The Runaway Roller Skate

The much-loved and celebrated children's story, written and illustrated by John Vernon Lord, Emeritus Professor of Illustrating at Brighton University, has been out of print for many years. Bouley Bay Books is bringing out a special, golden anniversary edition, to celebrate the fiftieth year after its original publication by Jonathan Cape in 1973.

In Lewis Carroll's nineteenth century children's classic, it was a White Rabbit who tempted Alice to go down a rabbit hole, leading to fantastically entertaining adventures. In what many regard as the most delightful children's story of the twentieth century, it's a mischievous mouse who creeps into one of Mr Ellwood's precious roller skates. With a crack of the bootlace reins, he's off - through a hole in the door and out of the house. Mr Ellwood and his pet cockerel have no choice but to give chase - still dressed in his signature blue-and-white striped pyjamas and riding perilously on his one remaining roller skate. Their journey takes them to the bottom of a river, out to tumultuous seas, up perilous, snowy mountains, across a scorching desert, to a heartless city where they leap off a skyscraper with only an umbrella for a parachute, through a tangled overgrown forest, across a crocodile-infested moat to a medieval castle and then home at last - in time to start the story all over again.

This wildly inventive and delightful tale is the twentieth century equivalent of Alice in Wonderland. It deserves to be available to this and all future generations of children.