This author and former journalist, who specialized in writing books for children, made effective use of his local area (he lived in different parts of east Kent at various times) for his books, whose settings were an integral part of the story. In 'He Is Your Brother'(1974), for example, an autistic child is drawn out of his private world by his brother’s passionate interest in railways, particularly the long disused Canterbury-Whitstable line ('Crab and Winkle line'), the first steam-powered passenger railway in the country.
The former route of the ‘Crab and Winkle’ line has now been made into a cycle route linking Canterbury and Whitstable.
Quotations
They scrambled up onto the embankment, and where the old line had been was now a cindered footpath between high over-grown hedges. They followed this for some distance until it went into a cutting under the main road. …He had picked up a flattish disc about two inches across and green with corrosion.’Looks like an old horse-brass,’ Jock said. Chris laughed. ‘Not much to do with a railway, then’. ‘It is though,’ Mike said. He took the disc and turned it over. Faintly on the back of it could be made out ‘C. & W. Ry. Co.’ ‘They used horses on this line for years, to pull the carriages the last mile or so into the (Whitstable) station. … They stopped using horses when the South Eastern took over, so this must be over a hundred years old.’
In his children’s book, ‘The Sheltering Tree’, Richard Parker used the setting of the marshland south west of Margate as a background for the story of a mid-nineteenth century family’s struggle with poverty and involvement in the local smuggling trade...
In ‘The Sheltering Tree’(1970), a story of smuggling in the nineteenth century, the children’s author, Richard Parker, used more of his favourite east Kent settings to give authenticity and atmosphere to his book...
The description of the collapse of Rochester bridge, caught live on television as car and train passengers are plunged to instant death is, for a children’s book, a powerful image, as shocking in its casual brutality as any latter-day video game...
In ‘The Sword of Ganelon’ (1957), Richard Parker, the children’s author, who often used parts of east and north Kent as settings for his books, took the village of Sarre, which he called Serrin, as one of the chief locations for this story set in early Britain, soon after the departure of the Romans...
