by Patrick Barkham)
The kitchen units are oak panels from an old library, the floors are salvaged wooden blocks from a former laboratory and an old milk churn is a walking-stick holder. If ever a house embodied one of the strangest and most enduring characters of children's literature, it is Clive King's. The author of Stig of the Dump doesn't exactly live like a rubbish-tip dwelling caveman – as far as I can tell, King's water supply is not acquired via a bicycle mudguard feeding rainwater through a vacuum cleaner tube into an old can of weedkiller – but it is easy to see from where his stone-age creation acquired his ingenuity. Like Stig, who is 50 years old this year, King was an exemplar of recycling long before it became fashionable. Other social trends and attitudes examined by the 89-year-old author in the 16 books he has written for young people have also resurfaced as contemporary concerns. King's ability to be some years ahead of current thinking on everything from immigration to hunting may be one reason why Stig is still in print, and perhaps more pertinent than ever.
King, who lives a somewhat ascetic existence with his second wife, Penny, in their mostly self-built home on the edge of a Norfolk marsh, has never enjoyed enormous acclaim. A slow-burning success, Stig of the Dump missed out on the Carnegie Medal when it was published in 1963 and failed to win the "Puffin of Puffins" (which went to Eoin Colfer's modern bestseller Artemis Fowl) when the children's imprint celebrated its 70th birthday three years ago.
But recognition, in a variety of forms, may be belatedly arriving. King's best-known book is the subject of a Radio 4 documentary, Stig at Fifty, to be broadcast on Christmas Day and Stig will also be read by Andrew Lincoln on Radio 4 Extra in the week after Christmas. This year King was also belatedly awarded an Arctic Cross medal for his role in the Arctic convoys, the naval operation to ship goods to Russia during the second world war, which was described by Churchill as "the worst journey in the world".
The recognition that every author craves, however, is simply being read, and King has always had that in abundance. He still receives fan mail posing questions that he has been asked for six decades – Is Stig real? Is the chalk pit real? Everyone from Hugh Bonneville to David Walliams has cited Stig of the Dump as an inspiration but it is not just a book beloved of boys of a certain vintage (for whom "Stig" was a schoolyard insult). Fiona Reynolds, former director general of the National Trust and a key player in the charity's campaign for a "natural childhood", is also a fan and many young readers still enjoy the book for its vivid dramatisation of that universal childhood experience – "believing in something that no one else believes in," as my 12-year-old niece puts it.
The story of eight-year-old Barney, who tumbles into a rubbish-strewn chalk pit and befriends Stig, strikingly illustrates how child's play has been transformed over the past five decades. Few eight-year-olds today are likely to experience this sort of outdoor adventure: Barney wanders off for whole days alone without adults worrying about him, hanging out in a dump that would now be fenced off.
But King thinks one reason his manuscript was rejected by 12 publishers was because its portrayal of children roaming free was already frowned upon in the 60s. "It was beginning to be rather improper to let a child run wild like that," he says.
King based Barney's experiences in the chalk pit on his own explorations of the dump by his parents' home close to the village of Ash on the North Downs of Kent in the 1930s, and watching his own son, nicknamed Barney, do the same two decades later. "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," he says. "Of course there wasn't actually a 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."
It would be easy for a portrait of a stone-age man written in the 1960s to make a contemporary reader cringe but, re-reading Stig of the Dump as an adult, I was struck by the sensitivity of King's portrayal of not just the imaginative interior life of a young boy but also of a caveman of indeterminate age whose "hands looked cleverer than his face". King believes this may be because of his itinerant postwar career in the British Council, which saw him work in Amsterdam, Belfast, Aleppo, Damascus, Beirut, Dhaka and Madras. "I have travelled quite a lot and I have met so-called 'primitive' people abroad. They are not primitive people, they are not so different from us," he says. King studied 10 languages during his career and perhaps he also mastered the inner language of children – and stone-age man.
Ever since he wrote a play based on Winnie-the-Pooh as a young boy, AA Milne has been an inspiration. When King was posted on HMS Farnham Castle, part of the Arctic convoys, he was made the ship's correspondence officer and kept his captain awake with bashing his typewriter. Shortly after his ship changed positions in the convoy, the boat that took its place, HMS Lapwing, was torpedoed, killing 158. "I may have sunk a German submarine. That was my job," says King. More than 3,000 men lost their lives in the Arctic convoys.
