September - and a Library I knew long, long ago.

At the foot of Jolly Butcher’s Hill was a busy crossroad, where long-gone tram rails were still embedded in the tarmac. On one corner was the almost-Art-Deco Wood Green Tube station, where a warm nicotine fug seeped out into the damp air.

Across Lordship Lane, on the other corner, was a basic brick ‘retreat’ for drivers from the big Bus Terminus,which intruded on the more ancient and interesting expanse beyond. This was Spouters Corner, with its weekend flower stall. Here, strange men stood on boxes, ranting about diet, grievances or God while pigeons circled overhead or dived for crumbs. The third corner, to me, was merely a row of bus stops, and a narrow public house.

But the fourth corner? That held our destination, Wood Green Public Library, whose Victorian facade was decorated with ornate carvings and pillars and, at least to my eyes, glorified by the beautiful green copper dome above the entrance. The library was,to me, a book palace from the times before, when there had been no rationing or grimness.

I followed my mother up the steep stone stairs, through the carved door to the mosaic floor into the library, and then life felt safe again. I could feel the power of the library, the silence, the rows and rows of books and the sense that, for a while, nobody could get at you. Almost like a church, it was, without the hymns and statues. My mother gave me a gentle push, and trotted off up the short flight of steps, through the double doors with their stained glass panels, and into the vast mysterious space where only adults were allowed.

Down the echoing stairs I went, with their green tiled walls, to the basement, where the Junior Library welcomed me with its whispery silence. A subterranean daylight seeped through half-moons of wired glass high along one wall, where the passing feet and pram-wheels created flickering shadows from the outside pavement. But I was here, now, in this calm other world, rarely reached by sunshine. The room was wide and generous, with shelves around all four sides: one wall for my ignored non-fiction, and three satisfactory walls for the fiction, in alphabetically arranged rows.

In the centre of the carpeted floor stood the Librarian’s desk: a square wooden fortress, with a creaky gate to keep children away. With her tight rolls of mousy locks, pinned in a net, she reigned grimly over wooden trays of tickets, her date stamp, pens and ink pad at the ready, and her eyes watching for any child who stayed too long. Good behaviour, silence, few chairs, power & suspicion.

I recall no enticing prints or paintings hung high on the grey-washed walls. The only glow was over by Non-Fiction where, beyond the impressive set of encyclopaedias, was a table, holding a bubbling tank where tiny fish hid under loops of water-weed. Nearby there were books with pictures, made for children who could not yet read yet. Imagine that?

The books on the fiction shelves were bound in subdued tones of cloth: drab browns, faded blues, weary moss-green, withered rose, with gilt letters sparking on spines here and there. Occasionally, small black images were embossed on the front covers, hinting at the line drawings of the illustrations within. Occasionally, a coloured frontispiece appeared facing the title page. But, for the most part, then, colours came from the pictures that words made in your imagination.

Though the stock was old, that barely mattered; the books on our three shelves at home were old too. Newness was not something that mattered in books, other than the fact that ‘old’ writers like Dickens were revered. Did the book have pages? Yes. That was enough. 

(No wonder I found a recent ‘Get them while they’re hot!’ message, posted on a current fiction site, such an abomination. Don't stop for that: move on to this or be a failure!)

The books had probably been purchased when that Junior Library was created, part of the inspired movement for Children's Libraries and Children's Librarians pioneered by Eileen Colwell during the Twenties and Thirties, and which received much support, especially from the poet John Masefield, and which also led to Storytelling and Storytime sessions in libraries. But by now that original starting stock was a lot older. 

Book publication, and books available in schools and libraries, would have been affected for Wartime Rationing Restrictions some years before and taken a while to recover. Certainly this was the era of all the second-hand bookshops along Charing Cross Road.

George Orwell, writing in Tribune in 1944, protested about the severity of the cuts in paper allocation:

‘A particularly interesting detail is that out of the 100,000 tons allotted to the Stationery Office, the War Office gets no less than 25,000 tons, or more than the whole of the book trade put together . , . At the same time paper for books is so short that even the most hackneyed "classic" is liable to be out of print, many schools are short of textbooks, new writers get no chance to start and even established writers have to expect a gap of a year or two years between finishing a book and seeing it published.’

(Oh, just two years? Might just go check on publication waits now . . .)

