A runaway schoolboy finds a magnificent monument to a magnificent
animal in this ghost story, at once marvelous and matter-of-fact,
from Morpurgo (Robin of Sherwood, 1996, etc.). The author casts
himself as the ten-year-old narrator, whose attempt to run away
from a miserable boarding-school existence ends in a dusty house,
where a friendly old widow shows him a great lion cut into the
chalk on a hillside - the butterfly lion. She tells him how it came
to be there: Her Bertie, a lonely boy in South Africa, found and
began to raise a white lion cub, tearfully saw it sold to a French
circus owner, reclaimed it years later during the Great War, and
brought it to England to live. When it died, Bertie spent the next
40 years carving its likeness on the hill. Astonishing in itself,
the chalk lion becomes even moreso after a rain, when thousands of
Adonis Blue butterflies gather on it. Urging him to come again, the
old woman takes the boy back to school; only later does he learn
that she died - as her husband did - years ago. This dreamlike
story is suffused with a man's lifelong love for a rare, gentle
animal friend. (Kirkus Reviews)
ILLUSTRATED BY CHRISTIAN BIRMINGHAM.
A lyrical and moving tale of a young boy growing up in Africa, and his lifelong friendship with a white lion.
“All my life I’ll think of you, I promise I will. I won’t ever forget you.”
Bertie rescues an orphaned white lion cub from the African veld. They are inseparable until Bertie is sent to boarding school far away in England and the lion is sold to a circus. Bertie swears that one day they will see one another again, but it is the butterfly lion which ensures that their friendship will never be forgotten.
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