Frederick Grice commented:

(1978) I was born in the North of England, within hearing distance of the bells of Durham Cathedral. My father worked in a small colliery a few miles out of Durham. I think I had the best of three worlds--the world of the pit village with its stories of strikes, evictions, lock-outs, and accidents; the world of the beautiful mediaeval city of Durham where I went to school; and the world of the austerely beautiful countryside that encircled the colliery village.

The first book I wrote was a simple collection of North Country legends and folk tales. I was interested in them because they seemed to embody the spirit of the land and the people that were to be the main theme of my writing--The Bonny Pit Laddie, The Oak and the Ash, The Courage of Andy Robson, Nine Days' Wonder, etc. The variety of my interests, and in particular my interest in literature (for the greater part of my working life I have been a college tutor) has prompted me to investigate other themes such as the fortunes of strolling players in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the lives of railway navvies, etc., but I write best and most authentically about the North, and these are the stories to which children most eagerly respond.

At a time when working-class children's stories were rare, The Bonny Pit Laddie, set in Frederick Grice's native Durham, came as a welcome phenomenon, its subject matter handled with deep feeling and skilful craftsmanship. True, it did not depict the contemporary scene. Set back more than half a century, it had the nostalgia that is apt to creep into this author's fiction. Thus, A Severnside Story has jukeboxes and leather-jacketed motor-cyclists to denote the 1960s, but one feels...