However, back then, as a quick and early reader, I sped through fiction greedily. I re-borrowed and re-read favourite stories, although now I remember few titles specifically from the library. Black Beauty? Call of the Wild? Christmas Carol? Children of the New Forest? The Silver Skates? Heidi? Arthur Ransome? Where did I come across all of those?  My strongest passion was for myths and legends and fairy stories. I loved Andrew Lang’s famous Blue, Yellow, Green and Red Fairy Tale collections, which I borrowed time after time.

Another fondness was for the ‘Twins’ series, such as ‘The Dutch Twins’, ‘The Cave Twins’, ‘The Irish Twins’ and others. Recently, I found the books were written by an American, Lucy Fitch Perkins. She wrote the first – The Dutch Twins - in 1911, to help children and families understand the homelands and cultures of all its immigrant population. The last title of her 26 book series, ‘The Dutch Twins and Little Brother’ was published in 1938. Below is a 'library edition', not one of the more beautiful versions.

 

I did say the books in Wood Green Library were very old when I came across them, even then, but maybe some of that Lucy Perkin's cultural understanding would be useful in the States now.

My job, while my mother chose her latest crime novel and my father’s new cowboy adventure, was to behave myself, keep quiet, choose which three books to take home and, I’m afraid, to avoid thinking about needing the toilet as there were none available. So I waited and read on, basking in that bookish library scent until I was collected.

That beautiful copper domed library was a huge and significant part of my life, or whoever my self was trying to be just then, but three things happened, at almost the same time.

One: As a very good reader, I was granted an adult ticket, taken to find John Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrims Progress’ among the cavernous adult shelves, and carried it proudly all the way home with me. How or why I seized upon this heavy tome and title as the book my young self needed to read, I do not know, other than my delight in the alliteration of the title. Afterwards, I felt in a sort of limbo, neither of the unfamiliar adult nor the junior library and lost heart. That children’s librarian was probably pleased that I disappeared.

 

Two: I had another birthday and another school report, All at once, my time at home was strongly directed away from burying my head in books and towards the pages of the Progress Papers for the 11+ Exam booklets. Over and over again. Saturdays disappeared.

Thirdly: The Progress Papers exercises worked. I became a pupil at St Angela’s Convent Grammar School, where I had to learn a whole new culture of homework and subtle religious snobbery, and that there were ‘wrong’ authors and 'wrong books'.

And we moved away, to another area. So there were no more visits to that Wood Green Public Library. Soon, there could be no more, as the library was transferred to a new, accessible open-plan site within the vast Wood Green Shopping City nearby – for all sorts of valid, rational reasons, I know - and my lovely, copper-domed building was demolished. Please note: in pictures,it doesn't, look as big as it felt.

Those ancient slippery tram lines? My mother, cycling back down Jolly Butcher's Hill on her way to work one rainy day, caught her front wheel in a tram line and the bike crashed down. Luckily, thankfully, she was not run over by any bus or lorry but had mild concussion and suffered a bad back for ages afterwards. Double luckily, she had already delivered my young brother off at his nursery school and so the child seat was empty. I think they have since been removed.


Penny Dolan

Up to my elbows in flour by Sheena Wilkinson

This will be a short post because this week has found me mostly up to my elbows in flour. The reason? I am baking, not for a book launch this time, but for a charity coffee morning. 

current state of kitchen 

One of my best friends, Susanne Brownlie, died recently from a brain tumour. It is most heartbreaking of course for her family, but the loss of a close friend is horrible: we lose  a shared language, an esoteric frame of reference, and a particular way of being ourselves. 

That frame of reference for us was books. Susanne and I met through our mutual interest in the Chalet School and that love was at the heart of our decades-long friendship. She was always my first reader; long before I was published we used to share our works-in-progress, and though I was the one who went on to be a professional writer Susanne was a fine writer too. In fact we collaborated on a Chalet School 'fill-in' story, Robin Heeds the Call, which was published in 2014 by Girls Gone By and before she died Susanne self-published her own historical novel, Courage to Love.

Susanne's novel, with cover design by Emma Pass

Our birthdays were a fortnight apart, and we always had a joint treat halfway between the dates (22 August and 4 September). Women of modest, bookish tastes, our  outings generally involved book-shopping, having a cuppa or (best of all) once visiting a litter of puppies which my sister had thoughtfully bred around the right time of year.

tea and chat 

As this year's birthday approached I decided to do something in Susanne's memory, in aid of Marie Curie, the charity which gave her such wonderful care in their Belfast hospice for the last seven months of her life. I'd already done a couple of sponsored walks so I decided on a coffee morning. She would have been the first to offer to help. 

