A PAPERBACK version of a retired schoolteacher’s novel based on her colourful and dramatic memories of being evacuated has been published.

Georgina Jack, a former art teacher in Stanley, has written a wartime children’s book based on her experience of being sent to Northumberland from her home in Chopwell.

Calendar Pigs reflects her experiences of being sent to Sparty Lea as a seven-year-old, to live on a farm with her aunt and uncle during the Second World War.

She remembers being forced to leave her two older brothers, Alan, 12, and Gordon, nine, with her parents, John, a miner, and Alice, a housewife.

Mrs Jack said: “My Aunt Nance was very strict and my Uncle Dickie was affable and a bit eccentric.

“My brothers wanted to come but my aunt did not want them, she just wanted a little girl. It was a hard life on the farm. It was very bleak and very cold and farming in the winter was almost impossible.

“I had to walk two miles to school, which as a seven-year-old on your own, over rough terrain, wasn’t very civilised.”

Mrs Jack, who is 81, and now lives in Hamsterley Mill, illustrated her story herself when it was first published in 2011.

The Tyneside-based publisher Consilience Media has just released a paperback edition and with extra illustrations for the new version.

The book tells the story of eight-year-old Emma and is based on real-life events, including her experiences with Nazi spies and a pack of aggressive geese.

Mrs Jack said: “Because of the war we had barrage balloons coming down on the farm and Nazi spies living next door.

“There was a fella who claimed to be Dutch with a small holding nearby and people realised he could not make much of a living with 20 sheep so people thought he was a Nazi spy and it turned out he was.

“He was German and living with an English girl who collaborated, but when he was exposed as a spy they did a moonlight flit.”

The book was written over a period of eight years while caring for her mother, who came to live with her, and her late husband, Ron, a former accountant.

Mrs Jack said: “There was also a spy landed on the moors and my brothers, who were up on holiday, saw him. He went into this old ruin and got changed. He went in in uniform and came out in a dress and a little fur cape.

“He got caught at Hexham though because he went into the gents’ toilet, still wearing the dress and got chased by the locals because he was applying lipstick.”

Calendar Pigs is on sale on Amazon and at outlets including Waterstone’s in Hexham; tourist information centres, and craft shops.

The Forge Gallery in Allendale stocks it alongside cards and prints taken from the illustrations.