It wasn’t until several years later that Joan had the company of a baby brother, David, and as soon as he was old enough, it was Joan who took him exploring on the Downs, and told him stories to cheer him along as he began to tire on the way home. Some of these short tales were published in her very first book many years later, such as “The Parrot Pirate Princess,” which she gave to David as a birthday present. Joan used to say that it was only by racking her brain to answer her little brother’s constant question of “What happened next?” that she learned how to write the exciting fiction she is known for today.
I was lucky enough as Joan’s daughter to have many more of those stories told to me as she was writing them quite a number of years later. Then I was the one asking “And what happened next?” When the tales were finished, she would type them out and send them away to her publishers, and I would enjoy the excitement of seeing them come back as printed books with pictures, just as you are able to see these stories today on your own screens—wouldn’t it have amazed Joan to imagine that all those years ago?
—Lizza Aiken, 2015
Joan’s birthplace, the little town of Rye, England. This is a page from the picture timeline on the Joan Aiken website.
Joan, age two, with her mother, Jessie, in the garden of Joan’s birthplace, the Jeake’s House, in 1926.
Mermaid Street in Rye. They didn’t have many cars in those days!
Some of Joan’s first picture books.
Some of the stories were quite scary. Joan loved this one in which Pinocchio meets some robbers in the woods.
Joan’s mother, Jessie, married again and the family moves to a small village. This is another page from the Joan Aiken website.
The small cottage where Joan’s family lived. It was called Farrs.
Joan’s family could only reach the nearest town of Petworth by horse and cart.
Mr. Budd, the blacksmith, shoes carthorses in the village smithy.
May Day in the village was a grand day. The little girl (at left) in a long coat is Joan watching the May Queen’s procession go by.
Joan’s first notebook, where she wrote her stories. She kept it all her life!
One of Joan’s early poems and a drawing of her cat Teglees.
Joan (upper right), age ten, with her big brother and sister, John and Jane; her mother, Jessie; and her younger brother, David, who loved to listen to her stories.
Where Joan and David took walks, up on the Sussex Downs.
When she was older, Joan would go back to Rye to visit her father over the holidays, before she went away to school. Like Joan, he loved cats, and one year the family cat had kittens!
All images courtesy of the Joan Aiken Estate.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1984 by Elizabeth Delano Charlaff for the Joan Aiken Estate
Illustrations copyright © 1997 by Peter Bailey
Cover design by Jesse Hayes
978-1-5040-2092-3
This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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