Josephine's Journey

Josephine doesn’t find life easy. She is slow, ponderous and, although these characteristics are fine for any usual tortoise, she doesn’t feel they are

right for her. The race she has just won against her friend Harvey the hare, was a happening that legends are made of. Although usually one of the

fastest creatures on four legs, however, Harvey is easily distracted and quite often loses track of his everyday living.

Because Josephine has a feeling there is something lacking in her daily humdrum existence, she develops an urge to set out on an adventure with

Harvey and a friendly tawny owl called Evelyn, to try to discover what it is she might be missing.

However, this is no ordinary adventure. The land drawing her away from her comfortable burrow on the edge of Sir Nigel Hodgson’s grounds,

could be fraught with all sorts of dire dangers and never-ending nightmares.

Author Biography

Born in 1946 in the West Riding of Yorkshire’s coal fields around Wakefield, he attended grammar school, where he enjoyed sport rather more than academic work. After three years at teacher training college in Leeds, he became a teacher in 1967. He spent a lot of time during histeaching career entertaining children of all ages, a large part of which was through telling stories, and encouraging them to escape into a world of imagination and wonder. Some of his most disturbed youngsters he found to be very talented poets, for example. He has always had a wicked sense of humour, which has blossomed only during the time he has spent with his wife, Denise. This sense of humour also allowed many youngsters to survive often difficult and brutalising home environments.In 2006, he retired after forty years working in schools with young people who had significantly disrupted lives because of behaviour disorders and poor social adjustment, generally brought about through circumstances beyond their control. At the same time as moving from leafy lane suburban middle-class school teaching in Leeds to residential schooling for emotional and behavioural disturbance in the early 1990s, changed family circumstance provided the spur to achieve ambitions.Supported by his wife, Denise, he achieved a Master of Education degree in his mid-forties and a PhD at the age of fifty-six, because he hadalways wanted to do so.Now enjoying glorious retirement, he spends as much time as life will allow writing, reading and travelling.