Loyal Creatures

Morris Gleitzman's Loyal Creatures is a war story for 9 year olds, told by an Australian boy who wants to go and has to talk his dad round first.

What happens

It is 1914. Frank Ballantyne is fifteen. Station hands keep riding past on their way to Sydney to volunteer with their horses, and Frank fancies it something rotten. Distant places. A pack of bullies to sort out. Medals.

His dad tries to clout him round the head with a canvas bucket, which is not like his dad at all.

The two of them find water for a living. They read the scrub, pick the spot, dig the bore. Since Frank's mum died they have worked as a team, and Frank does the heavy end because his dad's back is going. He is nearly thirty-six.

Then Frank catches him swinging a pickaxe much harder than the job needs, and works out what it means. His dad wants to go as badly as he does. He promised not to.

The other reason Frank wants medals is Joan Prescott, who works in the chemist after school. Her parents have decided a boy who digs holes is not right for a girl with a grammar school scholarship. So Frank hangs about pretending to inspect the ointments, and Joan slips him cough lozenges. Their conversations last about three lines and they will flatten you.

And there is Daisy, Frank's horse, currently eating her way through somebody's carrot patch and entirely unaware of what her owner is planning.

The voice is the whole thing. Frank talks straight at you in short flat lines, funny about everything, and the jokes are what he uses instead of saying how he feels. He does not say he misses his mum. He tells you he promised her he would never smoke, permanent, and moves on. You do the rest yourself.

Be honest with yourself about what this is. It is a book about horses going to a real war, and it does not pretend that is a lark. Frank's mother is already dead when the story opens, mentioned plainly rather than lingered over, so that part is background, not a shock waiting later on. The Middle Eastern campaign ahead of them is a gruelling one. Daisy is a horse and this is a real war, so a child who loves animals may want you within reach for some of it. If they can, this is an unusually clear-eyed way in, because Frank is so young and so certain and so obviously wrong about what he is signing up for.

What to read next

War Horse tells the same war from four legs down, following Joey from a drunken auction to a Devon farm and on towards the front, with the horse himself doing the telling.