AWARD-winning author and former Exeter school teacher Gene Kemp, who has died ten days after her 88th birthday, has left a final literary gift to her old school.
Mrs Kemp, who lived in St James' has bequeathed £1,000 to the library of St Sidwell's School, just a few hundred yards from her home, where she was a much loved teacher for 16 years from the early 1960s.
Her daughter, Chantal Kemp, who lives at the family home in St James', Exeter, and did many illustrations for her mother's books, said: "She was a remarkable woman, extremely down to earth and very friendly. Her books are still very poplar, and have been translated in many languages, including Korean, Afrikaan and of all the Scandinavian countries languages."
Born near Tamworth on December 27, 1926, the young Gene won a scholarship to Exeter University.
It started a love affair with the city and Devon as a whole.
After leaving university she became a teacher and married Norman Pattison and had a daughter, Judith.
The couple subsequently divorced and Gene returned to Devon to take a teaching post at Drewsteignton, living in a thatched farmhouse with Dion, the sister of Allan Kemp, a much respected Labour politician and trade union worker in Exeter, who she later married. They had two children Chantal and Richard.
Chantal said: "It was in the early 1960s that my mother began her teaching career at St Sidwell's School where she taught for 16 years and then continued to be a governor there for a number of years.
"During those years she was much involved in campaigning for the Labour Party supporting my father who stood for election in the city's Rougemont ward."
It was as a teacher that she first realised just how important reading was for children.
Early in her career one teacher commented that it was always Gene's classroom where children congregated when it rained, although she confessed: "It was because I had a big chest full of Beanos and Marvel comics.
"All the boys, who would have otherwise been naughty because they weren't occupied, would be found with their heads stuck in the comics.
"It didn't always work but on the whole you then got them on to other things.
"I strongly believe that children should be holding a book from day one.
"Anything that encourages children to read should be welcomed. I see myself as a go-between from the comics to the more involved books."
From 1972 she wrote stories for young writers about a pig named Tamworth, named after the town she grew up in.
Her best known book is The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler, published by Faber's Children's Books in 1977. A new edition of Tyke has come out for 2015 and it is still regularly adapted into plays and musicals.
Set in the fictional Cricklepit School – based, she freely admitted on St Sidwell's Combined – and charting the pleasures and pains of friendship and growing up it won the prestigious Carnegie Award - a success that changed her life.
Chantal said: "Mother gave up teaching to concentrate on her writing and her output was steady.
"She wrote about 30 books and edited a number of poetry anthologies aimed at children."
She was seen as unique among children's writers because she brought a sort of social realism to writing for middle school children, caring for the inadequate, the rebels, the fearful, the bullies, the bullied, the deprived and the underdogs - and the strange".
Among her works was Seriously Weird which is told from the perspective of the sister of a young man with Asperger syndrome and now regarded as ahead of its time.
Gene, who used an old typewriter and long hand for her writing, was awarded an Honorary MA degree from Exeter University in 1984.
In the 1980s and 1990's Gene held at least 1,000 workshops at schools.
She said: "I do like children. A lot of old people say they don't like what the young do but it doesn't bother me. Every generation reacts against the generation before, it is part of growing up.
"Writing the books and always being with young people keeps me young."
Mrs Kemp's funeral is at St David's Church, Exeter on Wednesday January 21, at 11am with a private interment at Exwick Cemetery.
