About the author
Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, Grub … I can still write that without having to check it because watching the firemen in Trumpton (Pugh, Pugh etc.) was part of my childhood. And Alison Prince wrote it. She’d become a writer when she was left as a single mother, and met Joan Hickson, mother of two sets of twins whose husband had left after the second set. They decided to write together to make money. The Joe stories, about a boy who lived in a transport café, were the result, and Trumpton followed soon after. Alison Prince has never stopped writing.
She was educated at the Slade School of Art, having resisted her school’s entreaties to apply for Oxford. She trained to be a teacher, and then married, had three children, and found herself in a park, with another mother … Tower Block Pony is the one pony book she’s written. It has what is quite possibly a unique storyline; trying to keep a pony in a tower block flat.
Finding the books
Joe and a Horse is on the pricey side: Tower Block Pony is very easy to find, and is, I think, still in print.
Links and sources
Alison Prince’s website
Bibliography
Joe and a Horse, and Other Stories from Watch with Mother
BBC, London, 1968, 57 pp.
One of the short stories is about Joe, and a horse! Further than that I cannot go, not having read it.
Tower Block Pony
Orchard Books, London, 2004, 87 pp.
Maeve and her best friend Hannah are obsessed with ponies. Why? It isn’t as if they’re going to have one, thinks Dermot, Maeve’s brother, because they live in a tower block. And what’s wrong with cars, railways and planes? However, it’s Dermot who saves the day when Maeve and Hannah ignore the fact they live in a high rise and bring home a pony they’ve rescued.
