My father used to tell me a story in the 1950s that I think may have come from a book, possibly English. So I don’t have a title.
A boy lives in a country home and very much wants a dog for a pet. At night a metal statue of a dog in his front yard comes to life and plays with him until the sun comes up. And the part that I always loved was when my father would act out how stiff the dog would get as he tried to race back to his pedestal before dawn and one foot remained raised when he froze in place.
Can you help?
This reminds me a little bit of this series of British chidren’s books. I reread the first one myself in recent years. (I think the young boy you remember might be the character of Tolly)
From Wikipedia:
Green Knowe is a series of six children’s novels written by Lucy M. Boston, illustrated by her son Peter Boston and published from 1954 and 1976. It features a very old house, Green Knowe, based on Boston’s home at the time, The Manor in Hemingford Grey, Cambridgeshire. In the novels she brings to life the people who she imagines might have lived there.
For the fourth book in the series, A Stranger at Green Knowe (1961), Boston won the annual Carnegie Medal, recognising the year’s best children’s book by a British subject.
Some of the stories feature Toseland, a boy called Tolly for short, and his great-grandmother Mrs. Oldknow. Green Knowe is inhabited by the spirits of children who lived there in ages past and more than one of the spirits whom Tolly knows as children later grow into adults. Other supernatural entities in the series include the demonic tree-spirit, Green Noah (manifesting as a large tree on the grounds of the manor house), and an animated statue of St. Christopher.
Lisa,
Thank you for the help. I will certainly look into this!
Carolyn