There is no explanation for why this happens – or indeed how Stig finds himself living in a 1960s chalk pit in the first place. The final act sees Barney and his unflappable little sister Lou walk into the Kent countryside on Midsummer’s night and find themselves in Stig’s time. But where the Doctor and his companions have a machine to whisk them away, Stig relies on a more literary device, the ‘time slip,’ the practice of simply falling out of one time and arriving in another. Children also met Doctor Who for the first time in ‘An Unearthly Child’ which, like Stig, began in a junk yard before time-travelling to the Stone Age. Stig of the Dump was published in 1963, the epochal year that saw the publication of that other great study of our primal selves, Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. But this isn’t the point – Barney’s relationship with Stig is equally valuable whether real or imagined. It is entirely possible that the entire novel is in Barney’s imagination. His grandmother and sister accept this unlikely story as being perfectly normal, albeit imaginary, and despite the physical injuries sustained a more than healthy pursuit for a small boy. He gets his water through a vacuum cleaner and puts chalk in the bath.

‘He just wears rabbit-skins and lives in a cave. Returning to his grandmother’s house covered in chalk and bruises following a fall into the pit, Barney is able to explain quite truthfully what has happened. Stig and Barney’s friendship plays out on the boundary of the physical world and the imagination. Illustrations from the Puffin edition by Edward Ardizzone It was an idea that really came to the fore during the postwar period in books by writers including Philippa Pearce and Lucy M. French critical writer Paul Hazard called this the ‘ republic of childhood,’ stressing the importance of children’s imaginative freedom and of ‘ entering the child’s world’ as a place separate and possibly superior to the adult domain. The novel looks at the world of children away from adult gaze. Stig of the Dump illustrated by Simon Bridgland Despite being unable to speak to each other the boys strike up a friendship based around the mutual pleasure of making and fixing stuff using bits of rusty cars, broken bottles and hats from old scarecrows. In Stig of the Dump by Clive King, bored Barney meets a Stone Age boy in a rubbish filled chalk pit near his grandmother’s home.