Free The White Horse of Zennor by Michael Morpurgo

mother that I’m happy and well, that all her stories were true, and that she must never be sad. Tell her all is well with me. Promise?’
    â€˜Course,’ Sam whispered. ‘Course I will, dear lad.’
    And then as suddenly as he had appeared, Williamwas gone. Sam called out to him again and again. He wanted confirmation, he wanted to be sure his eyes had not been deceiving him. But the sea around him was empty and he never saw him again.
    William’s mother was feeding the hens as she did every morning after the men had left the house. She saw Sam coming down the lane towards the house and turned away. It would be more sympathy and she had had enough of that since William died. But Sam called after her and so she had to turn to face him. They spoke together for only a few minutes, Sam with his hands on her shoulders, before they parted leaving her alone again with her hens clucking impatiently around her feet. If Sam had turned as he walked away he would have seen that she was smiling through her tears.
    The inscription on the tablet in the church reads:
    Â 
WILLIAM TREGERTHEN
AGED 10
Gone to sea, where he belongs

MILK FOR THE CAT
    OLD MAN BARBERY HAD BEEN FARMING below the Eagle’s Nest at Tremedda for as long as anyone in Zennor parish could remember. The wind and the years had gnarled his leathery face and bent his bones; but his sharp blue eyes, although watery with age, remained bright with joy until the end. He died as every man should die – in his sleep. He left no mark in the world except his son, and the farm at Tremedda which he had not altered in sixty years.
    During the twilight of his life no one couldunderstand how he remained so smiling and contented, when so far as anyone else could see his life was and had been one long round of hard labour on the land and of wretched tragedy at home. He had married very late in life and his young wife had died in childbirth leaving him, already an old man, with an only son to bring up.
    He was the wise old man of the village, and when asked, as he often was, how he stayed so cheerful, his eyes would smile and he would say:
    â€˜The secret is to be in tune with the land, to be in rhythm with the seasons, to rise with the sun and to go to bed as it sets. The land is like a god,’ he would say, wagging his crooked finger. ‘Love the land and it will love you in return.’
    Thomas was still young when the old man died. For some years already he had worked on the land alongside his father, but always under his father’s direction. There was a small herd of sundry milking cows still milked by hand in the old parlour below the house. The suckling cows and bullocks wintered out in amongst the rocks and the dead bracken. The dozen sows were still housed in a piggery that was so ancient that it looked as if it hadsprung from the ground a millennium before. They had nearly a hundred lambing ewes each year and countless bedraggled hens and muddy ducks that wandered at will and laid whenever and wherever they found it convenient. A few fields were put to oats and barley, and there was always one field of potatoes. They had the machinery they needed for ploughing and harvesting, but always fourth-hand and rusty. ‘Workable’, his father called it. He would allow no weedkiller and no pesticides to be sprayed on his land – his father referred to them as ‘damned blasphemies’.
    Thomas had often pleaded with his old father to modernise, but the old man would always point out that they had money in the bank, didn’t they, and that the land looked well, didn’t it? ‘Put all your eggs in one basket Thomas,’ he would say, ‘and then tell me what happens if you drop the basket.’ There was no arguing with him, Thomas knew that and was a gentle enough person not to want to hurt an old man by persisting.
    â€˜You’ll have your time, Thomas,’ he had whispered urgently the day before he died,