Free My Friend Walter by Michael Morpurgo

the way back to the library without stopping. I had a terrible urge inside me to catch the next train to London and follow him to the Tower. I had lost my friend and I was going to be alone again. I didn’t know if I was more sorry for him or more sorry for me. Either way I was miserable.
    I was sitting waiting on the steps of the library for Father when I had an idea. If I couldn’t have Walter with me then I would have the next best thing. I would find a book about him from the library and read it. That way I could find out more about him and I could get to know him better even if he wasn’t there. The book I found had very small print and only one picture of him, on the title page. It was of Walter Raleigh as a young man, but I recognised the way he stood leaningon his cane, a half-smile on his lips, his legs crossed.
    I was half way through the first page when Father drew up. I could see at once that something was wrong. He was grey and drawn and he said not a single word all the way home. I asked him what the matter was, whether he was feeling ill, but he didn’t even reply. It was as if he had never heard me. I had to wait until we got home to find out what had happened.
    He walked around the garden with his arm around Mother and then out into Front Meadow beyond. With Will beside me I watched and waited for them to come back. When they did I could see that Mother had been crying, but she tried not to show it. ‘I’ve got some bad news,’ Father said, ‘and your mother says I ought to tell you. Well, here goes. We’ve got to leave the farm. We’ve got to sell up.’
    â€˜What do you mean?’ said Will. ‘What do you mean, sell up?’
    â€˜Nothing else for it.’ said Father. ‘We can’t pay the rent on the place and so we’ve got to go. I’ve just been in to see the bank manager. He says we can’t go on, not any more. That’s all there is to it.’

CHAPTER 6
    IT TOOK SOME TIME FOR IT TO SINK IN. WE SAT together, the four of us, in the hay barn. We could talk there, Mother said, without any danger of Gran overhearing. Beside me Father was sitting forward with his elbows on his knees picking the nail of his forefinger with his thumb nail. It was left to Mother to explain it all. To be honest it didn’t much matter to me why it happened. I mean it didn’t make any difference, did it? We were selling the farm and that was all there was to it. I suppose Mother was doing her best to make it hurt less.
    â€˜We’ve done all we can,’ she said. ‘Your father’s worked himself to the bone. But it was always an uphill struggle on this land. It never was the best farmin the world but we knew that when we took it on, didn’t we dear?’ Father stared straight ahead of him and said nothing. Mother went on. ‘The land’s steep and a lot of it faces north, and it’s wet land, too. Still, we’ve managed to make ends meet over the years. But we’ve had a bit of bad luck just these last two or three years – poor lambing for the last couple of years, a lot of singles and then we had that scour. The price of pigs has fallen and you remember there was that blight in the potatoes last year. We hardly lifted any good ones at all. We were hoping for a good corn harvest this year, but it wasn’t good enough. The sums just weren’t adding up and that’s what farming’s all about in the end. The sums have got to add up. ’Course, if we owned the farm we could sell of a bit of land and we’d be all right again then, but we don’t. As you know, it belongs to Mr Watts.’
    â€˜I don’t like Mr Watts,’ said Will.
    â€˜Like him or not, Will, he’s the landlord,’ said Mother, ‘and we’ve got to pay him his rent. We’ve had to borrow money from the bank to pay the rent for three years now and Father says they won’t let us do it again. So