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       Also by Michael Morpurgo

      Arthur: High King of Britain

      Escape from Shangri-La

      Friend or Foe

      From Hereabout Hill

      The Ghost of Grania O’Malley

      Kensuke’s Kingdom

      King of the Cloud Forests

      Little Foxes

      Long Way Home

      Mr Nobody’s Eyes

      My Friend Walter

      The Nine Lives of Montezuma

      The Sandman and the Turtles

      Twist of Gold

      Waiting for Anya

      War Horse

      The White Horse of Zennor

      The War of Jenkins’ Ear

      Why the Whales Came

       For younger readers

      Animal Tales

      Conker

      Mairi’s Mermaid

      The Marble Crusher

      On Angel Wings

      The Best Christmas Present in the World

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image image To the people of Bryher, for all the warmth and kindness over the years MM

      CONTENTS

       Before I wrote my story

       The Sleeping Sword by Bun Bendle

       1 The dive of my life

       2 ‘Not a mummy mummy’

       3 Inside my black hole

       4 Only one way out

       5 Hell Bay

       6 One of us

       7 ‘Be Happy. Don’t worry.’

       8 ‘Be an angel, Bun’

       9 Dry bones

       10 ‘Isn’t that magical?’

       11 ‘No such thing as luck’

       12 In my dreams

       13 The quest begins

       14 Ghost ship

       15 Metamorphosis

       16 Arthur, High King of Britain

       17 The sleeping sword

       18 End of the quest

       19 ‘Is it really true?’

       After I wrote my story

      BEFORE I WROTE MY STORY

      Before it happened, before the world went black about me, I used to read a lot. I’ve tried Braille, and I am getting better at it all the time, but reading is so slow that way. So now I listen to my audio tapes instead. I’ve got dozens of them on my shelf. The trouble is I can’t tell which is which, so I’ve put my three favourite ones side by side on my bedside table. That way I can find them more easily.

      Left to right, it’s The Sword in the Stone, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Arthur, High King of Britain. I’ve listened to those three so often I can say bits of them by heart. But it’s Arthur, High King of Britain I’ve listened to most often, not because it’s the best – The Sword in the Stone is probably the best – but because Arthur, High King of Britain begins and ends on Bryher, on the Scilly Isles, where I live. I can picture all the places so well inside my head and that helps me to feel part of the story, free to roam inside it somehow, to be whoever I want to be, do whatever I want to do.

      And that’s my trouble at the moment. There’s so much I can’t do now that I used to do without even thinking about it – you know, ordinary things like going down to the shop, hurdling over mooring ropes, playing football on the green, watching telly, seeing my friends whenever I felt like it, messing about in boats, diving off the quay with them in the summertime. I can still go swimming, but someone always has to be with me. That’s the worst of it, really. I can never go free like I used to.

      It’s not so bad at home. I’ve got a sort of memory-and-touch map of the house inside my head, every room, every doorway, every chair. And, provided my father doesn’t leave his slippers in the middle of the kitchen floor – which he often does – and provided no one shifts the furniture or moves my toothbrush, I can manage just about all right. I really hate it if I trip or fumble about or fall over. No one laughs, of course they don’t. In a kind of way I wish they would. Instead they go all silent and feel sorry for me, and that just makes me angry again inside.

      And there’s so much I miss – all the colours of the sky and the sea, the blue and the green and the grey, the black and white of the oystercatchers. I can’t picture colours in my head any more, and I can’t picture people’s faces either, not like I could. So, like the oystercatchers, everyone’s a voice now, just a voice. I’m getting used to it, or that’s what I keep telling myself, anyway. I should be after two years. But it still makes me angry when I think about it, the bad luck of it, I mean. I try not to think about it, but that’s a lot easier said than done.

      That’s what’s so good about ‘reading’ stories, and ‘writing’ them, too. I’ve made up lots and lots of short stories. I love doing it because I can be whoever I like inside my stories. I can make my dreams really happen. I’m the maker of new worlds. Inside my dreams, inside my stories I can run free again. I can see again. I can be me again.

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