Stig of the Dump: 60th Anniversary Edition (A Puffin Book)

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Other themes in the novel are the importance of friendship, education through experience, bullying and risk taking. The book opens with Barney falling over the edge of the chalk pit and adventurous children will find this attractive. This would need to be handled with care in a classroom situation. I was surprised at how readable it was for contemporary young audiences. My son was just as fascinated by the idea of who Stig was as I remember being. And the final chapters, with their eerie otherworldliness and inexplicable time setting added to the mystery. Barney and Lou do not share their adventures with anyone, and their parents never realise the truth of Stig's existence, although they jokingly talk about him as a kind of magical being that can fix particularly "odd jobs". It is left unclear whether Barney sees much more of Stig, or even whether Stig stays in the rapidly-filling rubbish dump. A figure that resembles Stig is sighted working with junk in various locations around the area; but the book concludes that "perhaps it was only a relative of his", suggesting that Stig may not be the only caveman alive in the modern world. This was a return to a book I remembered fondly from my childhood (I remembered the book fondly; I couldn’t stand the tv adaptation) which is always risky. Clive King’s ‘Stig of the dump’ is about a boy called Barney who befriends a caveman called ‘Stig’ who lives in a quarry. Barney finds Stig by accidently falling into the quarry and through the roof of Stig’s den. From this point onwards they become good friends.

The central theme of the book is a wonderful story of friendship and trust between Barney and Stig, despite the vast differences that separate them. As well as allowing children to identify with and engage with the story, the imaginative writing from a child's perspective also provides various outlets for them to develop their reading, writing and even numeracy skills. One example of this is that Barney often consciously counts items he's found in the dump, and the story also makes good use of adjectives to describe item's properties.Stig's success finally enabled him to become a full-time writer, aged 50. Not long afterwards, he moved to his current home in Norfolk. What brought him here? "My feet," he says. It is not exactly a joke. The Stig sales did not make him rich. In fact, King was so impoverished that he once walked across London from his former home in Camden Town to Shepherd's Bush to discuss a script with the BBC because he couldn't afford the bus fare. When he retired from the British Council to write, he and Penny drew a circle 100 miles from Charing Cross and explored – by walking - places like Dorset, Offa's Dyke and East Anglia. But King thinks one reason his manuscript was rejected by 12 publishers was because its portrayal of children roaming free was already frowned upon in the 60s. "It was beginning to be rather improper to let a child run wild like that," he says. The recognition that every author craves, however, is simply being read, and King has always had that in abundance. He still receives fan mail posing questions that he has been asked for six decades – Is Stig real? Is the chalk pit real? Everyone from Hugh Bonneville to David Walliams has cited Stig of the Dump as an inspiration but it is not just a book beloved of boys of a certain vintage (for whom "Stig" was a schoolyard insult). Fiona Reynolds, former director general of the National Trust and a key player in the charity's campaign for a "natural childhood", is also a fan and many young readers still enjoy the book for its vivid dramatisation of that universal childhood experience – "believing in something that no one else believes in," as my 12-year-old niece puts it. Another issue that Primary teachers will need to be aware of is the fact that the language in the book is not modern and may therefore present problems for younger readers.

Stig of the Dump is a children's novel by Clive King which was first published in the United Kingdom in 1963. It is regarded as a modern children's classic and is often read in schools. [1] It was illustrated by Edward Ardizzone and has been twice adapted for television, in 1981 and in 2002. It was featured in a broadcast as an adaptation on BBC Home Service for schools in November 1964, and later on the BBC series Blue Peter. Barney's adventures with his thought-to-be-imaginary friend, Stig are led by his inquisitiveness and wholly absorbing need to play: the idea of a child escaping to the local dump or wasteland alone now would cause many a raised eyebrow yet in my own youth the raised eyebrow would come to the child who did not do this. Write a play script about an argument between Barney and his sister Lou about it not being safe at the chalk pit.

The social commentary is very entertaining. Barney is clearly a bit of a posh boy, from an upper middle class family. There's a fox hunt, which he's too young to join, but he decides to go unofficially with Stig. Things don't go to plan when Stig kills a pheasant, but refuses to kill a fox when he has the chance. Barney is worried because killing pheasants isn't very sporting, but Stig communicates to him that foxes don't taste good, whereas pheasants do. And of course Stig's logic makes more sense - he kills for food, not for sport. The book tells the story of eight year old Barney who stumbles across a solitary caveman called Stig in the dump at the bottom of his Grandmother's garden. Despite the barriers, both linguistic and cultural, that separate them, the two strike a friendship and embark on a series of exciting adventures, each of which both highlight and bridge the gaps between their vastly different worlds. All of the adventures take place in the modern world, with the exception of the final chapter when one night Barney and his sister Lou sneak out of their Grandmother's house and find themselves in Stig's prehistoric world. Together Barney, Lou, Stig and Dina the dog help Stig's tribe build a set of standing stones that Barney recognises as a weathered landmark from his own modern home, further cementing the links between their worlds that are built on in earlier chapters. This book surprised me. I was expecting it to be a simple, fun, mildly enjoyable read, which I would have better appreciated had I read it at 9 years old (which is when everyone else seemed to read it). Instead, I was wowed by the levels of humour and social commentary and astute observation and depth within this story.