The Tortoise and the Soldier

Michael Foreman's The Tortoise and the Soldier is a First World War story for 10 year olds, based on real events, about a sailor, a shell crater and the tortoise who kept him going.

What happens

It's the 1950s, and Trev is the office boy at the local paper in Lowestoft. Every spring somebody has to check whether Mr Friston's tortoise has woken up yet. This year it's Trev's turn.

Henry Friston is fifty-nine and lives in a pair of old railway carriages. His tortoise, Ali Pasha, is sixty-eight-ish. So why the grand name? It's a long story, says Henry. Come back on Sunday.

So Trev does, Sunday after Sunday, with his pencils and his notepad. Over apple juice, cups of tea and a battered wartime diary, Henry tells him everything.

He was the daydreamer who got chalk thrown at him for staring at the classroom map. Then a gardener's boy, a deckhand on a fishing boat at fourteen, and a gunner on the battleship HMS Implacable. And then, in 1915, Gallipoli.

It's there, blown face down into a shell crater, alone and terrified, that something rolls in and bonks him on the head. A tortoise! He shares his squashed tomato with it. Then he smuggles it aboard ship in his pack.

The storytelling is lovely. Trev is cheeky and honest about being a not-very-proper reporter, and Henry's voice is warm and plain. You feel Trev growing up as he listens. When he calls the Turkish soldiers evil, Henry gently tells him about the truce where both sides buried their dead side by side and shared a smoke.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

This doesn't soften what war was like. Henry describes wading past the bodies of men and mules, a dying boy calling for his mother, and hiding behind the dead while bullets hit them. It's told simply and without gore, but it's upsetting, and Henry cries remembering it.

A child who's sensitive about death, or about animals being hurt, might find those pages hard. A reader who's curious about history, or who's just started learning about the First World War, will probably find it unforgettable. And Ali Pasha makes it bearable.

What to read next

For another old man telling a young listener about that war, try Farm Boy. A Devon grandpa shares the story of his father and the farm horse he went to war to follow.