About

As a child, I lived in a town called Chingford, which is on the borders of London and Essex, with Epping Forest on our doorstep. I spent most of my youth in the forest with my friends, exploring on our bikes, making dens and racing up and down the hills and dips (bomb craters).

Many years later, I started making up bedtime stories for my young children, and created Spike & Prickles. The first story I told them was ‘A Forest Divided’, which was based around the Epping New Road, which runs through the middle of Epping Forest. Every night, the children would ask me to tell them more Spike & Prickles adventures, which I did for many years.

My children now have children of their own, and have constantly asked me to write down ‘The Adventures of Spike and Prickles’. In 2016, having never written a book in my life,
I hired a small gite in France and put pen to paper (fingers to keyboard). I was amazed that I could remember the stories and also loved creating new ones. I left France after a few weeks with some draft stories, which then remained on my PC for many years, mainly due to work commitments.

It wasn’t until May 2020, during the COVID lockdown, that I was on a zoom call with Chris Witham, one of the friends I used to play with in Epping Forest, and told him about the stories I had written based around the forest where we spent so much of our youth.
He asked me to send him a copy of the first story and, having fallen in love with the characters and their adventures, took the lead in the journey to getting the first book published.

The biggest challenge, besides finding fantastic people like my sister-in-law, Ann Newman, who spent endless hours correcting and improving the text, was to find an illustrator who could bring the characters to life. After days and days of searching the internet, Facebook, Instagram, etc., we found the wonderful Rose Skelton, who has not only managed to create and bring to life the characters, but draw them exactly as I envisaged them.

I hope you enjoy reading the books as much as I enjoyed writing them.