Free My Friend Walter by Michael Morpurgo Page B

better that way and safer, Mother said. Aunty Ellie would tell her gently, when she felt the time was right.
    At school it soon got around that the Throckmortons were being put off the farm and everyone wanted to know where we were going and why. In the playground after lunch one day Will had a fight with Simon Battle – it
would
be him, he picked fights with everyone. Simon Battle told Will that he’d heard Father had been drinking too much in the evenings at ‘The Mucky Duck’ (it was really The Black Swan, but everyone called it ‘The Mucky Duck’) when he should have been out farming, and that was why we were having to leave the farm. Will didn’t care too much for that and said so with his fists, leaving Simon Battle a bit bruised and battered. I was proud of my brother that day. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like fighting, not normally.
    But in some ways life changed for the better, strange as that may seem. Everyone, except Simon Battle and one or two others, felt sorry for us. The teachers were all as sweet as pie, so that Will got away with blue murder; and my pictures and poems werealways put on the wall in the classroom – I even had one up in the front hall. They were all good of course, but not that good. But this was small enough compensation for the misery facing us every afternoon when we got back home from school.
    You couldn’t call it home, not any more. The farm was full of strange people wandering around scrutinizing the cows and looking into the sheep’s mouths. They inspected the machinery and clambered all over the barn. They peered down the drains and wells, and sniffed at the hay. And they weren’t only out on the farm. They were in the house as well. I came back from school one day and found a man in a Sherlock Holmes hat up in my bedroom pushing his penknife into the window-sill. ‘Just testing for dry rot,’ he said. ‘Lots of it about in this house. No central heating, I see. Nothing much been done in this place for a few years, by the look of it.’ I felt like knocking his silly hat off. I never discovered who he was. I never knew who any of them were, except Mr Watts.
    I recognised Mr Watts, the landlord. You could hardly miss him. He had a face so purple and puffed up that I thought he might blow up one day and fly away snorting like a balloon. Of course I’d seen him out onthe farm with Father from time to time. He used to come around a couple of times a year to inspect the farm gates and the ditches and the hedges. In spite of everything, Father and he still seemed very friendly and I could not understand that at all. After all, this was the man who was kicking us out of our home, and kicking Father off his farm. Well, I wasn’t going to smile at him nor have him give me one of his horrible humbugs he was always offering me. Will disliked him just as much, but the trouble was he loved humbugs, so he took all the humbugs he was offered; but at least he never smiled at Mr Watts and he never said thank you.
    It was at nights that I thought most about my friend Walter alone in his cold, damp room up in the Tower of London and I longed to have him with me again. Every night I read the book about him that I’d brought back from the library. There were a lot of long words I didn’t understand, but I understood enough to know that everything he’d told me was true. Walter Raleigh was never a traitor. They
had
taken everything away from him and they hadn’t even given him a fair trial. I could quite understand why he wanted revenge.
    I was angry at him, though, angry that he had leftme when I needed him most. True, he had warned me of the ‘storms’ ahead, and now I knew perfectly well what he had meant by that. But I wondered over and over again how he had known about what would happen; and if he had known, then why hadn’t he stayed to help me? I remembered every night his words of hope to me just