NURSE MABEL AND HER AMAZING FLEAS!: Jenny Woolf

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Thursday, August 22

Who Are We?

Here are Frank (left) and Vanessa (right) drinking coffee and sketching out the first ideas for Mabel and her fleas.

I (Jenny) was behind the camera there, and here I am in front of it, reading a book of photos of London in Mabel's day, or just before.

So far so good...

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What's this about?

I'm Jenny. I'm a writer, and when I was a little girl, my Grandma had a mysterious knife. It was almost the only thing she had kept from her youth. But she would never tell me why she had kept it, and she never let me examine it closely. Years later, I found the knife and suddenly realised it was fashioned from a bullet, with Grandma's maiden name and the word SOUVENIR cut on it.

Then I remembered Grandma telling me how, as a lively teenager, she'd left her boring home and signed up as a nurse in the Great War without telling her parents. She said how she'd worked on an ambulance train in France, where she'd met my grandfather. So did he give her the treasured bullet knife? Or was there another mystery attached to it?

And so I've ended up working with Vanessa of London Dreamtime to help the children of Boutcher School to create an imaginative tale rooted in an imagined time. What better theme than the tale of a girl who left her home to work on an ambulance train?

But today's schools don’t smile upon stories of knives and bullets. So our heroine, Mabel, did not have a secret about a little knife. She had another secret....or, actually, five secrets...

Thursday, August 22

Who Are We?

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