The reason I bring it to your attention is something the author said about its making:
One of the kids who came to the farm from Birmingham, a boy called Billy, years and years and years ago now, the teachers warned me that he had a stammer ... and told me not to ask him direct questions because it would terrify him if he had to be made to speak because he doesn’t speak. They said ‘He’s been two years in school and he hasn’t said a word, so please don’t confront him or he’ll run back to Birmingham’, which is a long way from Devon and they didn’t want that. So I did as I was told and I stood back and I watched him, and I could see that he related wonderfully to the animals, totally silently, never spoke to the other kids at all, and then I came in the last evening, which I always used to do, to read them a story. It was a dark November evening and I came into the yard behind this big Victorian house where they all live, and there he was, Billy, standing in his slippers by the stable door and the lantern above his head, talking. Talking, talking, talking, to the horse. And the horse, Hebe, had her head out of, just over the top of the stable, and she was listening, that’s what I noticed, that the ears were going, and she knew - I knew she knew - that she had to stay there whilst this went on, because this kid wanted to talk, and the horse wanted to listen, and I knew this was a two way thing, and I wasn’t being sentimental, and I stood there and I listened, then I went and got the teachers, and brought them up through the vegetable garden, and we stood there in the shadows, and we listened to Billy talking, and they were completely amazed how this child who couldn’t get a word out, the words were simply flowing. All the fear had gone, and there was something about the intimacy of this relationship, the trust was building up between boy and horse, that I found enormously moving, and I thought, Well yes, you could write a story about the First World War through the eyes of a horse, let the horse tell the story, and let the story of the war come through the soldiers: British soldiers first of all, then German soldiers, then a French family with whom the horse spends winters, and that maybe you’ll then get a universal idea of the suffering of the First World War. So in a way I just took a gamble and went for it, and then wrote like a horse for about six months.
More? Here.
