Children's book brings River Thames pollution into focus through otter adventure

A NEW children’s picture book focusing on the stretch of River Thames between Henley and Cookham is shining a light on the impact of pollution in rivers and upon animals.

Author and illustrator Amanda Boulding has had a love for rivers since childhood.

Growing up she enjoyed the outdoors, spending weekends walking along the River Chess and spending time outside while living in Hong Kong for almost four years.

The 50-year-old, who has just taken over The Chequers in Cookham Dean with her family, has always had an interest in art and came into writing books about two years ago.

Amanda said: “I started life as a project manager at the BBC and, when I had children, I stopped working to raise them. I’d do little illustrations for their lunchboxes when they were at school.”

Since then, she has gone on to create characters and stories and has published The Willow Bank Tales series, focusing on theme of nature and the environment.

While all her previous books were self-published, Amanda’s latest adventure, which was published on Thursday last week, has been published through not-for-profit independent publishing house The Lela Initiative.

The initiative uses its profits and donations to support literacy projects in communities in Uganda and some of the profits from Amanda’s latest book will go towards this.

Save Our River! follows the story of a family of otters who discover pollution flowing in their backwaters. Elements of the book are also inspired by places visited by Amanda and her family, including Hurley Lock Island.

“We’re in the river all the time when its warm,” she said. “We’re walking beside it in the winter and in the summer, we take our paddleboard and our Canadian Canoe and we’re always paddling around Henley — the backwaters of St Patrick’s Stream up in Henley.

“When I was younger, I wanted to make natural history programmes, so this is a little way that I can get involved in nature.

“When we’re on the river, we just noticed sometimes it smells a bit and there are gummy bubbles, and when the children are jumping in, I started to get a little bit concerned. It’s not actually as clean as it used to be.”

High profile figures, including TV presenter Steve Backshall, have also been raising concerns river pollution and its impact.

Amanda added: “I thought, let’s try and help educate the children about how we can start to improve what we’re doing to our environment from a very young age and hopefully, some adults to get involved as well.”

Amanda said she wanted to tell more stories about the creatures that live along the riverbank, and through WildCookham, she discovered that otters “live in the river here” and water voles had also been “reintroduced”.

“I thought this is a really good way to champion them and try and get some messages through about looking after the environment,” she explained.

“It’s tied in really fortuitously with all the news at the moment about rivers all up and down the country having sewage pumped into them.”

As part of the project, Amanda has also partnered with the UK Wild Otter Trust, which will use some of the illustrations in the book to support their education work on otter conservation and river habitats.

For each book sold through its website, £1 will be donated to the trust.

Amanda also took part in her second Maidenhead’s Big Read this year and has been visiting schools to share her story and educate youngsters on the environment.

Feedback on the latest book has been ‘really good’, Amanda said.

She is hoping to visit some schools in Henley to speak to youngsters about the book also.

Amanda’s future plans include ideas for books focusing on water voles and swans.

For more information about Save Our River! and other books in the series, visit: www.amandaboulding.com