This Morning I Met a Whale

This Morning I Met a Whale by Michael Morpurgo is a short, strange story for 9 year olds about a boy who is handed a message he never asked for.

What happens

Michael goes down to the river before five in the morning because bird-watching is his hobby and that is the best time for it. The flat is in Battersea. The walk takes five minutes.

He is watching an egret through his binoculars when every bird on the Thames lifts off at once. The river goes still, as if it is holding its breath.

Then something comes slicing through the water towards him. He thinks shark. It is a bottle-nosed whale.

Michael knows exactly which whale it is, because of a poster his uncle sent him that has been pinned over his bed for years. A small detail, that, and it tells you everything about him.

Then the whale speaks. Not out loud. Inside his head, like a talking thought.

It has come up the Thames alone and on purpose. Its grandfather swam this way once, got stranded, and was pushed back into the water by children who stopped to help. Children listen, the grandfather told him. Grown-ups will not.

The tide is going out the whole time they talk, and that is what gives the story its grip. Every few pages the whale has to thrash its way back into deeper water or be beached.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Near the end of the whale's speech, Michael is shown what is happening to the world, and Morpurgo does not soften any of it. A dying reef full of rubbish. A sperm whale winched bleeding out of the sea. A turtle tangled in nets. An orang-utan shot while she runs with her baby, and the baby pulled out of her arms. Then a tented city by the sea and a child lying alone on the sand, not crying, because she is dead.

That is about half a page and it lands hard.

If your reader worries about animals, or about the planet, this could genuinely upset them, and it may be one to read alongside them. For a child who already asks a lot of questions about plastic and polar bears, it may be the first book that talks to them straight instead of managing them.

The frame is clever, too. Partway through you work out that you are reading Michael's school writing exercise, and that his teacher cannot quite believe how hard he is suddenly working.

What to read next

If the whale stays with them afterwards, try Song for a Whale. Iris is deaf, and when she hears about a real whale calling at a pitch no other whale can answer, she decides somebody ought to do something about it.