Stig of the Dump author was inspired by chalk pit where he played as a child
Fifty years after writing Stig of the Dump, Clive King – who has died aged 94 – was still receiving letters asking if the Stone Age hero celebrated in the book’s title, and the chalk pit in which he lived, were real.
Needless to say, King’s caveman with his shaggy black hair and bright black eyes, whose ‘‘hands looked cleverer than his face’’, was an inspired invention. However, the chalk pit where Stig built his den was modelled on a dump at the bottom of the family garden in Ash, Kent, where King and his three brothers played as boys in the 1930s.
Two decades later, he watched his own children roam the same locations. In the book, King’s son,
Charles, became
8-year-old
Barney and his daughter, Sue, became Lou, the only two people who could see the otherwise invisible Stig, whose age might have been ‘‘ten, twenty, a hundred, a thousand’’.
‘‘My experience of the chalk pit was doubly enforced – I saw it through my own eyes and I saw it through the eyes of my children,’’ King said. ‘‘Of course there wasn’t actually Stone Age man living in a cave at the bottom of it, but Ash was a very boring place to live and I thought what it needs is something to wake it up. So I invented Stig.’’
Today the chalk pit has been buried under a golf course, but Stig and his dump live on in the minds of several generations. First published in 1963 by Penguin’s children’s imprint Puffin, the title has never been out of print, and has been adapted twice for television in 1981 and 2002.
Its success built slowly and caught King unawares. He was in the offices of his publishers for a meeting about his next project when someone passed him and congratulated him on his first million. ‘‘I said, ‘What?’ Puffin had already sold a million. It had taken off and I hadn’t realised it.’’
Stig of the Dump has since passed two million sales, although its success did not bring JK Rowling-style riches. It was more than a decade after its publication that King finally felt able to give up his day job with the British Council and became a full-time writer. He went on to publish a dozen more children’s novels, but remained best known for Stig.
David Clive King was born in Richmond, Surrey, but grew up in Ash, near Sevenoaks. His imagination was sparked by a schoolteacher named Miss Brodie who regaled her wide-eyed pupils with tales of Stone Age Britain and read them Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill. The historical fantasies of the latter were a direct influence on the scene in Stig of the Dump in which Barney and Lou are transported back in time on a hot mid-summer’s night and meet Stig in his own era, helping to erect giant standing stones in the manner of Stonehenge.
King went to Cambridge in 1941, and
‘‘I don’t think my grandchildren or greatgrandchildren read very many books. I don’t feel sad. It’s inevitable. Children these days like gadgets.’’
graduated with a BA in English. He then joined the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve and served on the Arctic convoys, shipping goods to the Soviet Union on a route described by Winston Churchill as ‘‘the worst journey in the world’’. More than 3000 men died.
After his discharge he joined the British Council, for whom he would work for three decades. His first posting to Belfast was hardly exotic, but he went on to work and live in Amsterdam, Aleppo, Damascus, Beirut, Dhaka and Madras.
‘‘I have travelled a lot and met so-called ‘primitive’ people,’’ he said. ‘‘They are not primitive at all, they are not so different from us.’’ This was another experience that fed into the creation of Stig. He began writing books for children only after the birth of his own. ‘‘I didn’t really force my own writings on them, but I listened to them,’’ he said. If he wrote a line that they struggled to understand, he put a blue pencil through it. ‘‘Does it help to have children as a writer of fiction for young people? I think it’s almost essential.’’
Stig of the Dump, which he spent three years writing, was his third book and was rejected by 12 publishers before it was accepted by Puffin. King then wrote The 22
Letters, about the invention of the alphabet, and Ninny’s Boat, set in a world in which the English had become refugees, and which was inspired by his experience of Vietnamese boat people.
He finally left the British Council to write full-time in 1973. ‘‘I had been pushed around and provided with flats to live in for years by the British Council, and I wish I’d spent more time writing than earning my daily bread.’’
Yet if he harboured regrets, there was no rancour. ‘‘I’m one of the lucky ones. When people say, ‘How do you become a famous writer?’, I don’t know. However, when the opportunity arises, you’ve got to jump to it.’’
He is survived by his second wife, Penny, and their daughter, Emma, and by two children from his first marriage to Jane, which was annulled in 1974. He had seven grandchildren and is also survived by two great-grandchildren.
‘‘They are quite proud of me, they say, a famous author,’’ he told The Guardian in an interview in 2013. ‘‘But I don’t think my grandchildren or great-grandchildren read very many books. I don’t feel sad. I think it’s inevitable. Children these days like gadgets.’’
A keen walker, he spent several years after leaving the British Council exploring locations on foot with Penny, including Dorset, Offa’s Dyke and East Anglia.
In Norfolk, they discovered a remote cottage with no electricity or running water, lying below sea level in the marshes, which was due for demolition. He bought it and lovingly restored the property, which remained the family home for the rest of his life.
‘‘Here I feel a sense of relief,’’ he said when interviewed on the 50th anniversary of the publication of Stig of the Dump. ‘‘I’m definitely a claustrophobe and I like the wide open spaces.’’