The Sound of Propellers

by Clive King

When Murugan first arrives in England from India, he finds it difficult to adjust to the chilly climate and the complicated rules of his new boarding school.
But soon Murugan and his new friends find themselves caught up in something far more extraordinary than everyday school. For the year is 1938, war is looming and Murugan's school is close to the aircraft factory where a secret seaplane is being developed...

205 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

David Clive King was born in Richmond, Surrey in 1924. In 1926 he moved with his parents to Oliver's Farm, Ash, Kent, on the North Downs, alongside which was an abandoned chalk-pit. His early education was at a private infant school where one of the teachers, Miss Brodie, claimed to have taught Christopher Robin Milne, and introduced Clive to stories about Stone Age people. Thereafter he went to King's School, Rochester, Downing College, Cambridge, and the School of Oriental and African Studies, London.

From 1943 to 1947 he served in the Royal Navy, voyaging to Iceland, twice to the Russian Arctic, to India, Sri Lanka, Australia, East Indies, Malaysia and Japan, where he observed the ruins of Hiroshima within months of its destruction. Civilian postings as an officer of the British Council took him to Amsterdam, Belfast, Aleppo, Damascus (styled as Visiting Professor to the University), Beirut, Dhaka and Madras, and gave opportunities for independent travel between these places and England. Several of these exotic places provided material for his nineteen children's stories, but his best-known book STIG OF THE DUMP he wrote in an educational job at Rye, East Sussex. The BBC broadcast a new television adaptation in early 2002.

Married, divorced and married again, Clive King has three children, seven grandchildren and a great-grandchild.