The Fox and the Ghost King

Copyright

First published in hardback in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2016

HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

The HarperCollins website address is: www.harpercollins.co.uk

Text copyright © Michael Morpurgo 2016

Illustrations copyright © Michael Foreman 2016

Photographs in end material © Shutterstock.com

Cover photographs © James Warwick / Getty Images (adult fox face); FLPA / Alamy (fox cub face) eye35 / Alamy (Leicester Cathedral); Shutterstock.com for all other images

Michael Morpurgo and Michael Foreman assert the moral right to be identified as the author and illustrator of the work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008215774

Ebook Edition © 2016 ISBN: 9780008215781

Version: 2016-10-14

For Jonathan, charioteer supreme, and his family.

Remembering our journey from Kettering to Exeter.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

1. Over the Moon

2. Weird or What?

3. Rotten Onions and High-fives - global

4. The Promise of a King

5. Digging and Dreaming

6. Is This a Pizza I See Before Me?

7. All’s Well That Ends Well

A Note on Leicester City F.C.

A Note on Richard III

Discover more unforgettable books from the nation’s favourite storyteller

Also by Michael Morpurgo

About the Publisher

On moonlit nights we still often get together. We usually meet on the football pitch, after a match, because it’s quiet, no one about. That’s how foxes and ghosts like it. It’s only when all of us are together again that I can really believe it happened, that we really did make not just one but two impossible dreams come true.

I have to pinch myself – sometimes even then – to believe it happened. But I was there. I saw it all with my own eyes, heard it with my own ears, smelt it with my own nose.

Honest. Cub’s honour. Dib, dib, dib!

Imagine a family of foxes – Mum, Dad and the four of us little cubs – living in our den under a garden shed in Leicester. That’s us. I am the oldest, and I am the boss cub too, the friskiest, the peskiest, the pushiest. Dad likes that because it reminds him of himself, he says. And that’s why, if I pester him enough, he takes me out with him, now that I’m a little older, when he goes on his hunting expeditions at night. Mum never does, because she says she hunts better without me there to worry about. And it’s true; she always brings back a fat rabbit or a rat or a mole or a vole every time she goes out. Mum’s milk is so good and tasty and there’s always enough for all of us. But she does snap at me when I push my sisters off to get the best place to feed.

Dad never snaps at me. He’s a good hunter too, but he prefers dustbins, he says, because they don’t run away, and they’re full of tasty surprises. He hunts pizza crusts, and chips – my favourite, because I love tomato sauce – and chewy Chinese spare ribs, bits of burgers and buns – all great stuff. He’s the best dustbin hunter in the world, my dad, and he’s the top fox around, top dad too.

He’s not afraid of anyone, or anything, not ghosts, not kings, not even ghost kings – as you will see.

But the most important thing you have to know about our family is that all of us are football crazy: Leicester City fans, Foxes fans. The Foxes are our team, win or lose – mostly lose – the best team in the world.

Every fox in the whole town, in the whole country just about, is a Foxes football fan. We foxes are brought up Foxes fans.

All his life Dad has been going to the home games; Mum too, when she can, when she’s not having cubs. Down in our smelly old den – we like it smelly – all the talk is of football, or food. We talk a lot about food, it’s true: pizzas, worms, frogs, mice, chips – especially chips. A varied diet we have.

So you can imagine how excited I was when Dad asked me for the first time, one winter’s night, to come with him to the football. I felt at long last I was becoming a proper grown-up fox. All I wanted now was my silly droopy, drippy little tail to grow into a proper brush, like Dad’s. Once you’ve got a proper brush for a tail, then you’re a proper fox, but I was off to my first football match and that was good enough for me.

Over the moon, I was.

I loved it that first time I went, and every time afterwards, the lights, the roar of the crowd, the smell of hot dogs, the music, the singing, the chanting. The losing wasn’t so great. Dad always said then that the referee was rubbish, that he had favoured the other side.

He hated Chelsea especially, so did I, especially their manager. He was such a cocky-looking fellow.

I went with him after that whenever I could, whenever Mum would let me go. She worried about me, but mums do that. It’s their job.

The night this story began was the night we lost to Chelsea, again, a night we’ll never forget, but not because of losing to Chelsea.

No, not because of that at all.

Because of the ghost we met afterwards.

We were not happy foxes on our way home. Dad was going on about how Mourinho, the Chelsea manager, would be crowing like a cockerel, and how foxes knew how to deal with cockerels.

“Give him a good neck-shaking I would, then gobble him up,” he was saying. But we did pick up titbits of this and that from the pavement, leftovers: hotdogs and beef burgers, and fish and chips. You would not believe the stuff people throw away, but I’m glad they do. After that we knocked over a couple of dustbins and found some dribbly ice cream and some mouldy old cheese, which was delicious. We were trying to make ourselves feel a bit better, and we did too. So the Foxes had lost again. So what was new about that?

“Always look on the bright side of life, eh, son? Not the end of the world,” he said as we padded along homewards, down the lamp-lit city street. “The Foxes are still the best team in the world, son, right?”

“Right,” I told him. We stopped to do a high-five together, then chased our tails round and round three times – three times would bring us luck the next time, Dad said. I didn’t believe him, of course. We did the same every time we lost, and we still lost the next time. I knew really that he made me do it to cheer me up, and to cheer himself up too.

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