Free The White Horse of Zennor by Michael Morpurgo Page A

‘and when it comes you’ll do what you must do: but I warn you Thomas, donot hurry the land, do not upset the balance. And remember the story; remember to leave out the bowl of milk each night as we have always done, and to leave the one row of potatoes in the ground every year. My father made them a promise and I’ve kept to it, and you must keep to it. Promise me that much.’
    To others it might have sounded like the ramblings of a dying old man, but Thomas had grown up with the story and knew how important it was to his father.
    â€˜I promise Father,’ he said. ‘Of course I’ll keep the promise.’
    But the promise was made only to comfort his father. Once made, it was forgotten. In everything but this Thomas respected the wisdom of his father, although he may not always have agreed with him.
    He had been brought up with the story that had first fascinated him and then stretched his credulity as a growing child, but that had become quite ridiculous to him now that he was a grown man. The farm, so his father said, was inhabited by a family of strange little folk – his father called them ‘my little friends’. He himself had never seen one of them but his father before himhad seen and spoken to them, indeed he had made a solemn bargain with them. On their part the little folk would guard the farm and all the animals, keeping them free from disease and misfortune; and on his part the farmer would treat the land with the love and respect it deserved; and to seal the bargain the family would supply the little folk with milk and potatoes for ever and ever. Accordingly, each evening after milking, for over a hundred years now a bowl of fresh warm milk had been put out on the rock in the meadow below the cowshed. And each year a long line of potatoes was left in the ground after harvest, and when it was ploughed up the next spring there was never a potato to be found.
    As a child Thomas loved the story and longed for his father to set him on his knee by the stove and tell it to him again and again; and when he grew up he heard of other similar legends of strange little people on other farms and up on the moors by the Quoit – but by this time they were mere legends to be enjoyed, but not to be believed. He had long since stopped lying low in the grass to ambush one of the little folk. He no longer put his ear to the rocks to listen in on their conversations.
    So with his father dead and buried, Thomas now began to make changes at Tremedda Farm. With the money so carefully saved up over the years by his father he built a magnificent herring-bone milking parlour and installed a huge silver bulk tank. He trebled the size of the milking herd in the first year and worked like a slave to himself to finance the modernisation of the piggery and the building of a covered yard for the bullocks and suckling cows. He bulldozed away the hedgerows, the boulders and the giant fuchsias to enlarge the fields so he could farm more efficiently. He began to spray the encroaching bracken instead of burning it as his father had done.
    Within a few short years the farm was transformed out of all recognition. His hard work and his success were admired all over Penwith; and he soon found himself a wife and brought her back to live with him at Tremedda. She loved the peace of the place and the feeling of being at the end of the earth, and they were happy. Thomas wanted his first child to be a boy so that he could take on the farm after him, and sure enough the boy came, healthy and strong. The world seemedtruly to have become his oyster, but in all that time he had not once put out the bowl of milk and he no longer even grew a field of potatoes. It was not economic to grow just a few potatoes, and anyway he needed all the land to supply the barley and the straw he needed for the cows. So there was no room any more for potatoes, but even if he had grown potatoes he certainly would never have left them to