Hindbury’s Run: An Illustrated Animal Story

Hindbury’s Run was written in 1978. I would have been 13. I was living in a run-down cottage with my parents and siblings at the time. My childhood appeared innocent, cosseted; I kept a diary, wrote stories and painted.

On the lead-up, I suffered terrible health niggles. I have unsettled nights, am forgetful, have ‘ulcer pains in my limbs’ and depression.

Hindbury’s Run appears to be nothing untoward. It is an animal story starring sheepdogs who fear a raid on their farm. Little did I realise a sinister message runs beneath every paragraph. A saboteur also lurks within the farm animal company. This saboteur doesn’t want me to write this story.

Why? I wonder. And why do cripples, drowning, disfigured faces and deaths in caves recur in my stories?

Three years previously, I had been reading George Orwell’s Animal Farm. It echoes events leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917 where brutal dictatorship results. At the time, a demon in my head made life hell. I avoided my bed at night and kept the lights on. I now realise Animal Farm had provided subconscious notions of an appalling past. Hindbury’s Run appears to have resulted, only the theme for my farm story vastly differs to Orwell’s.

My other book, Tales from Daler Cottage uncovers the message within this and my other children’s stories. But the reason for my PTSD will be given at the end of this book.

Hindbury’s Run would remain in the dark until the summer of 2017.

My story has undergone necessary edits preserving the story and the tone of the young writer that I was. With illustrations.