The Fearless Treasure
Ref: 3385

Synopsis:

I wrote The Fearless Treasure for the same reason that I wrote my first book for children, Ballet Shoes. When I was a child, I wanted a book about stage children, and there was not one so Ballet Shoes was, in effect, a present from the grown-up me to the child me. When I was a child I wanted a book which was so far removed from a school history book, and yet was about England's history, that even I would read it without being told to. The Fearless Treasure is an attempt to give the child me that history book.

A journey into our past was an adventure for me as much as for the six children in the book. i knew it was possible to walk off a map into a foreign country, but I had not before tried walking backwards into the past. I knew that an imagination kept in training could take you anywhere, but experimenting with the children in this book, I found it was surprising how much more agile my own imagination became.

The tapestry of England, its texture, and its colour, is exciting. It is, I think, even more worth looking at when you know which part of the pattern belongs to you personally. There is, too, a chance that when you know where your thread started, that should your colours have faded or your thread grown weak, you could perhaps do something about them. It would be pleasing, too, if a child, having read this book, discovered how enthralling it was to journey into the past, and made a habit of it.