A turnip for the books as kids’ novel set in veg garden published after 40-year wait

TWO pensioners who wrote and illustrated a charming children’s book over 40 years ago have finally seen it published.

Lifelong friends — actress and writer Sybil Allen (76) from Antrim town and artist and illustrator Anne Montgomery (72) from Eglinton — will see Mixed Veg hit the bookshelves this week.

It is the story of a little boy who goes on an epic adventure around a beautiful walled garden brimming with vibrant vegetable characters.

The pair finished the book in the mid-1970s and, having been turned down by a publisher in London, shelved it as life got in the way.

Forty years on, Anne unearthed it in her attic, and the women are now able to see their work finally come to fruition.

Children across the world will be able to follow the adventure of Tom as he journeys with Murphy the potato, Boris Beetroot, Sir Arthur Artichoke, peas-in-apod twins Celia and Amelia, and Belle the Broad Bean, among many others in their garden city.

Sybil, already a children’s novelist, says this special book was a long time coming.

“Anne and I have been friends since our student days in the Seventies,” she said. “I was living in London and Anne was lecturing in textiles at the Belfast Art School.

“I remember her saying: ‘I simply love drawing peas’. And she was so serious about it, I said that I would write something for her to play with.

“At the time I was very interested in National Trust gardens and there were huge vegetable gardens there. I remember standing in one with crosspaths, like little crossroads, and it looked like a miniature city in a way. And that is where the story started from for me.

“There is a little boy Tom, who doesn’t like vegetables. He declares war on them. He finds himself being dragged into their world, within a walled garden, and he has an adventure, meeting all different characters. They are people in vegetable form. It’s like an odyssey around the walled garden.”

The walled garden in Mixed Veg mirrors the one outside Anne’s window in her Eglinton home.

“I grew up in a home with a walled garden with vegetable rows all in lines,” she explained.

“My parents grew all the vegetables that are in the book in their garden. I would, as a child, look at all the onions and little carrots and things, and think