There’s always a fear attached to meeting your heroes, but when that hero is one from childhood, the fear is amplified. For, as melodramatic as it may sound, if they don’t add up to the conception you had, if they falter anywhere in your romantic notion, then your whole childhood is in jeopardy, is in danger of becoming a make-believe sham. When you read books as a child, there is no cynical critical shield. You jump wholeheartedly into your favourite author’s world, you trust them completely in the places they take you to and the people and creatures you meet there.

So it was with trepidation that I met the children’s author Michael Morpurgo for tea. Here was a man who had made me believe I could befriend foxes and lions, unearth unicorns and save whales, run off to war to win back my beloved horse. But with two thirds of the English Tripos behind me, and the sentiment-busting faculties of Prac Crit drummed in, I wondered how I could relate to the man whose adventures I submerged myself at the age of eight.

Morpurgo looks, in the best possible way, like a rosy-cheeked, slightly scruffy, gentleman farmer. He is one of the nicest and most sincere men I have ever met. Perhaps unsurprisingly, for an author who has written over a hundred books, he seems incapable of giving an answer that doesn’t involve a story. And so I learn, during the course of the interview, about his childhood spent birds-nesting in the 100-acre wood of his prep school, the time he and his friends made a make-shift chapel in the rhododendron bushes and became blood brothers in thrall to a boy who believed he was Jesus (later fictionalized in The War of Jenkin’s Ear), his short-lived foray into the army, the dislike of reading that made him turn to the comic books his step-father banned and his discovery as a teacher in a classroom of thirty disinterested kids that story-telling might just be the trick to capturing their attention.

Most recently, it is Morpurgo’s story of a boy and his horse that has captured the country’s attention, thanks to the National Theatre’s production of War Horse. The tale, of a farm boy and his horse, torn apart and reunited too late by war, sets the whole theatre crying. Any pretence an audience member might have of critical distance is shattered. Part of this is due to the beautiful rendering by the puppeteers of the movements of the horses. But the story itself is one that has all the classic markings of a tear-jerker: war, animals, love, death, unlikely friendship, family conflict. Yet the book and the play somehow escape saccharine sentimentality. There is often, especially in children’s literature, confusion between emotion and sentiment, but disentangling the one from the other is a near impossible task. "You can still have enormous emotional investment in the suffering of people in a story," Morpurgo explains, "without it being sentimental. But I think the problem is, you can only have that if it is firmly rooted in a reality which we all respect and understand." Hence Morpurgo’s bank of stories: each book he has written stems from a landscape or an experience he has known and which he makes us believe we can know too.

The majority of Morpurgo’s stories are set in the countryside. It’s a countryside that many of the children who read his books won’t have known. "Most grown up people and children don’t look at the birds flying past the window, they only notice them when they’re dead in the road. Most people haven’t got a clue about when the swallows come. So when they find they have got a connection – and I found it through Ted Hughes’ poetry - you find this connection to other animals and creatures, its cemented. You never forget it once its there because you feel you’re part of this bigger plan."

His faith in the importance of a connection to nature led Morpurgo and his wife to set up Farms for City Children in 1976. The idea was to set up a farm where inner-city school children could escape to for a week. "We wanted to create a situation where kids, many of whom had had a real poverty of life experience, could be extended emotionally, physically, intellectually, outside their home, and then maybe, just maybe, they could change attitudes towards their work and towards each other." The children work with farmers mucking out the dairies, milking cows and even helping sheep give birth. "The result was that by the end of their week they came back with their heads full. They’d experienced great discomfort; they’d seen lambs die. They’d been to places they’d never thought they’d go to. In that sense it was like a great book, an adventure."

This sincere belief in changing the experiences of children through concrete action was also the impetus behind Morpurgo’s creation of the Children’s Laureate with Ted Hughes in 1999. The award has done much to celebrate the range of children’s literature and bring it to a wider audience. "But what’s really sad is that in spite of this appeal we still have about 3 million children who don’t read. All that’s happening is that people who are reading are reading more. We’re not actually breaking through." The breaking through is only done through "story-telling by mums and dads". Too often this isn’t compensated for in schools. And when children miss out on that, "it’s like missing out on mother’s milk – you don’t get the intellectual and emotional nutrition when you’re very young." The problem is that this absence is rarely compensated for in the classroom. Rather than making story-telling a crucial part of early education, British schools focus on testing and "unless you get them in the first place enjoying the stories they’re not going to bother with learning the rest, the punctuation and spelling and so forth."

"What reading makes you do," says Morpurgo, "whether you like it or not, is empathise. You are being widened and deepened and hurt." Morpurgo’s books are full of children connecting with others, but also of suffering alone. "Like most people I’ve found myself very isolated from others around me, but books can lessen that isolation," he says. "You think ‘gosh, that’s just how I feel.’ You never thought someone else could feel like that. It’s rather simplistic, but it’s true." It’s that unapologetic conviction in the power of emotional involvement that carries through Morpurgo’s work. It’s a fine line between emotion and sentiment, but Michael Morpurgo’s safe.