About the author
Doing this page was a real trip round memory lane: my children had many of the Martin Waddell picture books. In fact we still have most of them, squirrelled away for visiting children who aren’t yet up to the sci-fi and chick lit mine have graduated on to.
Martin Waddell (b.1941) also writes as Catherine Sefton. He was born in Belfast, and this is what’s happened to him since: ‘I’ve been blown up, buried alive and had cancer as an adult, and survived all these experiences, so I’m a very lucky man. I live where I lived as a child, and nearly all my stories come from things that have happened to me here, at the foot of the Mountain of Mourne.’
He’s written many books, amongst which is one with some horsey content: Harriet and the Haunted School (1984).
Finding the book
Easy to find.
Links and sources
Martin Waddell on Fantastic Fiction
Martin Waddell on Walker Books
Terri Wear: Horse Stories: An Annotated Bibliography
Bibliography (pony book only)
Harriet and the Haunted School
Abelard Schumann, London, 1984, 67 pp.
Atlantic Monthly Press, 1984
Joy Street Books, 1984, Boston, 84 pp, illus Mark Burgess
Scholastic Young Hippo, 1985
Harriet’s friend Anthea wants a horse, so Harriet gets one for her. She borrows it from the circus, and hides it at school. Horses are tricky things to hide, and the rest of the school soon start to believe the school is haunted.
