Cornwall and Dorset are backdrop for kids’ book

AN AUTHOR from Woodcote whose career as a writer has led to talks in primary schools has written a book aimed at helping children to cope with grief.

Sue Palmer, 56, who is married with two sons, Josh, 23, and Joe, 20, was inspired by holidays on the coasts of Cornwall and Dorset when she wrote The Shell Secret.

In the story, 11-year-old Alice Clark wants to be a detective. She and her family always visit the coastal town of Trevellen in Cornwall, where she used to collect shells with her sister, Poppy.

However, this summer it is a year since Poppy died. Alice is determined to carry on collecting shells and to build a memorial in her sister’s honour.

When her parents forbid her from visiting the beach on her own, Alice has to get help from Jasper, the annoying boy next door.

Sue, who has also written the May’s Moon trilogy and Jed’s Jailbreak, says: “My dad’s family are Cornish and so I spent the first probably 20 years of my life going down every summer holiday to see grandparents.

“Their history in Cornwall, particularly in Falmouth, goes back. I’ve got a family tree to about 1865, which is when my great great grandparents opened a bakery there. That was carried on by my great grandparents and then my grandparents bought new premises in the late Thirties and they set up a bakery.

“During the Second World War, my grandfather, obviously in a reserved occupation, was not only running his own bakery but he worked eight hours in the evening at a co-operative baking bread for the troops. A lot of troops went from Falmouth across to the D-Day landings at Omaha, there were something like 27,000 US soldiers amassing in preparation.

“There’s some great stories that he told me about the war, including a landmine detonating at the back wall of the premises which went down to the harbour and had blown up all the windows.

“The story [in The Shell Secret] has two strands, it’s recent times and then, with the grandfather, there’s a separate parallel story about the Second World War and Alice and Jasper get involved in both of these. So they’re pulled into one thing and into another.

“Alice in my story is from Dorset, that’s based on our last 20 years of roaming Avon Beach and Highcliffe and Keyhaven Marshes, which have a plethora of shells. As you look over to the Isle of Wight, they have all sorts there, near an old castle, Hurst Castle. We do go down to Mudeford probably once every six weeks.

“I’ve collected lots of shells from Dorset including many whelks on Avon Beach which I take round to schools and then the rest of the shells that I take to schools come from the Cornish rock pools and Cornish coast.

“So that’s where the characters come from and that’s what the setting is. It indulges my interest in the coast and the way it made me feel as a child, completely free. We came all the way down from Lancashire at one point and then we moved to Cheltenham and came down from Cheltenham.

“At one point it was a nine-hour drive with the dog in the back down to Cornwall, so when we got down there we stayed for a month.

“My grandparents baked us the most enormous pasties. They would be like complete, the whole dinner plate, the pasty was off the edge of either side as a 10-year-old, with an ‘S’ for mine, all our initials were on them so we knew whose was whose.

“My time was spent on the beach around rock pools, scrabbling up cliffs, going into caves when the tide was coming in. I used to love collecting the tiny yellow flat periwinkle shells, yellow and orange ones, tiny little ones, not knowing what actually had been in them, I just loved the shells.

“If I’m totally honest, when I first wrote the book, I didn’t know why I was writing about Alice’s sister having died. It’s quite a dark theme for seven- to 12-year-olds, although they’ve got to deal with loss in their lives, unfortunately.

“The themes were about freedom, escape and being outside, where the outside can help with a lot of problems, if you just get out there and explore and move your legs and breathe the air and look around you, whether it’s in the woods or on the coast.

“I met a marine conservationist called Heather Buttivant in Looe and she has allowed me to use some of her rock pool creature images for school workshops. She’s helped me quite a lot with research.

“At the back of the book, Alice has written all her diary notes and she’s also written facts for people in her diaries about the flat periwinkle which she loves.

“I’ve done quite a lot of research while I was writing it and that has led me to develop a Key Stage 2 workshop, which fits in with the Year 4 study of habitats and living things. We look at the micro-habitat of rock pools, what lives there, why it lives there, how they survive and then some gory, gruesome, gooey details about some of the creatures and how they feed and how they survive. The children seem to like anything that involves mucus or goo!

“I take my shells and I’ve got all sorts of little story props. I love that bit in front of the children because that’s when you get real feedback.

“Every time I’ve seen children so far they’ve come up with two facts. ‘Did you know that the giant squid…?’. I’ve worked with Henley Library. In September, Sacred Heart Primary School brought their Year 2 and 3 and then Year 4 and 5 into the library and I ran sessions for them. In October St Mary’s Prep School brought their Year 3s to the library.

“Badgemore have just agreed to run some workshops in January. There’s quite a lot of activity which is great.”

l The Shell Secret, by Sue Palmer, published by Candy Jar Books, is available in all good bookshops, priced £8.99. For more information, visit sypalmer.com