What has this to do with books, reading and writing? Not much perhaps. I started writing it mostly as an apology: I have been so busy baking (and cleaning!) that there's not much else on my mind -- apart from Dolly Parton, but I'm guessing that by Saturday everyone else will have had their say about the wonderful Dolly. 

Susanne, unlike Dolly (and me) was a very private person -- she would be mortified by this public post, but I think she would forgive me. I offer it not only as an excuse for having nothing more literary, but as a reminder that the friends we make through books -- and what is Awfully Big Blog Adventure if not friends made through books? -- are very much to be cherished. 

the dedication to Name upon Name (2015)

A Love letter to Reading

Since everybody reading this blog will be an avid reader themselves, I thought my little review of this book would fit right in. I loved this book.

Lucy Mangan’s Bookworm, about the joys of children’s literature, was a little overwhelming. That’s not a criticism; rather, she wrote in such detail about all the books she’d read as a child that my mind reeled at the detail she dived into. She seemed to have read every book written for children – in English – ever! And while I’d read a lot of them, I hadn’t read nearly as many as her – probably about a quarter actually - so had no frame of reference for most of her comments. 

(It did introduce me to Gwen Grant’s Private – Keep Out though, and for that I’ll be grateful for the rest of my days.)

Bookish: A Love Letter to Reading is – well, for me at least – far more accessible. Mainly because I’ve read just about all the books she writes about and so can involve myself more deeply in her thoughts and judgements. 

And it’s pure pleasure to discover them. She takes in everything from early YA, to set texts at school, to an English Lit degree at Cambridge, bonkbusters and bestsellers… Lucy Mangan likes to read! And her enthusiasm makes me want A) to run right out and ransack my nearest bookshop and B) take another crack at The Da Vinci Code. (Which I think is probably the worst-written book ever published, but which she continued reading, even when a snotty colleague at the Guardian wondered out loud why she was wasting her time on such rubbish. Because, she says, she was enjoying the story, and if that isn’t the definition of a good time with a book, what is?)

Lucy Mangan just likes to read, and Bookish is a loving, wonderfully entertaining tribute to doing just that.

Letters - a treasure trove. By Sue Purkiss

 Far back in the distant past, O Best Beloveds, there was a time before emails, before WhatsApp, before Messenger - before any of these things which we now rely on. And in that time, if you wanted to communicate with someone far away, you wrote a letter. If you were in the same country, that letter might arrive very quickly - the post then was very efficient. It had to be, because apart from telegrams and the telephone (land lines only, of course, no mobiles), it was pretty much the only means of communication. If the letter had to go abroad, of course, it took much longer.

Many people kept the letters which were most important to them - indeed, some people kept the vast majority of the letters they received, but they were more likely to be people in the public eye, who had an eye towards future memoirs and biographies.

In the later years of his life, my father knew that I was interested in his stories about his childhood and family and about his experiences during the war. So he gave me this old chocolate box, which contained a few old photographs, his army record book and that of my Uncle George, who was a rear gunner in the RAF and was shot down just before the end of the war - a tragedy, one among so very many. 

It also contained a number of letters from Dad's mother and some of his five sisters. The reason these letter survived is that they never reached him. This was because at the end of May 1940, he was part of the British Expeditionary Force to France, about 400,000 men, which was retreating with all possible speed towards Dunkirk, where they were hoping to be picked up by the navy and taken back to Britain. This was the famous effort, involving hundreds of small boats, which did indeed rescue the majority of the men. But not all. Many were killed, and others were captured before they ever got there. Dad was one of these, and he spent the rest of the war in prison camps in Poland.

But back at home, my grandmother and Dad's sisters had no idea of this. So they kept on writing letters, chatty in the case of his sisters, increasingly anxious in the case of Granny Course. And eventually - extraordinarily - these letters were not just chucked into the nearest bin: someone examined them, investigated, and some months later, returned them to their senders, stamped 'Addressee reported Prisoner of War'. Granny kept them, and years later, gave them to Dad, their intended recipient.

