The White Horse of Zennor by Michael Morpurgo Page A

It’s difficult for me to get down on the rocks.’
    â€˜Dear lad,’ said Sam, brushing off his coat. ‘If you can run with a foot like that, then you can most certainly swim. Mark my words, dear lad; I may look like an old soak – I know what they call me – but drink in moderation inspires great wisdom. Do as I say, get down to the sea and swim.’
    * * *
    William went down to the sea in secret that afternoon because he knew his mother would worry. Worse than that, she might try to stop him from going if she thought it was dangerous. She was busy in the kitchen so he said simply that he would make his own way across the fields to their rock and watch the kestrel they had seen the day before floating on the warm air high above the bracken. He had been to the seashore before of course, but always accompanied by his mother who had helped him down the cliff path to the beach below.
    Swimming in the sea was forbidden. It was a family edict, and one observed by all the farming families around, whose respect and fear of the sea had been inculcated into them for generations. ‘The sea is for fish,’ his father had warned them often enough. ‘Swim in the rock pools all you want, but don’t go swimming in the sea.’
    With his brothers and his father making hay in the high field by the chapel William knew there was little enough chance of his being discovered. He did indeed pause for a rest on the rock to look skywards for thekestrel, and this somehow eased his conscience. Certainly there was a great deal he had not told his mother, but he had never deliberately deceived her before this. He felt however such a strong compulsion to follow Sam’s advice that he soon left the rock behind him and made for the cliff path. He was now further from home than he had ever been on his own before.
    The cliff path was tortuous, difficult enough for anyone to negotiate with two good feet, but William managed well enough using a stick as a crutch to help him over the streams that tumbled down fern-green gorges to the sea below. At times he had to go down on all fours to be sure he would not slip. As he clambered up along the path to the first headland, he turned and looked back along the coast towards Zennor Head, breathing in the wind from the sea. A sudden wild feeling of exuberance and elation came over him so that he felt somehow liberated and at one with the world. He cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted to a tanker that was cruising motionless far out to sea:
    â€˜I’m Limping Billy Tregerthen,’ he bellowed, ‘and I’m going to swim. I’m going to swim in the sea. I cansee you but you can’t see me. Look out fish, here I come. Look out seals, here I come. I’m Limping Billy Tregerthen and I’m going to swim.’
    So William came at last to Trevail Cliffs where the rocks step out into the sea but even at low tide never so far as to join the island. The island where the seals come lies some way off the shore, a black bastion against the sea, warning it that it must not come any further. Cormorants and shags perched on the island like sinister sentries and below them William saw the seals basking in the sun on the rocks. The path down to the beach was treacherous and William knew it. For the first time he had to manage on his own, so he sat down and bumped his way down the track to the beach.
    He went first to the place his brothers had learnt to swim, a great green bowl of sea water left behind in the rocks by the tide. As he clambered laboriously over the limpet-covered rocks towards the pool, he remembered how he had sat alone high on the cliff top above and watched his brothers and his father diving and splashing in the pool below, and how his heart had filled with envy and longing. ‘You sit there, with your Mother,’ hisfather had said. ‘It’s too dangerous for you out there on those rocks. Too dangerous.’
    â€˜And here I