Toro! Toro! [antikvár]

TORO! TORO! As I was walking in the hills of Andalucia in the south of Spain last autumn, I came, quite by chance, upon a farm where they breed black bulls for the corrida, the bullring. The very same day I found myself on a wooded hillside looking down at the ruined village of Sauceda. This remote village had been bombed and burned out in the early stages of the Spanish Civil War - the first time in Europe that deliberate aerial bombardment of a civilian population had ever happened. Since then, in Guernica, Warsaw, London, Dresden, Hiroshima and thousands of other cities, towns and villages all over the world, this practice has sadly become all too commonplace. My first glimpse of that herd of magnificent black bulls, and then the sighting of Sauceda in ruins, served to inspire me to sit down and write Tore! Torol. But I had some research to do first, into bullfighting, and into the Spanish Civil War. This terrible war, fought in the 1930s, was a struggle between the socialist left, the Republicans, and the fascist right, the Nationalists, for the control of Spain. After many years of vicious fighting, the Nationalists, under their fascist leader General Franco, won. Only on Franco's death, in 1975, did Spain become a democracy. So here's Torol Torol, a story of children who lived through that war, a story of Spain, of bulls and bullfighting, of a grandfather (like me) and his grandson. I hope you enjoy it. MICHAEL MORPURGO October 2001