Michael Murpurgo (1982) White Horse of Zennor and other stories.

Michael Murpurgo wrote this collection of five short-stories over forty years ago. He requested the reader read them in the order presented. A story within a story, which is quite a neat trick.

Murpurgo is most famous for War Horse. Book, stage-play (with an animated cloth horse) and film. I haven’t read it but did watch the film that elevated him into the elite group (less than five percent) of writers that can make a comfortable living from writing.

Every would-be writer knows there is no money in short-stories. Most of us write them as a calling card nobody much reads.

Murpurgo’s collection shares a commonality of place. Zennor in Cornwall is the setting.

I liked the first story, ‘The Giant’s Necklace’ best.  

   Cherry is eleven. That magical age. She can spend the whole holiday collecting pink cowrie shells. Her four older brothers mock her in a nice way. She’s determined to make a necklace for a Giant. The right size is when it reaches the toaster.

That’s a beautiful observation which takes the reader inside Cherry’s world.

Something must happen to the Giant’s Necklace or Cherry, or both to move the story on.   

 ‘The White Horse of Zennor’ is given as a reward by a Knocker to a wee girls and boy whose parents had farmed The Fossage Valley. One good deed deserves another.

‘Gone to Sea,’ the shortest of the short-story collection has the magical transformation in the title.

‘Milk for the Cat’ is a morality lesson. Thomas Barbery no longer respects the land or the little people who help tend it. He’ll get his comeuppance.

‘Mad Miss Marney’ is a writer. Madness, of course, being no hindrance and something of an asset. She is an old crone feared by local children and exiled by their parents. When one bold little girl, Kate, befriends her, we know to expect the best and not the worst. Read on.    

In Cornish folklore, a knocker—also known as a knacker, bucca, or tommyknocker—is a mischievous, gnome-like fairy believed to dwell in the tin mines of Cornwall and Devon.

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