Dad with his company at the beginning of the war - he is sitting on the front row on the far right. He was in the RASC, the Royal Army Service Corps. I don't know how many of these survived the war. 

There's a little side story to this. For months, in the chaos of war, no-one knew what had happened to Dad. At some point a telegram arrived back at home, saying that he was missing in action. My Aunt Connie intercepted it, and decided that Granny wasn't to be told: they would wait until they knew for certain whether he was alive or dead.

It's so moving to read these letters now, in the knowledge of what was happening in France. This is from a letter Granny wrote on the 15th of May, when Dad still had about ten days of freedom left. She is hoping that he will have leave before long.

...I have cleaned the house ready waiting to hear that quick step. I often fancy I hear you coming home early (in the) morning, so I do hope things won't be so long. It seems hard and furious now...

And then this one, written on the 25th, around the time that he was captured. She is obviously desperately worried, beginning:

Dear Bernard

    Do just let me know how you are as soon as possible, I know I am impatient... I am only wanting to know if you are well, and are quite alright...

And ending:

...if you are too tired I am sending you some ready addressed envelopes if you can only just say I am alright mam, that will suffice for your loving Mother/too anxious.

These letters were one of the many strands that fed into my book, An Ordinary War, which is very loosely based on Dad's experiences. I found, and still find, that image of my grandmother writing to her son, pausing and listening for his 'quick step', not knowing that she wouldn't see him again for five years, just so moving. If you'd like to read more, the book is available here.

Hunting the Generated Subject - by Rowena House

It’s the last lap, the final six weeks of a six-and-a-half year creative writing PhD, which, terrifyingly, has taken up (or, at least, often took over) one-tenth of my lifetime.

I’m line-editing and proof-reading at the moment, ten pages a day of an 80K manuscript, cut down from 87K at its longest. It’s mad to try to do both at the same time, but that’s how it’s turned out and by this stage I’m not questioning my process, just getting on with it.

Hopefully, I’ll have time to read it through again on the iPad in a different format as reformatting always seems to throw up those glaringly obvious typos that have slipped past me, oh, probably hundreds of times.

I’m getting all sorts of deja-vu with the comparable stage of editing The Goose Road, my debut for young readers. Like asking, where did I put that sentence I liked so much, and really worked? And, for goodness sake, what on earth were you on about there?

There’s also been a nice moment of circularity or closure this month. 

Right at the start of this project, when Arvon began online masterclasses during Covid lockdowns, I listened to author Hisham Matar recommending that we stay open creatively during our first drafts (which I’ve taken to mean over multiple drafts) so that we don’t get trapped by our original idea and fail to access our deeper level of intuitive invention.

That became a kind of mantra for this novel: stay open to whatever comes along. 

 

 

Then, on August 7th, an email came in from Writers.com, an American organisation which I often find useful and thank very much for all their inspiration. This email offered up a notion from poetry which struck a chord. The article is by Sean Glatch, whom I’ve quoted here before, and is titled, Writing Titles of Poetry: How to Title a Poem, which has a lovely internal rhythm, which I guess is the point.

Mr. Glatch quoted Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town, which he called ‘a great grounding in the craft and mindset of poetry writing’. To quote him quoting Mr. Hugo:

To Hugo, all poems have two subjects:

· The Initiating Subject: the topic, idea, or thing that led you into writing a poem.

· The Generated Subject: the subject that the poem discovers or was actually, secretly, about the whole time.

I really like this idea. It makes a whole lot of sense. For the work-in-progress, a seventeenth-century witch trial was the initiating subject, and the importance of writing to critical thinking is the generated subject.

Looking back, I realise I spent a lot of time in the early years trying to think up a generated subject, to plan it, to plot it, to do exactly what Hisham Matar said you shouldn’t do. It’s the theme thing, innit. We’re supposed to know it, but if it’s the storytelling that generates it, how can one plan it?

They say that writing a novel is new each time around. If there is another one in me, I’ll try very hard to remember this lesson and stop hunting for a theme and let it wade out of the story sea in its own good time.

All the best, everyone. Nearly there. 

 

A small step for me, potentially a giant leap for humanity - by Lu Hersey

Do you remember a time before Google and smart phones?  When people had typewriters or word processors to write with, and if you wanted to speak to someone at a distance, you had to call them on a landline? Research was done in libraries, which held so many books, there wasn't even room for a student cafe. People still respected creativity and the arts and no one used AI to write, produce art or music, or had GoogleMaps telling them where to go.

