Authors Electric

  As an only child, who first met other children at Sunday School, kids were more alien to me than the birds in the churchyard or the snails at the bottom of our tiny garden. I lived opposite a mainline railway station in North London, before the Clean Air Act, and smog and crowded tube trains and high rise flats were the things I hated most. I seized on any bit of nature I could – dandelions in the park and pigeons under the railway arches. I would follow the coalman’s horse around the streets just for the chance to give him a bit of apple, and visits to my great-aunt in rural Surrey were heaven with my first introductions to voles and shrews and slow worms. But if I couldn’t get the real thing, I’d read about it instead, and the local library was the answer.             The first book that I couldn’t put down was about an underwater world, and I think it was called Claud the Sea Horse , although a discussion board on Ama...

 I hope you realise that I am opening myself up to severe embarrassment by posting this blog. And all for the sake of a few laughs (I hope). But there we go. Would the eleven-year-old Rosalie (or Sheila, as she called herself in those days and still does, among friends) have apppreciated this somewhat belated publicity? Who knows - maybe she would. She was clearly something of an entrepreneur, even back then... Four Girls and a Test made it to Chapter 4 and then fizzled out, as Sheila's books were inclined to do. But not before she had invested serious effort and lashings of Winsor & Newton watercolours in a cover depicting the said four girls, be-ribboned, ankle-socked, and with the tiniest of tiny feet that would have appealed to a Chinese emperor. The eldest girl looks somewhat haggard (as well she might) and boasts a superb Cathy McGowan fringe (shame on you if you're too young to remember Cathy).  The writing style (a sample is given below, if you're feeli...