Mandrake (32 page)

‘I’ll have to jack up the front for a while,’ he said. ‘But see if you can do something to fix up his arm.’

He took the spare tyre from the boot, and began to change the front wheel whose tyre had blown. He was not quite sure why it should suddenly be as important to him to look after Oakley as it was to look after Beth. But he knew that there was a lot to be done.

FIN

Cooper was born in 1935 in Burnham, Buckinghamshire, to John Richard Cooper and his wife Ethel Maybelle, nee Field. Her father had worked in the reading room of the Natural History Museum until going off to fight in the First World War, from which he returned with a wounded leg. He then pursued a career in the offices of the Great Western Railway. Her mother was a teacher of ten-year-olds and eventually became deputy head of a large school. Her younger brother Roderick also grew up to become a writer.

Cooper lived in Buckinghamshire, until she was 21, when her parents moved to her grandmother’s village of Aberdovey in Wales. She attended Slough High School and then earned a degree in English from the University of Oxford, where she was the first woman to edit the undergraduate newspaper Cherwell.

After graduating, she worked as a reporter for The Sunday Times (London) under Ian Fleming, and wrote in her spare time. During that period she began work on the series The Dark Is Rising and finished her debut novel, the science fiction Mandrake, published by Hodder & Stoughton in 1964.

Cooper emigrated to the United States in 1963 to marry Nicholas J. Grant, Professor of Metallurgy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a widower with three teenage children. She had two children with him, Jonathan Roderick Howard Grant (b. 1965) and Katharine Mary Grant (b. 1966; later Katharine Glennon). She then became a full-time writer, focusing on The Dark Is Rising and on Dawn of Fear (1970), a novel based on her experiences of the Second World War. Eventually she wrote fiction for both children and adults, a series of picture books, film screenplays, and works for the stage.

Novels

The Dark Is Rising

• Over Sea, Under Stone
  (1965)
  
• The Dark Is Rising
  (1973)
  
• Greenwitch
  (1974)
  
• The Grey King
  (1975)
  
• Silver on the Tree
  (1977)
  

Other

• Mandrake
  (Hodder & Stoughton, 1964), science fiction for adults
  
• Dawn of Fear
  (1970), autobiographical World War II story
  
• Seaward
  (1983)
  
• The Boggart
  (1993)
  
• The Boggart and the Monster
  (1997)
  
• King of Shadows
  (1999)
  
• Green Boy
  (2002)
  
• Victory
  (June 2006)
  
• Ghost Hawk
  (2013)
  

Illustrated Children’s Books

• Jethro and the Jumbie
  (1979)
  
• The Silver Cow: A Welsh Tale
  (1983), retold
  
• The Selkie Girl
  (1986), the Selkie legend retold
  
• Matthew’s Dragon
  (1991)
  
• Tam Lin
  (1991), retold
  
• Danny and the Kings
  (1993)
  
• Frog
  (2002)
  
• The Magician’s Boy
  (2005), adapting her short play for the 1988 Revels