I know he had hoped for WH Allen, also of London. All six of my novels, from Episode in 1970 to The Chrysalis in 1974, were published jointly by the two firms. They each sold out their one edition, and were generously reviewed and moderately well received. However, they didn’t make much of a ripple and, thirty-five years on, are virtually forgotten. Nevertheless, odd copies may still be stocked in some libraries. Well, I know that for a fact…The Authors’ Fund (Public Lending Right) compensates writers for their titles held in public libraries, partly based on the assumption that borrowers of books would otherwise be buying them. A minimum of fifty copies of a title need be held in libraries up and down the nation in order to qualify for a payment. Inexplicably, my very first published title, Episode, came back onto my list two or three years ago after an absence of about two decades! Sadly, it has now disappeared back into oblivion…

Logically, it was only a matter of time before I began to write for a younger audience. It was a faltering start. I was teaching at Feilding Intermediate School when my last adult offering, The Chrysalis, was published. The Manawatu Standard did a profile along with a large photo of me with wife and sons.

‘So what? You can write books, eh? If you can write them for old people, why can’t you write one for us?’ I remember the comment well. A challenge? A throwing down of the gauntlet? I had never really given much thought to writing for kids. After all, I worked with and for them all day, and then went home at night to another couple of the little blighters. For all that, I accepted the challenge, picked up the gauntlet and began writing what was to become Pack Up, Pick Up and Off, sharing each completed chapter with my class. They seemed quite approving of my efforts. However, the exercise came to an abrupt halt when I was appointed principal—or it may still have been ‘head teacher’—at National Park School, Mount Ruapehu.

The new job was challenge enough, and those three or four chapters were consigned to a bottom drawer and almost forgotten for a number of years. There were other challenges, too. In 1975, Delia took off for a trip home to England and to her mother who lived in Spain. This was her first visit back to where she had come from as an eighteen-year-old migrant on the old Captain Hobson in 1959. I think we both knew that what had proved to be a rocky marriage had staggered to its end. We divorced, amicably enough, our union finally ending a couple of years later in the Crown Court in Hitchin, Herts. Unhitched in Hitchin! We’ve both always wryly appreciated that little drop of irony. We remain close friends.

So, running a school of 120 pupils, teaching a class back in those days before ‘principal release time’ for head teachers had been invented, plus raising two small boys singlehanded didn’t allow much time for writing!

Writer, bookseller, and children’s literature guru Dorothy Butler of Auckland visited the school in her book bus. Really, she came to visit her daughter, Christine Sidwell, married to David, then a ranger in the Tongariro National Park. Christine taught with me at the school, part-time. Naturally the school patronized Dorothy’s wonderful mobile bookshop. I spent some time with Dorothy, who knew I was writer—or, as I thought then, had been a writer. I mentioned that I had written the first few chapters of a novel for older children. I can’t remember whether I asked if she would like to read it or whether she asked if she could read it. Whatever, she took the fragment away with her and read it overnight.