Rachel Grant talks to children's author Ron Karley from Lower Bockhampton, whose early experiences at a school for the partially sighted provided inspiration for his latest book, A Capital Trap.
After a lifetime in schools, one retired teacher has made the journey back to the classroom via his imagination.
Ron Karley has just published his latest children's story A Capital Trap, inspired by his own post-war days at a boarding school for children with sight problems.
Storytelling is instinctive for the father of three from Lower Bockhampton, near Dorchester. At school he was commissioned to write the school plays instead of suffering the humiliation of the woodwork class, and by the time he returned to teach he was inspiring pupils with his own imaginative worlds.
The new book, Ron's third since retiring on health grounds from the headship at Milton Abbas First School more than 10 years ago, is a 1940s adventure story set in the West of England School for the Partially Sighted.
It is centred on the experiences of a new boarder, Londoner Matthew Kent, at the forbidding Victorian school in Exeter, and draws strongly on Ron's own memories.
As a child he spent a year at the school, now called the West of England School for Young People with Little or No Sight, and later returned as a teacher.
"I've taken some ideas from my own experiences, like the idea of the embossed leather suitcase, which is quite an important part of the book," he says. "I have still got my suitcase, but the silver letters are very faded.
"The background is as authentic as I can remember, right down to the show inspections, but I've added the mystery. The main difference is that Matthew has a difficult time and I never did, but this made for a more interesting character."
Ron, a keen naturalist who now spends much of his spare time painting, adds: "Like Matthew, I did actually start a butterfly craze when I was there, but that's as far as the similarities with the pupils goes."
All of the main characters have visual impairments, but Ron is eager to point out that they are not defined by their disabilities.
"A Capital Trap was never intended to make a statement about people with disabilities," he says.
"There are hardly any children's books where the main characters just happen to have disabilities, and I wanted to redress the balance."
Ron was himself partially sighted as a child. "I was incredibly short-sighted. Normally the condition deteriorates, but mine went the other way and improved as I got older."
His problems were pratically solved as perscription glasses improved and by the age of 23, when he received his first set of contact lenses, he had 'normal sight'.
He recalls: "After a year in Exeter they decided I could see well enough and sent me to another school.
"I don't think these days I would have been sent at all, but they were fussier in those days. Nowadays schools are much more accommodating."
In A Capital Trap one of the main plot lines is based on the exploits of a nasty boy called Horace, but all of Ron's own experience of bullying comes from the other side classroom.
"In many ways I didn't feel that I fitted in as a schoolboy, but it wasn't really a problem," he recalls.
"I was a small boy with very thick glasses, but I never had any trouble with bullies.
"For teachers, bullying can be very difficult to detect. It can be very covert. Children can be enormously cruel, but so can adults, of course. They behave differently from adults, but no better or worse."
Perhaps it is in understanding the way children think that has made the books by this unconventional teacher, now with his long wavy grey hair and pierced ear, so successful in Dorset. Or maybe it is his willingness to listen to the chapter-by-chapter comments from a panel of young readers at a middle school in Blandford.
Ron has already sold hundreds of copies of his two previous books, all illustrated with lively cartoons by the Dorset artist Danny Byrne.
The first, In and Out the Windows, is about a class that gets lost in a parallel world during a wet playtime.
"The other one, Us is Here, is a pure farce, written just to make children laugh. It is about aliens coming down on April 1st and trying to pass themselves off as a prank," says Ron.
"I think A Capital Trap is the most serious of the books, but in all of them the plots tend to be fairly convoluted so it keeps the readers guessing."
His 23 years as a teacher have given him a good insight into what it is that keeps children tuned in, and now some of his former pupils are snapping up the books after being transfixed by the early versions of them in the classroom.
"Sometimes I would ask someone for an idea and go with it, making a story up on the spot and including the children in it, and at other times I would prepare a story.
"I've still got three or four more stories I used in school in notes and on tapes that I might turn into books, and I am a third of the way through a sequel to In and Out the Windows."
All the subjects had the potential to come alive in Ron's teaching days, he recalls.
"We acted Romans to the extreme in Milton Abbas. The pupils dressed in costume and invaded another school. The children from the other school locked themselves in the toilet, which was probably what the Ancient Britons would have done.
"Fun was very important, but it was getting harder by the time I left. The demands were becoming overbearing.
"With young children it is nice to be spontaneous. I think that is more difficult now, but many teachers still manage."
It was his own schooldays that forged his path as a storyteller and communicator.
"I was very much encouraged in school to do these things. They told me I should be a writer.
"I was always useless at woodwork, and I still am.
"I would come into the class and we would be making a tea tray, or some such thing. At the end of the lesson we would put it on the bench and pick it up the next day to follow on with it. But I would come back and mine would always be missing.
"My teacher would just say 'don't worry', and give me some more wood to start again.
"Later I found out that the woodwork teacher would take them home and chop them up for firewood, that's why he never got cross.
"The other boys were building canoes and things and I was still trying to make a tea tray."
One year Ron was excused from the subject while he wrote the school play.
"I used to write it and as soon as I had finished one section it would go to a team of girls - and it was girls in those days - in the typing class who would type out as many pages as possible.
After leaving school Ron worked in department stores and sold tropical fish, but his friends would often ask him to consider teaching.
"I thought I would never be able to do it, but then the Labour Government in the 1960s made a lot of fuss about education and said they needed more teachers and opened more colleges to train them. So I took a course in 1969."
It was teaching that brought London-born Ron to the west of England, an area he had fallen in love with after boyhood holidays. He met his wife Dorothy in Devon and they eventually moved to Dorset.
When not concentrating on his writing, Ron shares his wife's interest in nature and paints watercolours of fungi while Dorothy focuses on flowers. The couple dedicated 30 years of weekends running nature clubs for children, including a Watch group run by the Dorset Wildlife Trust.
As with his writing, the interest started at school, he says.
"At 14 I was given a display area at school for my painting of fungi.
"I like the shapes and colours, and it is a good reason for getting out into wild places in the autumn. They make good, attractive subjects, and people buy them."
Ron is now hoping that his latest book will have the same appeal with young readers.
