Jeannie of White Peak Farm
Jeannie of White Peak Farm is a family story set in Derbyshire, where Jeannie and her family live on a remote hill farm. When her beloved Gran dies, it seems as if the whole family and their way of life will fall apart. Jeannie watches, but can she help? Carnegie nominated, Phoenix award winner. Television movie. 10+
Available from Amazon.
Published by Catnip, 2009, ISBN 978-1846470813. First published as White Peak Farm, Methuen Books, 1993.
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The seasons printed their patterns on the fields… but our lives, I thought, would never change. Mum, Dad, Kathleen, Martin, Marion and I, Aunt Jessie and Gran.
Jeannie of White Peak Farm won the Phoenix Award, USA, 1997, the Film and television awards, New York, 1988 (television adaptation) and was nominated for the Carnegie medal.
Jeannie of White Peak Farm was also published in France, Japan and the USA.
How I came to write ‘Jeannie of White Peak Farm’
I lived in the big, sprawling city of Sheffield for many years, and I loved to go into nearby Derbyshire and ramble and daydream. I used to think how wonderful it must be to live on a farm. Some time ago I received a commission from Radio Sheffield to write a story series, and decided to set it on a Derbyshire farm. My research took me to farms and to Hope Valley College, where I talked to teenagers from farming families. I soon found out that it isn’t such a romantic life as townies think it is!
“There’s always farm work to do before and after school,” one boy told me. “My best friend lives over the hills, miles away,” a girl said. “No point buying decent clothes, I’m always mucking out the barns,” another one said.
Why was it called White Peak Farm?
Derbyshire is divided onto the White Peak, which is limestone, and the Dark Peak, gritstone. I imagined a farm near Castleton, in the White Peak, and invented a family. The central character, teenaged Jeannie, tells the stories, romantic, joyful, troubled, of each of the members of the family. How lonely it might be for someone of Jeannie’s age to live in such a remote place. How difficult it would be for her brother to convince his father that he doesn’t want to be a farmer. I watched and developed the demands of this exhausting life on family relationships.
Soon after the radio series HarperCollins published White Peak Farm as a novel. A television producer contacted me one day to say he loved it, and wanted to serialise it for BBC Children’s TV. You can imagine how thrilled I was! Then he gave the good news and the bad news.
The good news was that he would like me to serialise the book myself. I was delighted with that idea. The bad news was that BBC TV were not going to film it in my beloved Derbyshire, but in Northumberland. It didn’t make sense, given the title, but that’s TV! The movie won a major award in the New York Television and Film awards, which was very exciting.
The BBC TV dramatisation can currently be found on YouTube: episode 1 • episode 2 • episode 3.
Why I changed the title
Now my dream has come true. Since 1993 I have lived ‘in a farmyard’ in Derbyshire, not in the White Peak but in the dramatic and gritty Dark Peak. I’m not a farmer, but live in a cottage next to the farm house. I am surrounded by the bleatings, barkings, clucking and neighing of the yards and fields of a working farm. There is also, of course, and often, the utter, magical silence of the sleeping hills. I love it here, as much as Jeannie loves her farm.
One day I came across my book in a local shop, on a shelf labelled ‘Farms and Holiday cottages’. Oh no! I persuaded the publishers to change the title to Jeannie of White Peak Farm.
Imagine a family very different from your own, but set yourself as the narrator. Imagine living somewhere very different from where you live now, perhaps an island, a ruin, a castle. Write some linked stories where each member of the family takes turns to be the central character.
Reviews of ‘White Peak Farm’ are housed in the Archives hub of Seven Stories, the National Centre for Children’s Books.
File of British and American reviews, press releases and newspaper cuttings relating to ‘White Peak Farm’, including several reader reviews from various American schools. The file includes press releases relating to the 1990 ‘Parenting’ magazine Reading Magic Awards, the American Library Association YASD Best Books for Young Adults list 1991, the Horn Book Fanfare 1991 list, the 1990 Honor List, and the 1990–1991 South Carolina Young Adult Book Award. ‘White Peak Farm’ was shortlisted for all of these awards. The file also contains an article from the Sheffield Telegraph, 18th June 2004, about Doherty winning the 2004 Phoenix Award for ‘White Peak Farm’.
If you enjoyed reading ‘Jeannie of White Peak Farm’…
You may also enjoy my other family books: Granny Was a Buffer Girl and The Sailing Ship Tree. My farm stories for younger readers: the two Peak Dale Farm stories A Calf Called Valentine and Valentine’s Day and Joe and the Dragonosaurus.
