Here is a lovely letter written and signed by Monica Edwards, childrens author.

The letter is about Badgers and is dated 28th february 1967 with the address as Punch Bowl Farm, Thursley, Surrey.

Her letter reads:-

"Dear Mr Lishman

Thank you for your letter.  I was very glad to hear that you and your wife had enjoyed my badger book so much.

We have something more in common.  As I am a parson's daughter; my father, The Rev H. Newton, was at Rye Harbour when the lifeboat there sank with a loss of all 17 crew, in -- I think -- 1928.

Katie sounds a proper person; a real Sometime Cat, as the Japanese might say.  Beautiful too; a ginger tortoiseshell must be very handsome.

I think you could enjoy your badgers without anything so arduous as a long night session, providing you can get to the setts without too much effort. I usually have a look at a sett to decide the best watching place with regard to winds and camouflage, and dig myself a comfortable little sitting ledge, with a foot-ledge and even, sometimes, back-rest in the hillside.  Not a hard job of work, with a small trowel.

Then, dabbed with midge-lotion and warmly clothed in dark coat and trousers, I get there half an hour before sunset on a spring or early summer evening.  I seldom have to wait more than half an hour or so before they come out, unless I am trying to get too close and they wind me.  At twenty yards or so, with field glasses, it is easy.  The nearer one tries the more likely one is to be discovered by the badgers.  At field-glass distance, too, one may wiggle toes, fingers, even lift one's glasses and whisper to a fellow-watcher without disaster.

I too have hunted in my youth - but now with a camera only.  With good wishes, Yours sincerely, Monica Edwards".

Born in Belper, Derbyshire, she spent much of her childhood living at Rye Harbour in East Sussex, encountering fishermen and rural characters who would later appear in her "Romney Marsh" series of books. In 1933 she married Bill Edwards in Rye Harbour Church, and would publish articles and verses in a variety of publications, and spend eight years as editor of a Correspondence magazine for parents, before the publication of her first book "Wish For A Pony" in 1947, set at Westling (a renamed version of Rye Harbour), with the town of Rye itself renamed Dunsford and nearby Winchelsea becoming Winklesea. The lead character, Tamzin Grey, was based on Monica's daughter Shelley although the things that happened to Tamzin were based on the author's childhood. Monica Edwards admitted this in an interview with John Allsup in 1995.

In November 1947, Monica and Bill Edwards moved to Punch Bowl Farm in Thursley, South West Surrey, the setting for her other main series of books (slightly renamed to Punchbowl Farm). The main characters in the Romney Marsh series are Tamzin, Rissa, Meryon and Roger; in the Punchbowl Farm series they are the Thornton siblings Dion, Andrea, Lindsey and Peter. The Romney Marsh books feature fictionalisations of towns and villages in the area; Rye becomes Dunsford, Winchelsea becomes Winklesea, and Rye Harbour becomes Westling.

Monica Edwards differed from many of her contemporaries - notably Enid Blyton - in that her characters grew older with the books until by the end the older ones were on the edge of adulthood, and the atmosphere of the books changed with the times (Anthony Buckeridge does change the atmosphere of the Jennings books as time passes, but the characters are the same age in 1994 as they were in 1950). The innocent celebration of childhood and traditional farming methods of the early books give way as time passes to an increasing unease which fits well with the mood of the 1960s (although there are social tensions, relating to Britain's relationship with both the United States and the Eastern bloc, in "The Cownappers", published as early as 1958).

In the Punchbowl Farm series, a profound tension develops between Dion (who wants to turn it into a modern, efficient farm) and Lindsey (a romantic, based on another aspect of the character of Monica's daughter Shelley, who yearns for traditional farming methods). Andrea, on the other hand, would prefer to live in a town or city and shows little interest in farming, aspiring instead to an Americanised consumer lifestyle. This uncertainty comes to a head in "Fire In The Punchbowl" (1965), which takes place in a heatwave and ends with an apocalyptic blaze which seriously damages much of the farmland. Her final fictional book, "A Wind Is Blowing (1969), begins with a crime and has little to do with most of its predecessors, being instead an encapsulation of loss of innocence, the end of childhood and the end of the 1960s (unlike all her previous books, it is not illustrated). Monica Edwards, effectively, destroyed her own mythos.

She herself (like Anthony Buckeridge) tended to prefer her later work, and regarded her famous and much-reprinted first book "Wish For A Pony" as a primitive early effort. Her penultimate book, "Under The Rose" (1968), created a whole new set of young people who seemed to fit very much with the mood of the time, and was one of its author's favourites - in a parallel universe, she might have continued writing fiction well into the 1970s, when the characters of "Under The Rose" could potentially have fitted into a new series of books comparable with her namesake Monica Dickens' "World's End" series. However, her husband Bill - who had been working away for two decades at Punch Bowl Farm - was seriously disabled in a tractor accident in 1968. This almost certainly had a major effect on Monica Edwards' decision to give up writing fiction; further farming was now pretty much impossible, and she and her husband left Punch Bowl Farm at the end of 1970 and moved to a bungalow nearby, retaining access to the dramatic valley around the farm.

The supposedly unsettling elements of the later Monica Edwards books, which some claim are not easy reading, are probably part of the reason why her last two fictional books, "The Wild One" and "A Wind Is Blowing", have never been reprinted until now (in fact they are almost impossible to find - copies are regularly sold on eBay for three-figure sums). Monica Edwards’ main publisher was Collins, of London, but there are Armada paperback editions of many of the titles, up to and including "Fire In The Punchbowl", the third from last title in the main series. A possible explanation for the last two books' non-appearance in paperback is that even by the 1970s reprints of her books were increasingly based on their growing nostalgia value, and Armada may have believed that the last two books could not fit into that vision. In the 1980s John Goodchild published the earlier titles, using text edited or abridged by the author and without any internal illustrations. This series stopped before "Storm Ahead" could be produced, due to the death of the publisher, and this partially explains why the later books are so rare.

Most of the books were illustrated by Geoffrey Whittam with images based on the actual places which are the subject of the books.

Monica Edwards’ two children, Shelley and Sean, still live in southern Britain. They have recently agreed to the republishing of their mother’s entire output, starting at the point where John Goodchild stopped in the 1980s, with "Storm Ahead". The appointed publisher is a small concern specialising in the nostalgia republishing of (mainly girls’) books, Girls Gone By Publishers. This distinguishes them from the reprints of the 1980s, which were still notionally aimed at children; the forthcoming reprints are essentially aimed at nostalgic adults.

Shelley and Sean have also approved the writing of their mother's biography by Brian Parks.

Bill Edwards died in 1990, and Monica on 18 January 1998.

Please see scans.

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