Farm Boy

Michael Morpurgo's Farm Boy is a warm, quiet story for 11 year olds about a grandson, his grandad and a very old tractor.

What happens

There's an old green Fordson in the back of Grandpa's barn, always under cornsacks. When the narrator was little he'd climb up and drive it all over the farm (never mind that it had a wheel missing). Grandpa always said it was very special. He doesn't find out how special until years later.

He's a town boy who spends his holidays at Burrow, Grandpa's thatched house in Devon. Grandpa talks with his eyebrows and his hands. Lots of his stories are about his own father, the Corporal, who went off to the First World War at fourteen because his horse Joey had been sold to the army.

Then, the summer he finishes school, Grandpa tells him a secret. He can't read. He can't write either. Would his grandson stay at Burrow for a few months and teach him? Grandpa's so sure he'll learn fast that he bets a hundred pounds on it.

What follows is lovely. Grandpa sits at the kitchen table every spare minute, pressing so hard he goes through pencils like he's eating them. It turns out Grandpa is the slave driver, not his teacher!

Part of the book is Grandpa's own story, written out in his own words. There's hardly any punctuation (they'd only got as far as capital letters and full stops) and you can hear his Devon voice in every line. It's about a boastful farmer with a brand-new tractor and a ploughing match against two old horses. Who doesn't love an underdog?

It's gentle, but it isn't all sunshine. Grandpa talks about losing his wife, and the war memories include friends and horses who didn't come home. None of it is graphic. It's told the way old people tell sad things, plainly and a long time after.

If you've got a reader who's close to a grandparent, this one will probably mean a lot to them. It might even send them off to ask a few questions of their own.

What to read next

Grandpa's stories do give away the big moments of Joey's war. So if your reader would rather hear it from the horse first, start with War Horse and come back to this one after. Either way round, they'll meet the same two horses, Joey and old Zoey.