This countryside is a familiar backdrop in Pearce's fiction, the village becoming Great Barley, the river the Say, and Cambridge, minus its university, Castleford. Convalescing, she wove those memories into Minnow on the Say (1954) which, after being rejected by one publisher, became a runner-up for the Carnegie Medal. She brightened the long days in bed by savouring in her imagination every second of a canoe trip on the river that had run beside the garden of that childhood home five miles away. One hot summer in the early 1950s, Pearce was recovering from tuberculosis in a Cambridge hospital. His father had been miller before him, and he had grown up in the Mill House, moving back with his young family when he took over the mill. She was the youngest of two boys and two girls whose father was a flour-miller in Great Shelford, a village on the upper reaches of the Cam. Philippa Pearce, who has died of a sudden stroke aged 86, was not only one of the finest children's writers of the 20th century, but an astute and caring editor who nursed the careers of many other writers, and her passing will grieve generations who were emotionally and intellectually nourished by both her fiction and her advice.
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