The Fox and the Ghost King by Michael Morpurgo
Well, Dad liked digging anyway. So did I. What had we got to lose? You get worms if you dig, great fat wriggly ones if you’re lucky.
And if the king kept his promise we would be getting a lot more than worms for the Foxes, for Leicester City.
So we dug.
We dug down and down, deep under the car park, then along and along, Dad digging – Dad doing most of the digging, if I’m honest – with me scooping out the earth behind us.
We dug, and scooped, and dug and scooped, and the king’s voice talked us in towards him all the time, mostly about that wretched horse of his that ran off just before they killed him at Bosworth Field, and how you should never trust a war horse. They’re not brave at all, he said, just big, and stupid. And of course he went on and on about how much he loathed and detested and despised William Shakespeare.
Dad didn’t like to upset him, but he told me quietly, as he was digging, that he had once watched one of those Shakespeare plays, an open-air production in the park, and it wasn’t bad at all, he said. A Midsummer Night’s Dream he thought it was called. He wasn’t sure he quite understood the story, but there were a lot of laughs, and a donkey called Bottom, he remembered, and a funny little fellow, a wild creature of the woods, called Puck.
“A bit like a fox, he was,” said Dad, digging away. “A bit like me, bit like you. He kept getting himself into all sorts of trouble, but somehow managed to get himself out of it again. Like I said, like us!”
It was a tiring night and a long night. But we kept ourselves digging by telling each other what the scores were going to be in every match the Foxes would be playing in their winning season ahead.
We lived every game as we imagined it: who scored the goals – so Vardy mostly, of course – who made the tackles, the crosses, the perfect passes, who took the penalties.
Spurs 0 – Leicester City 4!
Manchester United 1 – Leicester City 3!
Southampton 1 – Leicester City 6!
Chelsea 0 – Leicester City 10!
The more we won, “in our mind’s eye” – that’s Shakespeare again (he gets everywhere that man, like the king said) – the more goals we scored, the harder we dug. We ate a few worms as we went along, of course, to keep ourselves going.
By dawn we were that close to the king’s voice we thought we could almost smell him.
“They’ll find you easily enough now, Your Kingship,” said Dad. “And we’ve got to get home before the city wakes up.”
The king thanked us quite politely.
But Dad was not fooled by politeness. “When they find you, Your Kingship, you just keep your side of the bargain. All right?” he told him, politely but very firmly.
“I will,” said the king. “Don’t you worry, Mister Fox, Master Fox, I will. I am a king of my word.”
So we padded back along the streets, visiting a dustbin here and there on the way, and came back to our lovely warm smelly den under the garden shed, where we told Mum and all my little sisters everything that had happened.
And Mum was cross with us. We had stayed out so late, and she’d been worried sick, she said. Also she thought that digging all night, just because some strange voice from under the ground asked us to, and for a ridiculous promise that could never come true, was a waste of time and plain silly. And my sisters were cross because Dad had not brought home any pizza or chips for them, and they were jealous I had had such an exciting time.
They wanted to go to the football as much as me, and it wasn’t fair, they said. They do go on sometimes, my sisters. But I love them all the same.
And when I slept that night, I dreamed the impossible dream: the Foxes had won the league, and Vardy was holding the cup aloft and everyone in Leicester, and every fox in the whole country was over the moon, on Cloud Nine – well, you know what I mean.
And do you know? They discovered the grave of Richard III in the car park – followed our tunnel and found it – the very next day. They even said some fox had led them right to it. It was two foxes actually.
And after a bit of historical and political kerfuffle and argy-bargy, they buried him, with all the pomp and honour and dignity he had so longed for, in Leicester Cathedral. And do you know something else?
William Shakespeare was wrong about that king, in part at least. King Richard III of England was not as bad as all that, as Shakespeare had made him out to be.
He was a king of his word. He kept his promise.
How he kept his promise we did not know, and we did not care.
Right from the start of the season Leicester City, our wonderful Foxes, just started winning. The very first match we beat Sunderland 4–2. Easy peasy.
We came back from two goals down to beat Aston Villa 3–2, scoring three goals in the last twenty minutes. Easy peasy.
Soon we were up to fifth place in the league. We were there at every home match, not just Dad and me, but the whole family now. Dad and me came for the football, of course, for the Foxes, but Mum and my sisters came for the easy pickings after the match: the hotdog rolls soaked in tomato sauce, the left-behind pizza slices.
But we were worried. We were letting in too many goals, not beating everyone the way we needed to if we were going to win the league, like he had promised us.
But the Ghost King was not bothered, not one bit. “Don’t you worry, my friends,” he told us. “I had a word with the manager, that Ranieri fellow – I told him in a dream. I said, ‘Use bribery; it’s the only way.’ Kings know these things.”
Next thing we heard that Ranieri had promised the players that whenever they kept a clean sheet, no goals scored against them, then he would give them all a treat and take them out for a pizza.
It worked a treat too! The Foxes chased and chased, tackled and tackled; the goalkeeper saved goal after goal.
We were there at the Crystal Palace match, the whole family of us foxes, cheering them on, and we were there too down the alleyway at the back of the pizzeria after we had beaten them 1–0, not letting in a single goal, and the players were inside scoffing their pizzas.
*
We waited until they’d finished, then knocked over the dustbins outside and scoffed the leftovers – theirs and everyone else’s. We were chomping away on our heroes’ pizzas! Best pizzas I ever had!
That was the match when we all began to believe the impossible dream might happen – my little sisters too, Mum as well. They were loving the football now as much as the pizzas.
After that Crystal Palace match, we just went on winning, and Ranieri kept taking the team out for pizzas, because so few sides could ever score against us.
We were there on another moonlit night, a year or so later, out on the Leicester City football pitch the day they won the Premier League. The whole city was going bananas. Every fox all over the land, in towns and villages, in city parks and countryside, was barking at the moon.
