Hardback, Faber and Faber, first edition, 1949.
Book condition: lacking the dustwrapper, spine and upper covers sun faded, some slight foxing to fore edge, otherwise a very nice copy.

The publisher's blurb for this first (and only) edition – and Williamson's sole book written for children – reads: 'Henry Williamson took an original line of country when he wrote an entire book about an otter; again when he did it about a salmon; and once more when he revealed the presence of that rara avis, the Phasian bird, on a Norfolk farm. Now he does it with a couple of semi-educated monkeys, a retired and ex-alcoholic jockey named Tommy Topp, a vegetarian fox called Charles James who refused to touch fur or feather on sporting grounds (since fox-hunting had been stopped in his country), Oocuck the cuckoo who, ashamed of the parasitism of his species, sang his name backwards and built a large communal nest in which small birds might lay their eggs and rear their young in safety, and other odd inhabitants of that strange smallholding hidden deep in the Charcoal-burners' Woods near London, at the end of the Old Surrey Road.

'It is there, on the clearing in the forest, that the aged London cart-horse Prince, alias Charcoal King, alias Electric Wonder Boy, alias Scribbling Lark, was trained to win the Derby on beans, pease, meadow grass and—cocoa.

'All who were present on Epsom Downs and watched the most astounding race in the history of the Turf afterwards agreed that a new technique had been found for flat-racing. And the reader will probably concur. At any rate, now that the full story has been written-up by that well-known sporting journalist Henry Williamson, nobody can say that the facts have not been made available to the world.'

(For a further consideration of the book and the background to the writing of it, see Anne Williamson's Scribbling Lark.)