Stig of the Dump

Clive King's Stig of the Dump is a classic adventure for 8 year olds about a boy who falls into a chalk pit and finds a friend at the bottom.

What happens

Barney is staying at his granny's. Everybody has told him not to go near the edge of the chalk pit because the ground gives way. But it's one of those grey days with nothing to do, so he goes anyway. And the ground gives way.

He crashes through a roof made of branches, an old carpet and rusty sheets of iron, and lands in a den. In the dark corner sits somebody with shaggy black hair and sharp dark eyes, dressed in rabbit-skins, with bare feet. He grunts something that sounds like "Stig".

Stig can't really talk. He doesn't need to. He takes Barney's broken penknife and uses it to chip a flint into a razor-sharp blade, then slices through the creepers tangled round Barney's legs. Barney's reaction? "I wish I lived here."

And honestly, who wouldn't? Stig's den is full of everything people have thrown into the dump. His water runs along a bicycle mudguard and through a vacuum cleaner tube. His lamp is an old teapot with a bootlace for a wick. It's the kind of place that makes you want to go out and build a den straight away.

Barney's sister Lou decides Stig is a pretend friend, and his granny smiles and plays along. Barney just gets on with it. He lowers carrots down the cliff on a string, drags a cartload of old jam jars across the paddock and helps Stig dig his cave deeper. Before long he's wondering how to find Stig some windows and a chimney.

The two of them hardly share a word, and it doesn't matter one bit. That's the loveliest thing about it. It's a friendship made out of doing things together, and the cheerful, matter-of-fact way it's told makes the whole thing feel completely possible.

It's also full of a kind of freedom you don't see much any more. Barney wanders off on his own for whole mornings, and nobody panics.

If your reader hoards bits of string and bottle tops "just in case", Stig will feel like a kindred spirit (and so will Barney).

What to read next

For more creatures who make good use of what people throw away, try The Wombles. They live under Wimbledon Common, tidying up after untidy People, and their handyman Tobermory once built an electric fire out of bits of this and pieces of that.