Farm Boy (7 page)
Father says to me once its not the same working with a tractor. Cant hardly talk to a tractor can you. But all the same I can mind he looked after that old Fordson like a baby. Never get rid of it he says to me. Family history that old tractor.
In spite of his bad leg Father went on working till the day he died. Every evening when it was getting dark he would walk up the lane to shut up the fowls against the fox. Never let anyone else do it no matter how much his leg was paining him. And then one evening he goes off and doesn’t come back. I found him lying outside the fowl house with his stick still in his hand. The doctor told Mother and me it was the best way to go. He would never have knowed a thing.
When my time comes I want it to be just like that. Good and quick. Maybe I’ll be shutting up the fowls just like Father was and someone will find me outside the fowl house and the police inspector will come along and look for footprints and fingerprints and write in his report
Death by natural causes.
Fowl play not suspected.
Make me smile that would
THE END
Grandpa’s story came with me in my rucksack, all the way to Australia. I read it by torchlight lying on my bunk in the sheep station. I read it in the bush by the light of the moon. I read it on the plane home, the paper glowing red with the last of the Australian sun. By then I think I had already made up my mind.
I did go to college to study engineering as I’d planned, but four years later I was back at Burrow, farming with Grandpa. He’s retired now, or as good as. He spends most of his days reading – Sherlock Holmes at the moment. He leaves most of the farming to me. It’s all I hoped it would be, and more.
I’ve been spending my evenings up in the barn restoring the old green Fordson. It now has four wheels again, a reconditioned engine, and the bodywork is almost finished. My pride and joy.
Grandpa came in to inspect it yesterday evening. He walked around, patting it and stroking it, just as if it were a horse.
‘Looks good as new,’ he said. ‘Wish you could do the same for me.’ And he went off to shut up his hens. No matter how cold and wet and windy it is, he still likes to do that himself.
Once he’d gone, I sat myself up on the seat. I gripped the steering wheel, closed my eyes, and off I went, thundering out over the farm. I was out on Candlelight and roaring along in the wind when he interrupted my dreams. He was waving his stick at me from the barn door, and laughing. ‘Mighty noisy, that old tractor,’ he said. ‘And you want to watch the brakes. You can’t trust ’em. Remember what happened to old Harry Medlicott.’
‘I remember,’ I said.
Michael Morpurgo is one of Britain’s best-loved writers for children and has won many prizes, including the Whitbread Prize, the Red House Children’s Book Award and the Blue Peter Book Award. From 2003 to 2005 he was the Children’s Laureate, a role which took him all over the UK to promote literacy and reading, and in 2005 he was named the Booksellers Association Author of the Year. In 2007, he was Writer in Residence at the Savoy Hotel in London.
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First published in Great Britain in 1997 by
Pavilion Books Limited
This edition published in 1999 by HarperCollins
Children’s Books
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ISBN 978 0 00 675412 1
The author and illustrator assert the moral right to be identified as author and illustrator of this work
FARM BOY
. Text copyright © Michael Morpurgo 1997. Illustrations copyright © Michael Foreman 1997. 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 e-book 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 e-books.
EPub Edition © JANUARY 2012 ISBN: 978-0-00-747962-7
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