After the war, King travelled with the British Council but only began writing books for children when he had a son and a daughter, Charles and Sue, who were the inspiration for Barney and Lou in Stig. "I didn't really force my own writings on them but I listened to my children, 'Barney and Lou', mostly fighting," he says. During the writing of Stig, which took three years, King would constantly ask himself, would his children understand this language? "When I strayed into adult language, I could see they didn't ever understand it." Does it help to have children as a writer of fiction for young people? "I think it's almost essential," he says.
King's literary career began with a jolly book for younger children about a Syrian golden hamster called Hamid when he lived in Aleppo, which was published in America. More books followed but his agent dispatched Stig to six publishers in Britain and six in the US before Kaye Webb, the influential and charismatic editor at Puffin Books, took a chance on its dog-eared manuscript. "Its success as a book and my success as a writer owes a lot to Kaye Webb," says King. He was oblivious to its gradual success. Some time after Stig's publication, King went to the Puffin offices for a meeting and someone passed him in a corridor and congratulated him on his million. "I said, 'What?' Puffin had already sold a million. It had taken off and I hadn't realised it."
The success of Stig has overshadowed King's 16 other novels for children, including The 22 Letters, an ambitious historical adventure about three brothers who devise an early alphabet, and Ninny's Boat, a prescient historical drama set in an era when the English are the newest illegal immigrants. This latter book was inspired by King's experience of Vietnamese boat people while working in Pakistan and was set in his adopted home of East Anglia. King feels that The 22 Letters "deserved more promotion and didn't get it" and also slightly regrets the way he has been received. "In my day, they didn't take children's writers seriously. They didn't really review them, they just retold the story." But he turns schoolmasterly-stern when I ask which of his novels is his favourite. "Do you have brothers and sisters? It's like asking your parents which is their favourite child. We don't have favourites."
Stig's success finally enabled him to become a full-time writer, aged 50. Not long afterwards, he moved to his current home in Norfolk. What brought him here? "My feet," he says. It is not exactly a joke. The Stig sales did not make him rich. In fact, King was so impoverished that he once walked across London from his former home in Camden Town to Shepherd's Bush to discuss a script with the BBC because he couldn't afford the bus fare. When he retired from the British Council to write, he and Penny drew a circle 100 miles from Charing Cross and explored – by walking - places like Dorset, Offa's Dyke and East Anglia.
In Norfolk, they discovered a cottage with no electricity or running water, lying below sea level and earmarked for demolition. It appealed. "We're in the middle of three rivers and we reckoned it wasn't going to get built up, not while we were there," he says. "It had all this shoreline. Offa's Dyke is too much inland. I feel smothered. Here I feel a sense of relief. I'm a claustrophobe, definitely a claustrophobe, and I like the wide open spaces."
He no longer writes novels and is frustrated that his memory for words is going, not helped by Parkinson's. But this year he wrote a piece for Ladybird Books about his wartime memories and also two wedding speeches, one for his youngest daughter and another for the musician who helps with his garden. He still reads constantly, and currently has Lincoln by David Herbert Donald on the go.
In the era of JK Rowling we assume that all successful children's authors are wealthy, but King is sanguine about his relative lack of riches, and the way most writers have to take other work to support themselves. "Look at Dickens. He wrote a lot of books, yes, but probably spent more time touring America and giving lectures. It's either that or going back to the days of patrons." While his travels with the British Council provided many settings for his stories, he regrets that writing was not more central to his working life. "I wish I'd spent more time writing than earning my daily bread," he says. "I'm one of the lucky ones. When people say, 'how do you become a famous writer?' I don't know, but when the opportunity arises you've got to jump to it." King did that, but he still got distracted, not least by rebuilding the cottage. "I had been pushed around and provided with flats to live in for 20 years or so by the British Council. Even then, I should've been writing books rather than converting a house."
King has witnessed the decline in wild play – and reading books – through his own seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. "They are quite proud of me, they say, a famous author. 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."
The ultimate symbol of the way so much of our wild landscape is closed off to children now is the fate of King's old chalk pit. It is now a golf course – another slice of wild land, another potential playground for the imagination, sealed off and sanitised. "I've not been back for a long time," says King, firmly. "I don't want to go back."
• Stig at Fifty is broadcast on Radio 4 at 7.30am on Christmas morning and again at 10.30pm on 28 December
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