Serendipity

Caterpillar Hall: A guest post by Gay Doggart

A guest post by Gay Doggart

My mother, Anne Barrett (1911-1986) was a writer, who was steeped in literature and poetry. Mum introduced me early to the joy of books and poetry. She had a magic way with words and who was forever telling me stories of her own. If we went on a bus ride to Oxford Circus the next day Mum would tell me a story of how my teddy bears, sitting on the top front seat of a London bus, had gone to see the Christmas lights and their adventures on the way.  Or washing-up we would chant poetry together many of the words of which I remember still.

Anne Barrett

One long wet summer holiday we stayed on my aunt’s farm in deepest Ireland.  My cousins and I were happy playing in the barns or venturing out in our wellies, so my mother with no other amusement retreated to her bedroom and wrote her first children’s book which was to become Caterpillar Hall.  I remember the excitement back home in Paddington when we posted off her completed manuscript to the publishers. A few months later Caterpillar Hall was published by Collins! 

Through the 1950s, 60s and 70s my mother was the author of seven books for children as well as numerous articles and short stories for magazines.  Anne Barrett, became a well-known children’s author in the Enid Blyton era. Over the years she became a great friend of Billy Collins. One book even had the distinction of being runner up to William Mayne for the Carnegie Medal.  

My mother left her huge archive of letters, stories and thirty years of diaries to me.  Earlier this year I decided that I must do something with this archive, but I really wasn’t sure where or how to start often getting drawn into whatever I was reading and so getting nowhere! Then from out of the blue, serendipity, Divine intervention or Mum pulling strings, I received an email:

Hello, Ms Doggart,
Hope you’ll forgive this email from out of the blue, but are you by any chance the daughter of writer Anne Barrett? If so, I’d be delighted to hear from you and, if possible, to learn more about your mother whose books are so well remembered. By way of context, I’m an editor and literary executor and historian, and am publishing a fan magazine about marvellous children’s books of the past.
Thank you for your time.
With best wishes
Jon Appleton

Jon, a freelance book editor whose hobby/passion is children’s books of the 50s, 60s and 70s – the ‘Golden Era’ of children’s books he calls it.  Researching on an Enid Blyton website he had come across over 50 chats on Anne Barrett and Caterpillar Hall, all full of nostalgia for the book and wondering how to find copies. Jon researched Anne Barrett but could find no details apart from a brief reference to Caterpillar Hall.  Had she had children, who held the archive? Eventually Jon found me on the internet via an article of my mother’s that I had had published in Dorset Life several years ago about Weymouth after Dunkirk  – my mother’s description of helping on the beach as the small boats loaded with soldiers returned from France. Jon had my name and found an email address for me on the EBSB, a bell ringing website!  

After meeting we decided the time was right to republish her first book ‘Caterpillar Hall’ in paperback for the first time.  The original book, published by Collins in 1950, was only in hardback.  

Written for 9/10 year-olds I hope that nowadays it will also appeal to the nostalgia market and to the parents, grandparents even great grandparents of today’s children.  With an evocative setting in Paddington in the late 1940s the heroine Penelope goes on an adventure through time as she learns more about the adults who people her life.  Ending in a wonderful Christmas Party.  Hopefully it will make a good stocking present for all us oldies as well as the children!   The brief synopsis is:

While her father is abroad, life for Penelope, who lives in London with her uncle and her governess, is a little dull.  But when she is sent some money with which to buy herself a very special present, everything changes and becomes almost magically exciting. This present leads her first to a new acquaintance who lives in an extraordinary house, and then, back in time and space, to the childhood of her grown-up friends.  In each one she discovers that there is something they have always been looking for but never found.  Penelope sets herself the task of obtaining this one thing for each of them – with surprising results …

Orsett Terrace: the glass covered way which gave mum the idea – still in the same terrible condition in 2024!

The Barrett family about 1947 in the garden at Orsett Terrace

For more information about the book please email annebarrettenquiries@icloud.com.  The book is selling for £8.99 plus postage and packaging.

Wikitree: Anne Mainwaring (Gillett) Barrett (1911 – 1986)

Post first published at https://anneyoungau.wordpress.com/2024/10/21/serendipity/