It honestly wasn't that long ago. The last twenty-five years has seen such a massive expansion of AI, we've all become accustomed to it. No one reading this would use it to write their books for them (hopefully!), but we live in a world where if you wanted to produce a readable manuscript from your idea in under ten minutes, you probably could. All thanks to AI's pirating of everything ever written by us. 

There's a rumour going around that AI centres burn books to stop us going back to print copies. Scary shades of Fahrenheit 451, and though it might sound like an urban myth, there's actually some truth to this rumour. Anthropic, a mega AI company with an 'AI assistant' they've named Claude (presumably to make him sound more user-friendly), is known to have sourced thousands of books, removed the spines to enable easy scanning, then pulped (I believe they call it 'recycled') all the pages. 

This has been public knowledge for over a year, but people only started getting seriously worried when another massive company called ISBNdb began ordering books in bulk, including rare books, from booksellers - and apparently destroying the originals. ISBNdb's website is really something - they manage to make it sound like they're doing you a huge favour by allowing you to access any book you want to read (at a price, obviously) instantly, online, from your desktop. 

Not long ago you could order a hard copy of any book you needed from a library (and up to a point you still can). Although it might take longer to source, the point of libraries is to conserve the original books, rather than destroying them. 

Yes, AI has made fantastic advances in medicine possible, and solves difficult science problems in a fraction of a second that could otherwise take years. It's brought some huge benefits to us all, and obscene amounts of money to the billionaires behind it. 

But there's a costly, sinister pay-off. Look at the rising numbers of data centre buildings being constructed to support it - no need for proper planning permission because the people financing them promise the earth, while systematically destroying it. 

The wonderful Erin Brockovich (remember the film? She's a real person) is currently fighting the rise of data centres, which are springing up everywhere (including the UK) with no proper public consultation or planning consent, despite the fact they seriously contaminate land, make a constant, deafening noise and use vast quantities of water at the expense of the environment. If you're interested, you can read about Erin's campaign in an article published recently in the Guardian.

I'm now ranting about the potential destruction of the planet by AI, while intermittently using it to research this piece. The irony isn't lost on me. So could direct action be the only possible alternative route to save the planet from the rise of data centres? This week saw Wynd Kaufman, aged 69, jailed for chaining and locking the front doors of Open AI's HQ last year. She's a member of a protest movement called StopAI , whose website describes them as a 'grassroots movement of everyday people using democratic and non-violent methods to disrupt the reckless development of destructive artificial intelligence technology'. As the first person jailed for taking direct action against destructive AI, she's been hailed by some as akin to Rosa Parks. Of course others might view her as a modern day Luddite. (Though if you follow that thought through, the Luddites had a point. Technology isn't always a good thing...)

Maybe we need to use Gandhi's example, using his charkha (portable spinning wheel) to spin cotton into yarn, a form of passive resistance against British colonial textile imports. OK, I'm not giving up my laptop to write for the time being - and I freely admit I used Google to help research while writing this piece. 

So what's my first step towards independence from AI? 

I'm trying to get places without using GoogleMaps. It involves using actual paper maps and road atlases like everyone had to, only a few decades ago. Amazingly, it works just like it always did.

A small step for me, right? But if we all remember how to do basic things without using AI, it could be a giant leap for humanity. 

Lu Hersey

lu-hersey.com

Oh you silly things By Steve Way

 I’m sure, like me, several children – and a few adults – have asked you, ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ I know some authors have said it’s the question they most expect and least know how to answer. I’d be interested to know if, as I do, you feel that one of several ways we snatch onto possible ideas is by watching out in our daily lives for interesting incidents, events and situations in our daily lives. One possible consequence of that might be that we notice much around us that doesn’t necessarily spark off an idea – at least straightaway – but which we maybe consider in more depth than others might do. In this case, I want to describe a few things I’ve observed which struck me as particularly silly.

It hadn’t occurred to me before until I began writing this, that all of what I’m going to describe were observed on, or by roadways. I’ve mentioned before that my wife and I currently live in a small rural town in France (though we’re seriously thinking of moving back to the north of England after this year’s unending sequence of heatwaves – we realise that moving to the south would be a living example of the adage about moving from the frying pan into the fire).

