Michael Morpurgo is both the author of the novel and the novel’s protagonist. In the novel’s first-person perspective, an adult Morpurgo recalls the events of his childhood in Wiltshire. Morpurgo’s childhood is in turn a frame story for the embedded narrative about Bertie, Millie, and their white lion.

Morpurgo was inspired to write the novel by several real-world encounters and events (see Background); however, the novel itself is fiction.

As a boy, Michael is, “more miserable than I had ever been before” (8) at the novel’s opening. He is stuck at boarding school in Wiltshire, away from home, his mother, and London. He faces a bully named Basher Beaumont, and a teacher named Mr. Carter, who tortures him for poor spelling. Michael decides to run away and catch the train to London. He flees in the rain on a Sunday afternoon, but a car startles him through a gate and into the yard of Millie Andrews, who invites him to tea. She tells him a long story about her life with Bertie and the lion, and then returns him to school where he learns that the real Millie Andrews died roughly a decade earlier.