But as Mum was forever telling me, that was just how Grandma was and we had to put up with it, like Grandpa did. Somehow I swung myself round so that I could cling on with both hands, trying all I could to scrabble up the elephant’s side, and haul myself up. Separated from Oona, he's captured by a hunter-dealer who has tigers shot for their body parts and baby orang-utans captured for sale. It occurred to me at once that if I threw myself off here, then at least I would have a soft landing.

I knew for sure that they must be looking for survivors, rescuing people, and that one of them could be my mother. This was a million miles from everything that had happened, from everything that had brought me here. No leaves, Oona, I can’t eat leaves” was being rocked so violently from side to side up in my howdah that it was all I could do to avoid being thrown out.

Sometimes she wants to run when I do not want her to run, and once she is running she is very hard to stop. But this, this was the real thing, this was life or death – I knew it because Oona was trumpeting it. There are so many great Michael Morpurgo books to enjoy, but this month we’ve highlighted sixteen of his must-reads! However, the war began in 1939 so Michael's evacuation cannot have been triggered by the start of the war.

Then she lifted her trunk and began trumpeting at the sea, tossing her head as if there was something out there, something that terrified her. Breathless with drinking now, triumphant with it, I found myself laughing and whooping and slapping the water, filling the forest with my noise, sending thousands of screeching birds flying up out of the trees. He has written over 150 books, including The Butterfly Lion, Kensuke’s Kingdom, Why the Whales Came, The Mozart Question, Shadow, and War Horse, which was adapted for a hugely successful stage production by the National Theatre and then, in 2011, for a film directed by Steven Spielberg. was really being honest with myself, that no one could possibly be alive back down there on the coast, and that there was no use any more in pretending otherwise.In 2016 Samuel Adamson adapted it for the stage, in a production at the Regent's Park Open Air Theatre. I’d seen one in a natural history programme I’d watched back home, a virtual one that had been set off after the volcanic eruption on Krakatoa.