Helen Peters

The Great Farm Rescue: Hannah's Farm Series

About Author

Helen Peters revisits her childhood, growing up on an old-fashioned farm in Sussex, surrounded by family, animals and mud, in her new book, The Great Farm Rescue.

Helen spent most of her childhood reading stories and putting on plays in a tumbledown shed that she and her friends turned into a theatre. After university, she became an English and Drama teacher.

She lives with her husband and teenage children in Brighton. You can find her on Twitter @farmgirlwriter

Interview

The Great Farm Rescue (Nosy Crow Books)

August 2024

Helen Peters draws on her own childhood growing up on a farm with all the joys and challenges it brought for her Hannah's Farm series. In the latest adventure, The Great Farm Rescue - which can be read as a stand-alone story - Hannah and her family learn that the farm is being put up for sale. Can they find a way to save it?

Exploring themes of community, resilience and fighting for change, The Great Farm Rescue is an entertaining as well as inspiring adventure. We find out more from Helen Peters.

Q&A with Helen Peters, exploring Hannah's Farm series

"I would love readers to take from these books the message that all of us can
make a difference and effect real change in the world."

The Secret Hen House Theatre The Farm Beneath the Water The Great Farm Rescue

1. Can you tell us a little about your everyday world and how writing fits into your working day? What do you enjoy most about writing for children?

For the past 20 years, I've fitted in writing between looking after my children and teaching part-time, but now both my children are at university and I'm lucky enough to be a full-time writer. On an ideal day, I write for about four hours in the mornings. If the weather's good, I love to write at a table in the garden. My cat, Inka, generally sits on my lap, which is lovely, though it's less helpful when she sneezes on my laptop or walks all over the keyboard. The creative part of my brain doesn't work very well in the afternoons, so that's when I do some exercise and deal with admin, emails and all the other parts of the job.

My favourite things about writing for children are when I'm immersed in the writing; when a tricky plot point clicks into place; and when children tell me they've enjoyed one of my books.

"Both the Jasmine Green series and the Hannah's Farm series are hugely inspired by my
wonderfully free-range childhood on a farm with my three siblings."

2. How do you draw on your own childhood in your stories, and what kinds of books do you like to write?

Both the Jasmine Green series and the Hannah's Farm series are hugely inspired by my wonderfully free-range childhood on a farm with my three siblings. We were encouraged to play outside, read stories, and join lots of school and village clubs and activities. We could get involved in farm life as much as we wanted to, and we were allowed loads of pets. Our friends and cousins spent a lot of time at the farm, and we set up masses of secret clubs and put on lots of performances.

So I love writing about sibling relationships, friendship dynamics, and children creating things and having adventures in the countryside. I like to include a lot of drama, and put the children in difficult situations where they have to come up with creative and audacious solutions. And although there is often sadness along the way, I always end my stories with hope for the future.

3. Can you tell us what happens in your Hannah's Farm series, which includes the books The Secret Hen House Theatre, The Farm Beneath the Water and The Great Farm Rescue?

In The Secret Henhouse Theatre, Hannah's mother died when she was six, and her dad is preoccupied with running their rented farm, so the children are very much left to their own devices. Hannah is expected to look after her younger siblings and cook for them all, but what she really wants is to be writing and performing plays. She and her best friend Lottie set up a secret theatre in an abandoned hen house and decide to enter a drama competition with a cash prize, to save the farm and realise their dreams at the same time. But things don't quite go according to plan!

In The Farm Beneath the Water, The children discover that the local water company wants to flood their farm to create a reservoir, and they devise a very daring and risky plan to stop it.

The Great Farm Rescue begins with the children having to run the farm while their dad is in hospital. When the children learn that their landlord has put the farm up for sale, Hannah devises an ambitious scheme to buy it and turn it into a community farm. But how on earth can they raise two million pounds in six months?

I planned this third book ten years ago, but then I was kept busy writing the Jasmine Green series and three historical adventures (Evie's Ghost, Anna at War and Friends and Traitors), so I finally came back to The Great Farm Rescue last year. I'd always wanted to write about the community coming together to buy the farm, ever since I read The Fight for Fordhall Farm by Charlotte and Ben Hollins, the amazing real-life story of how two siblings raised the money to save their family farm from developers and turn it into a community farm.

"We always had pet lambs, who became tame for life and caused endless trouble for my dad
by leading the rest of the flock on successful escapes."

