Stick Man
Is a children's story, written by Julia Donaldson, about an anthropomorphic wooden stick who becomes separated from his family home and his Odyssey-like adventure to return there. It takes place in England.
The story follows the journey of Stick Man trying to find his way back home after being torn away from his family. There are many dangers of being a Stick Man - dogs want to play, swans want to build nests and people make fires using sticks! Just as it seems that all hope is lost, Stick Man gets rescued by none other than Santa Clause, who helps him find his way back home.
Stick Man is a cute story with a simple and repetitive rhyming scheme, which allows children to join in and identify the rhyming words in the story. As with most of Axel Scheffler’s illustrations, the pictures tell their own tale and truly bring the story to life. Children love studying the detail and can be encouraged to describe what they can see using a range of action verbs. The repetitive nature of the story makes it an ideal choice for working on grammar targets, particularly negatives and subjective pronouns.
Stick Man has sold over 2 million copies worldwide and has been adapted into a short animated film and a successful stage play.
About the author
Julia Catherine Donaldson (born 16 September 1948) is an English writer and playwright, and the 2011–2013 Children’s Laureate. She is best known for her popular rhyming stories for children, especially those illustrated by Axel Scheffler, which include The Gruffalo, Room on the Broom and Stick Man.
She originally wrote songs for children's television but has concentrated on writing books since the words of one of her songs, "A Squash and a Squeeze", were made into a children's book in 1993. Of her 184 published works, 64 are widely available in bookshops. The remaining 120 are intended for school use and include her Songbirds phonic reading scheme, which is part of the Oxford University Press - Oxford Reading Tree.
Julia Donaldson in Hampstead
Donaldson was brought up in Hampstead, with her younger sister Mary. The family occupied a Victorian three-storey house near Hampstead Heath. Her parents, sister and Geoffrey (their cat) lived on the ground floor, an aunt and uncle (and later their children, James and Kate) on the first floor. Her grandmother lived on the second floor.
“One of my earliest memories is of the day we moved from Golders Green to Hampstead, in north London, because my aunt and uncle bought me a football rattle from Woolworths. I was only two. It was around 1951, and my parents, my aunt and uncle and my granny had decided to pool their funds to share the house at 25 Worley Road” - now part of Pilgrim's Lane.
Donaldson's parents, James (always known as Jerry) and Elizabeth, met shortly before the Second World War, which then separated them for six years. After the war, they were reunited and married, and in 1950 they bought the Hampstead house together with Jerry's mother, his sister Beta and her husband Chris (the two men had met in the P.O.W. camp).
It was a household full of music. Elizabeth sang with the Hampstead Choral Society, Jerry played the cello in amateur string quartets, and both parents were active members of the Hampstead Music Club. Summer holidays were at Grittleton House in Wiltshire, where Jerry played his cello in a summer school for chamber music, while Julia and Mary romped around and put on musical shows with the other children.
“Mother sang alto in the Hampstead Choral Society and they pretty much ran the music club for years. My father researched the history of Burgh House and put on wonderful concerts of songs and music about Hampstead.”
Poetry also featured strongly in Donaldson's early life; she was given The Book of a Thousand Poems by her father when she was five years old, and her grandmother introduced her to Edward Lear’s nonsense rhymes.
Donaldson attended New End Primary School (a traditional school in Hampstead, since 1906) and then Camden School for Girls. During her childhood and adolescence she acted (understudying the fairies in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night’s Dream at The Old Vic where she made the acquaintance of a young Judi Dench and Tom Courtenay), sang with the Children's Opera Group, and learned the piano.
“The house still belongs to the family. Now it seems incredibly near but as a little girl the distance to the Heath felt such a plod on short legs. I remember the playground being built, and lovely willow trees, with a half hollow tree my sister and I used to slide down we called the super tree.”
A good linguist, she learned French and German at school and later picked up Italian through a summer tutoring job with a family in Naples, so that by the age of 19 she had a good grasp of all three languages.
Nowadays, she lives in Glasgow with her husband Malcolm.
About the cache
In honor of Julia Donaldson's work and the period in which the writer lived in Hampstead, we have placed this cache to draw the attention of GeoCachers to this moment in British literary history.
You start your journey in front of a sequence of three-storey houses, on the old Worley Road. One of these houses still belongs to the Donaldson family. Today, this ancient street has been incorporated into Pilgrim's Lane. Place that also lived another illustrious resident, Sir William Nicholson (house #1).
To crack this puzzle you will need to answer the following questions in the published coordinates:
- Looking at the lane markings, you can see that the maximum speed allowed on this stretch is AF mph.
- Across the street, specifically at number 27, there is a white sign that says “Kenrick (?)”. The number of letters in this second word is C.
- Along the entire Pilgrim’s Lane you will see that only residents permit holders can park their cars, from 9am - Xpm. D = X / 2.
- B = C - D
- E = D + A
The final location where our cache is located is:
N51 33.ABC W000 10.DEF
Check sum for all the digits in the final coordinates = 31.
After solving the puzzle, you’ll be looking for a geocache that appears to be screwed in, but it is a magnet.
Arriving at the final coordinates, the trained eyes of a good geocacher will already be able to see that there is some object that does not belong there, as its placement does not make any sense.
The cache is within eyesight, it is not hidden.
BYOP, the cache has only a log strip for you to sign your find, but no pen/pencil.
About Hampstead_Twins
We are Hampstead locals and have recently discovered GeoSearching activity. As we are delighted with the place where we live and with the stories we find in every corner of this locality, we decided to share some curious facts about our neighbourhood and encourage GeoSearching activity in the region. We hope you enjoy.
If you found any errors, had any ideas for improvement while doing the route or even just want to talk with us and encourage more caches like this one, feel free to send us a message. We will respond to everyone as soon as possible. Let’s get in touch.
What’s next?
This cache is the second in a multi series of seven, known as the Hampstead Writers Series. The series is a tribute to the periods of time that famous writers (British or not) lived and contributed with the Hampstead community.
#1 George Orwell - Animal Farm
#2 Julia Donaldson - Stick Man
#3 Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
#4 Agatha Christie - The Mousetrap
#5 H. G. Wells - Floor Games
#6 D. W. Lawrence - The Rainbow
#7 J. B. Priesley - The Good Companions
So, how about trying to find another cache in the heart of Hampstead? Search for any other cache from this series and have fun!