Clive King
Author of the novel Stig of the Dump whose powerful imagination delighted generations of children
CLIVE KING, who has died aged 94, was a children’s author who became a publishing phenomenon in 1963 with his third book, Stig of the Dump, the tale of friendship between a solitary young boy and a caveman living in the local chalk pit. Straying too close to the edge of the pit one day, the eight-year-old hero, Barney, loses his footing and falls into a cave, where he encounters Stig, a skin-clad and largely mute figure with “shaggy hair and two bright black eyes”.
Despite their communication difficulties Barney soon becomes a helpmate to Stig, building him a chimney out of old tin cans and windows out of jam jars. In return Stig presents him with flint cutting tools and arrows bound with catgut from an old tennis racket, teaching him the arts of mining and lighting fires. They foil a break-in at his grandparents’ house and hunt in the woods.
For the bulk of their adventures Barney remains largely incurious about his friend’s origins. The lack of an adult perspective invests the book with a air of fantastical realism, and the question of Stig’s physical existence is never wholly resolved. But when his sister Lou accompanies Barney to the Downs one midsummer night, they discover a very different, altogether more primal world.
Stig, illustrated with Edward Ardizzone’s evocative drawings, marked the beginning of a creative resurgence in children’s publishing, placing King among the ranks of such celebrated authors as Alan Garner, Penelope Lively and Nina Bawden. Within three years of the first edition it had come to dominate Puffin’s bestseller lists.
Read on Jackanory and adapted for television by both the BBC and ITV, it has remained continuously in print and was reissued as a Puffin Modern Classic in 1993.
Though King was able to make a comfortable living as an author, penning more than a dozen other novels, he never matched the early success of Stig – perhaps because it was Stig, above all his other work, that had drawn most closely upon his early experiences.
Born David Clive King on April 24 1924 in Richmond, Surrey, the young Clive spent much of his childhood at Ash on the North Downs of Kent, where he and his three brothers would explore a disused chalk pit at the bottom of the family garden. He attended a private infants’ school where his teacher, Miss Brodie, would tell them tales of the Stone Age and of the shifting historical narrative in Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill. The idea of a living past made present excited the young Clive, who later thought of Ash as a “place of childhood boredom”, where his abiding desire was for “something primitive and elemental to wake it up”.
At the age of nine he went as a boarder to the King’s School, Rochester, where his first published articles appeared in the school magazine, and then read English at Downing College, Cambridge. Towards the end of the Second World War, he enlisted in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve and served as a sub-lieutenant until 1946, spending his 21st birthday inside the Arctic Circle. Other voyages took him to Australia and the Far East, including the newly devastated region of Hiroshima.
The war over, he obtained a post with the British Council, and became an Administrative Officer for Belfast. His first book, Hamid of Aleppo, about an ancestor of the Syrian golden hamster, was published by Macmillan in 1958; it was swiftly followed a year later by The Town That Went South.
Many of King’s subsequent positions with the Council concerned education, particularly the teaching of English, and he worked as a lecturer in Syria and Beirut, where he was living when the manuscript of Stig of the Dump arrived at the desk of Kaye Webb, the newly appointed editor for Puffin Books.
King had already received a clutch of rejection slips – a circumstance which he blamed partly on the novel’s portrayal of children roving freely, something which, even in the 1960s, was “beginning to be rather improper”, as he explained in a 2013 interview with The Guardian.
The work lay on Kaye
Webb’s slush pile for a year before she decided on publication. She would later consider it one of the wisest moves of her career, and the two would enjoy cordial relations for more than 30 years. She visited him in
Beirut to help with his book about the invention of the alphabet, The Twenty-two
Letters (1966), citing it two decades on as a personal favourite and among the “most important we had turned into a Puffin”.
Until 1973 King remained in the employ of the British Council. But the continued success of Stig of the Dump prompted him to re-evaluate, and from the mid-1970s he focused exclusively on his career as an author.
He attended Children’s Literature Camps, organised for members of Kaye Webb’s Puffin Book Club, and published three novels in quick succession – The Night the Water Came (1973), Snakes and Snakes (1975) and Me and My Million (1976) – as well as the four-part Inner Ring series (1976).
He also wrote for children’s theatre: in the mid-1970s two plays, Poles Apart and The World of Light, were staged in London; and a 1987 touring production of Get the Message, introducing a young audience to scientific ideas, was praised as “captivating” by the New Scientist.
Later he moved to a converted marshman’s cottage in Norfolk, where he lived in semi-retirement and indulged his passion for DIY, installing a built-in ironing board and a panelled kitchen. In 1993 Kaye Webb, then 82 (she would die three years later), telephoned him to say that she was working on the introduction to the Puffin Classics edition of Stig of the Dump. “I am once again indebted to you for lifting Stig out of his dump,” King wrote to her. The letter contained extracts from his unfinished memoirs, which he had determined not to publish, citing “a superstitious reluctance to draw a line under my own life”. Clive King was twice married. His first marriage was dissolved and he is survived by his second wife, Penny, and three children.
Clive King, born April 24 1924, died July 10 2018