But the football stadium in Leicester was quiet, not a soul about. Leicester weren’t even playing that day: it was Chelsea drawing against Tottenham that gave our beloved Foxes the points to win the Championship, and that only made Dad and me happier.
All of us were there on the empty pitch in the empty stadium, the whole family, my sisters too, and the Ghost King, our friend who had made it all happen, just as he had promised it would.
“So are you happy foxes tonight?” the Ghost King asked. He was a bit see-though this ghost, but ghosts are. You get used to it. He wasn’t a bit frightening – weird, but not frightening.
“Tonight every fox all over the country is happy, thanks to you, Your Kingship,” said Dad. “But how on earth did you manage to do it?”
“I told you, a king can do stuff, and a ghost king can do even more, once he’s free.”
“‘Such stuff as dreams are made on’?” said Dad.
“That Shakespeare fellow, he’s inside your head now, isn’t he?”
“Which reminds me,” Dad said. “They’re putting on the play of A Midsummer Night’s Drea
So we went, all of us together.
A lovely summer’s evening. Dad was right. That Puck really is a wild spirit of the woods, a bit like him, a bit like me, a bit like all of us foxes – just foxy! And Dad was right too about William Shakespeare – he makes wonderful plays.
Even the Ghost King thought so, reluctantly maybe, but he couldn’t hide it. As we walked away, he whispered just loud enough for all of us to hear: “‘All’s well that ends well.’”
“Right on, Your Kingship,” I said.
And we all did high-fives together, the Ghost King too.
A Note on Leicester City F.C.
By Michael Foreman
In 1884, a group of old boys from Wyggeston School in Leicester formed a football team and played on a field near Fosse Road. They called the team Leicester Fosse and eventually joined the Football League in 1890.
The Leicester Fosse team of 1892
In 1908, they gained promotion to the First Division (the highest level of English football at the time) but were relegated the very next season.
So began a century-long see-saw pattern of promotion and numerous relegations. Their highest position during all this time was second in Division 1 in 1929.
In 2002, the club hit their lowest point by going into administration with debts of £30m, to be followed in 2008 by relegation to the third tier of English football – their lowest ever position.
Then … in August 2012, King Richard III was found under a Leicester car park, and a right royal turnaround in the Foxes’ fortunes began, with their long-awaited return to the top flight, the Premier League, in 2014.
After narrowly avoiding relegation again at the end of the season, they started the 2015/16 season as favourites to be relegated. Bookmakers assessed their chances of winning the Premier League at 5,000 to 1.
However, as the whole world now knows, after an amazing season the Foxes were CROWNED CHAMPIONS!
A Note on Richard III
By Michael Morpurgo
History in the United Kingdom was never more horrible than during the long civil war in the fifteenth century, which came to be called the Wars of the Roses – the struggle for the crown between the White Rose of the Yorkists and the Red Rose of the Lancastrians.
This war raged on for decades, and was essentially a family squabble about which line had the most rights to the throne, this son or that cousin, the Yorkist side of the line or the Lancastrian.
It became a brutal and cruel conflict and drew in the whole country. Sometimes the Lancastrian followers of Red Rose seemed to be winning, and then the White Rose of the Yorkists had their man on the throne.
The Wars of the Roses
The kings – Henry, Edward and Richard – may have different names and numbers, may have been White Rose or Red Rose, but all were soon deposed or killed.
Betrayal was rampant; people and families changed sides depending on which way the wind of opportunity seemed to be blowing. Battles raged as the power ebbed one way, then the other. Opponents were imprisoned, banished, murdered or executed, in an effort to establish supremacy. It was an era of terrible tyranny and great suffering.
By means just as devious and ruthless and murderous as his predecessors – but not a lot worse – Richard III, Duke of York, and therefore champion of the White Rose Yorkist family faction, manoeuvred and murdered his way to the throne in the year 1483 at the age of thirty.
Richard III
Shakespeare and others painted him as the cruellest of kings, largely because of the murder of the two young princes in the tower, his rivals to the throne. Whether Richard ordered this “disappearance” or simply allowed it to happen, we cannot be sure. We cannot even be certain that the boys died. But they did disappear and they had as rightful a claim to the throne as did Richard III. Who knows how guilty he was?
It was Shakespeare who made up our mind about him for us by writing his play Richard III, in which the king became the most villainous and reviled in our history. Two great actors, Laurence Olivier first, and in recent times, Benedict Cumberbatch, in their dark portrayals of Richard III, have confirmed him as the personification of cunning, ambition and evil.
Richard’s short reign came to an end at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, where he met the army of Henry Bollingbroke, the Red Rose and Lancastrian claimant to the throne. The story goes that in the battle Richard fell off his horse, could not find it again, and was surrounded by Henry’s soldiers. They cut him down and killed him. His body was later taken to a monastery in Leicester where it was buried hurriedly and without ceremony in an unmarked grave.
Hundreds of years later, his body was discovered, under what had since become a car park. The rest, as they say, is history. He was buried finally in Leicester Cathedral; and, shortly after, Leicester City Football Club – the Foxes as they are called – who were 5,000 to 1 outsiders, won the Championship.
Now I don’t think they could have done that without some ghostly help, do you? The foxes might have helped too, I reckon.
Discover more unforgettable books from the nation’s favourite storyteller.
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Also by Michael Morpurgo
An Eagle in the Snow
Listen to the Moon
A Medal for Leroy
Little Manfred
An Elephant in the Garden
Shadow
Kaspar – Prince of Cats
Running Wild
The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips
Private Peaceful
Alone on a Wide, Wide Sea
Born to Run
Sparrow
Outlaw
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Michael Morpurgo, The Fox and the Ghost King