It is now often described as a ‘timeless classic’. Stig of the Dump wasn’t critically acclaimed at the time but it enjoyed slow burning success and has gone on to become a favourite Puffin title. Curiously, the manuscript was rejected 12 times before being picked up by Puffin. Stig was an invention though - as the place where he grew up was very boring and needed something to ‘wake it up’. He also drew upon his own childhood, as he too often explored a chalk pit near his parents’ home in Kent. No-one believes Barney, but the two boys become great friends, learning a lot from each other and embarking on adventures.Ī story about an unusual friendship between a lonely boy and the Stone Age child he meets in a chalk pit, now considered to be a modern classic.Ĭlive King’s children were the inspiration for Barney and Lou in the story.

One day, he discovers a cave-boy living there, who has made a house for himself out of junk. Perhaps it's because it combines my own experience and fantasies with those of my son Charles, in the English countryside we both knew so well.Barney is a small solitary boy who loves exploring the dump at the bottom of a nearby chalk pit.

I don't really know why Stig of the Dump is so much more popular than my other books. My travels have also given me an interest in the misunderstanding caused by different languages and backgrounds - though, yes, I do believe we can all get on with each other. 'Places give me ideas for stories, and I like to get the topography exactly right. In 1973, he became a full-time writer, heartened by the growing popularity of his third book, Stig of the Dump. Many of these places provided settings for the stories he was writing. The British Council offered him jobs, mostly concerned with teaching English, in Amsterdam, Belfast, Syria, Beirut, Dhaka and Madras (now Chennai). He returned with a post-war grant to Downing College, Cambridge, where he read English and Russian. This gave him seagoing experience that took him to the Arctic, Australia and Asia. He was a boarder at King's School, Rochester at a time when every boy expected to be called up for the armed services in World War Two, and he opted for the Navy. David Clive King was born in Richmond, Surrey, England in 1924 but spent most of his childhood in Ash, a small village some 30 miles from London on the Kentish North Downs, where he and his three brothers used to play in a disused chalk pit.

Stig of the Dump by Clive King