Spring Comes to World's End

With their parents working on a boat in the Mediterranean, Tom, Carrie, Em and Michael have learnt to look after themselves – and their menagerie of animals in their tumble-down house at World’s End. As their Uncle Rudolph threatens to sell their beloved home, the children are determined to earn the money to buy it themselves. But money disappears as fast as it comes in, especially when there are thirty-nine mouths to feed, and time is running out. Spring Comes to World’s End is the last animal-packed instalment in The World’s End Series.

Great grand daughter to Charles Dickens, Monica (1915-1992) was born into an upper middle class family. Disillusioned with the world she was brought up in - she was expelled from St Paul's Girls' School in London for throwing her school uniform over Hammersmith Bridge - Dickens then decided to go into service, despite coming from the privileged class; her experiences as a cook and general servant would form the nucleus of her first book, One Pair Of Hands in 1939.Dickens married an American Navy officer, Roy O. Stratton, and spent much of her adult life in Massachusetts and Washington D.C., but the majority of writing continued to be set in Britain. Her book of 1953, No More Meadows, reflected her work with the NSPCC and she later helped to found the American Samaritans in Massachusetts. Between 1970 and 1971 she wrote a series of children's books known as The Worlds End Series which dealt with rescuing animals, and to some extent children. After the death of her husband in 1985, Dickens returned to England where she continued to write until her death aged 77.