Farm Boy

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperCollins Children’s Books An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 1999

FARM BOY. Text copyright © Michael Morpurgo 1997. Illustrations copyright © Michael Foreman 1997.

The author and illustrator assert the moral right to be identified as author and illustrator of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780007450657

Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2012 ISBN: 9780007479627 Version: 2016-11-25

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Farm Boy

Keep Reading

About the Author

Other Books by Michael Morpurgo

About the Publisher

There’s an old green Fordson tractor in the back of Grandpa’s barn, always covered in cornsacks. When I was very little, I used to go in there, pull off the cornsacks, climb up and drive it all over the farm. I’d be gone all morning sometimes, but they always knew where to find me. I’d be ploughing or tilling or mowing, anything I wanted. It didn’t matter to me that the engine didn’t work, that one of the iron wheels was missing, that I couldn’t even move the steering wheel.

Up there on my tractor, I was a farmer, like my Grandpa, and I could go all over the farm, wherever I wanted. When I’d finished, I always had to put the cornsacks back and cover it up. Grandpa said I had to, so that it didn’t get dusty. That old tractor, he said, was very important, very special. I knew that already of course, but it wasn’t until many years later that I discovered just how important, just how special it was.

I come from a family of farmers going back generations and generations, but I wouldn’t have known much about it if Grandpa hadn’t told me. My own mother and father never seemed that interested in family roots, or maybe they just preferred not to talk about them. My mother grew up on the farm. She was the youngest of four sisters, and none of them had stayed on the farm any longer than they’d had to. School took her away to college.

College took her off to London, to teaching first, then to meeting my father, a townie through and through, and one who made no secret of his dislike for the countryside and everything to do with it.

‘All right in pictures, I suppose,’ he’d say, ‘just as long as you don’t have to smell it or walk in it.’ And he’d say that in front of Grandpa, too.

I have always felt they were a little ashamed of Grandpa and his old-fashioned ways, and I never really understood why – until recently, that is. When I found out, it wasn’t Grandpa I was ashamed of.

I always loved going down to Devon, to Burrow, his old thatched house at the bottom of a rutty lane. He was born there. He’d never lived anywhere else, nor had any desire to do so. He’s the only person I’ve ever met who seems utterly contented with his own place on earth, with the life he’s lived. That’s not to say that he never grumbles. He does – about the weather, about his television reception – he loves detective series, whodunnits, police dramas. He’ll curse the foxes when they tip over his dustbins, and shout abuse at the jets when they come screaming low over the chimney pots. But he never ever complains about his lot in life. Best of all, he never pretends to be someone he isn’t, and what’s more he doesn’t want me to be anyone I’m not. I like that in him, I always have. That’s maybe why I’ve spent so many of my school holidays with him down on the farm in Devon.

Sometimes he’ll tell me how things were when he was young. He doesn’t say things were better then, or worse. He just talks about how they were. I think it’s because he loves to remember.

Grandpa loves his swallows. We’d often watch them together as they skimmed low over the fields and he’d shake his head in wonder. He once told me why it was that he loved swallows so much. That was when he first told me about his father, my great-grandfather, or ‘the Corporal’, as everyone in the village called him. And that’s when I first heard about Joey, too.