring up the sea. The Eldest Magician, aka God, has to put things right.

Yes, God plays his part in Kipling. But so does Darwin, and so do man and child. He encompasses, unslavishly, all the possible explanations here: God, man, nature, we all seem to be woven together, collaborating together in a great and mysterious enterprise.

What I love particularly is the part children play in this creative game. They are not always there within the story – sometimes they are simply being told it. But in others they play the major role. In "How the First Letter was Written" and in "How the Alphabet was Made", it is Taffimai Metallumai ("we will still call her Taffy, Best Beloved") who first finds a need for writing (in pictures to begin with) and then the way to do it.

Adults of course get the wrong end of the stick entirely, and it is a while before they understand just how clever she has been. It is the child's understanding that teaches the adults the way

of the future. They're still doing it today with modern technology.

•Just So Stories is published by the Folio Society   at £24.95. A limited collector's edition, introduced by Michael Morpurgo and illustrated by Niroot Puttapipat, will be available from 17 January 2013 at £445