4. Were there incidents in your own life that helped inspire each of these adventures about life on a farm? Did you also have pet farm animals like these children do?

The children's theatre in The Secret Hen House Theatre is based on the theatre in a shed that I created with my friends and siblings when I was 11. We put on lots of plays that we wrote ourselves, and my friend made amazing costumes.

The reservoir threat in The Farm Beneath the Water is based on the reservoir threat to my family's farm. The community came together to fight the water company's plans, and that inspired the community spirit that is also vital to The Great Farm Rescue.

And the children's pets are based on our real pets, including Jasper and Lucy, the tame sheep and duck who feature in all three books. We always had pet lambs, who became tame for life and caused endless trouble for my dad by leading the rest of the flock on successful escapes from their field!

5. Can you tell us a little about the siblings in the story and how they all get along?

The siblings all have different attitudes to the farm, which sometimes causes conflict between them. Hannah loves the beauty of the landscape and the freedom of being able to commandeer a shed for her theatre. Jo loves the animals. Sam, although very young, takes the whole business of farming very seriously and is occupied with which crops and enterprises will make money. And Martha absolutely hates the mess and chaos of the farm. All she wants is to live in a nice clean town, where her shoes won't get covered in chicken dung every time she steps out of the house.

Jo and Sam tend to bond together in their farming activities, but Martha and Hannah are at constant loggerheads, as both are strong-willed and want to be in control. When there's a crisis, though, they are able to use their different strengths to tackle the problem, and occasionally even stop arguing.

"I wanted to show the pressures and worries that farmers face, as well as the
lovely aspects of living on a farm."

6. As well as the good times, did you draw on the difficult times your farming family might have faced in these stories, particularly the money problems in the new story?

Yes, money problems and worries about paying the rent were a big feature of my childhood, as they are for so many tenant farmers. Farmers have so many issues to deal with, from floods and droughts to disease and rent rises. So I wanted to show the pressures and worries that farmers face, as well as the lovely aspects of living on a farm.

7. Drama is a strong theme through these books, too. How did that theme develop, and how do you use it in The Great Farm Rescue?

Drama was my passion as a child, so I gave that passion to my main character, too. For Hannah, drama is an escape from the drudgery and worries of her everyday life into a fantasy world of glamour and fun.

My favourite play is A Midsummer Night's Dream, so I wanted to feature it in The Great Farm Rescue. I loved the idea that Hannah and her worst enemy, Miranda, are cast as best friends Helena and Hermia. I really enjoyed writing the scenes where Hannah is furious with Miranda but having to express love for her while acting in the play. And because A Midsummer Night's Dream is also about the power and magic of nature, I wanted to connect that with Hannah's feelings about the beauty and magic of her farm.

"When my family's farm was threatened with being flooded to make a reservoir, I learned first-hand
about the power of community."

8. There are also strong themes of enterprise and community in these books. What would you like your readers to take from the challenges the children face in these books, and particularly in The Great Farm Rescue?

When my family's farm was threatened with being flooded to make a reservoir, I learned first-hand about the power of community. The water company seemed to hold all the power, but my family, the parish council and many people in the village decided to oppose the plans, by holding a public meeting, commissioning independent wildlife surveys to counteract the water company's ones - which we strongly believed to be false, and encouraging everyone who had concerns about the plans to write letters to the environment secretary.

All this resulted in the water company's plans being called in by the environment secretary; there was a public enquiry and the plans were thrown out. So I would love readers to take from these books the message that all of us can make a difference and effect real change in the world.

9. Are you planning to return to the farm to write more about the children and their adventures? What are you writing currently?

I've always thought of these three books as a trilogy, but I would never say never! I do love writing about these characters and their world. I'm currently writing the 17th book in the Jasmine Green series, and having fun with ideas for an Easter egg hunt that goes wrong...

10. And finally.... three things about yourself that readers are unlikely to know?

- In the 1980s I made 27 scrapbooks of newspaper cuttings about Princess Diana.
- I spent a summer hitchhiking around southern Africa.
- I failed my first driving test because my dad's car was such a wreck that the examiner stopped the test and walked back to the test centre!

Discover Friends and Traitors, by Helen Peters

Friends and Traitors explores life for evacuee children during the war as well as questions about class and inequality at the time; Britain in the 1940s. Watch author Helen Peters introduce Friends And Traitors, telling us more about the story and also how her own job in a boarding school helped to inspired the book. Read a Chapter from Friends and Traitors

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