A windy road, barely wide enough for two cars to pass each other, stretches about five miles to the next town. Halfway along that road, just before two right-angled bends, is a sign indicating that lorries larger than a certain size should not use this road. There are no other signs like this anywhere along this road, i.e. at the beginning of the road at either end, offering said lorries the chance to re-route. Also, the sign only faces one way, so drivers coming the opposite way may only ever see the sign in their rear-view mirror. As I’ve intimated the road is so narrow and twisted that even if a driver considered honouring the restriction, it would be nigh on impossible for him or her to turn their vehicle around, leaving reversing their lorry nearly three miles backwards along a windy road as the only remaining option.

Ultimately this explains why we have to drive very carefully along this road, as regularly lorries patently far to large to drive on the road bear down on us and I have to drive as close to our edge as possible, while avoiding ending up in the deep drainage ditches dug alongside the road, only a foot or so away from each side. How we laugh at the ridiculousness of the sign at these stimulating moments…

But roadside stupidity isn’t confined to France. Years ago, I was driving on a hill road between Wakefield and Huddersfield and came to a small roundabout at what in the past had probably been a crossroads. The roundabout was grassed and rose gently towards the centre, like a small mound. Two signs had been placed near its peak. Both simply read, ‘Diversion’. One pointed to the right, the other to the left, creating a completely uninformative diversion lottery. There had been no signs about roadworks, or other obstructions coming up to this point – presumably there should have been two  - and as it happens none after as I continued on my way, in that sense ignoring the signs. I particularly couldn’t help wondering about the person who set up the second sign. The first was hardly helpful, or particularly informative but surely the person putting up the second one must have realised the implications of the conundrum they were setting up for me and my fellow drivers? Too much to explain to an unsympathetic supervisor perhaps…

Meanwhile, back in France, a country famous for encouraging cycling, they have been setting aside a section of several roads, on both sides, for cyclists. These areas demarcated by thick broken white lines marked along the road, with regular images of cycles painted in the lanes themselves. All very good and righteous of course – at least in theory. The only problem is that the space left between them available for cars and other vehicles on some of the roads where this has been done, is far too narrow for them to pass without colliding virtually head-on.  Another windy road near us is an example. Drivers have to decide between avoiding the cycle lane areas and facing the danger of colliding with a vehicle doing the same thing coming the other way, as we both drive around a curve in the road, or drive in the cycle lane in which cyclists assume themselves free of danger from vehicles and where, by doing so, we might be penalised by the authorities. I also feel that the massive cost, time and effort it took to set out these impractical zones would have been better spent on setting up regular signs reminding drivers to watch out for cyclists. (Though arguably there should be also be signs reminding cyclists to wear bright clothing and helmets – I don’t know if it’s the same in the UK these days but it seems half the cyclists in France don’t consider a journey without wearing the dullest colour clothing on the dullest coloured bikes, usually without a helmet.)

I find the French word for pavement quite sweet – it’s ‘trottoir’ – making is sound as though you should trot along them! However, certainly in our neck of the woods, they only have a cursory relationship with pavements. In many cases they are too narrow to walk along except by experienced tightrope walkers. The ‘trottoir’ in our street, close to the centre of the town, is far too narrow in both directions for a wheelchair. Speaking of wheelchairs, our post office – ‘La Poste’ – is near the end of our street, the last in a series of buildings and with the entrance in the corner nearest the road. It faces along the street, rather than into the road. The entrance is above the level of the pavement and so for the benefit of customers it can be accessed from one direction by two steps and from the other by an adjoining ramp. Given that the two steps face the centre of the town, able-bodied customers predominantly use them. However as the ‘trottoir’ to the side of the ramp is so narrow, wheelchair users – for whom presumably the ramp was mainly constructed? – would either have to lean precariously, half on the pavement, half on the road, to get around it or dismount the pavement, move along the road (in the potential face of oncoming traffic) and then remount having done so, presumably at the same time swinging their chair around to face the beginning of the ramp.

Having finally made it to this point by the way, they would then find that the ramp is so steep they would either need to have the strength of a paralympian to haul themselves up it, or a fit and healthy companion to push them.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

A series of stories, sketches and poems to support the NC requirements for learning spelling in a creative way. Also editions for KS1 and LKS2.