The Fox and the Ghost King. Michael Morpurgo

fox in the whole town, in the whole country just about, is a Foxes football fan. We foxes are brought up Foxes fans.

      All his life Dad has been going to the home games; Mum too, when she can, when she’s not having cubs. Down in our smelly old den – we like it smelly – all the talk is of football, or food. We talk a lot about food, it’s true: pizzas, worms, frogs, mice, chips – especially chips. A varied diet we have.

      So you can imagine how excited I was when Dad asked me for the first time, one winter’s night, to come with him to the football. I felt at long last I was becoming a proper grown-up fox. All I wanted now was my silly droopy, drippy little tail to grow into a proper brush, like Dad’s. Once you’ve got a proper brush for a tail, then you’re a proper fox, but I was off to my first football match and that was good enough for me.

      Over the moon, I was.

      I loved it that first time I went, and every time afterwards, the lights, the roar of the crowd, the smell of hot dogs, the music, the singing, the chanting. The losing wasn’t so great. Dad always said then that the referee was rubbish, that he had favoured the other side.

      He hated Chelsea especially, so did I, especially their manager. He was such a cocky-looking fellow.

      I went with him after that whenever I could, whenever Mum would let me go. She worried about me, but mums do that. It’s their job.

      The night this story began was the night we lost to Chelsea, again, a night we’ll never forget, but not because of losing to Chelsea.

      No, not because of that at all.

      Because of the ghost we met afterwards.

      

      We were not happy foxes on our way home. Dad was going on about how Mourinho, the Chelsea manager, would be crowing like a cockerel, and how foxes knew how to deal with cockerels.

      “Give him a good neck-shaking I would, then gobble him up,” he was saying. But we did pick up titbits of this and that from the pavement, leftovers: hotdogs and beef burgers, and fish and chips. You would not believe the stuff people throw away, but I’m glad they do. After that we knocked over a couple of dustbins and found some dribbly ice cream and some mouldy old cheese, which was delicious. We were trying to make ourselves feel a bit better, and we did too. So the Foxes had lost again. So what was new about that?

      “Always look on the bright side of life, eh, son? Not the end of the world,” he said as we padded along homewards, down the lamp-lit city street. “The Foxes are still the best team in the world, son, right?”

      “Right,” I told him. We stopped to do a high-five together, then chased our tails round and round three times – three times would bring us luck the next time, Dad said. I didn’t believe him, of course. We did the same every time we lost, and we still lost the next time. I knew really that he made me do it to cheer me up, and to cheer himself up too.