Copper Top
Coral Atkinson says:
When I was young I loved reading the junior historical novels of people like Geoffrey Trease and Rosemary Sutcliffe. Their books gave me so much pleasure and did much to fire my imagination and my interest in the past. I used to imagine that one day I would write one of these books myself. Copper Top is both the book I long planned to write and also a way of paying back a debt to these earlier writers.
I came to New Zealand from Ireland as a girl, just as Copper does, though unlike her I had my family with me, and it was at a different time. I have always found the gold rush period very interesting and it was fun creating a story about a young woman managing alone on the West Coast in the 1860s.
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Bran (the original of Nugget
in Copper Top) |
Copper Top is dedicated to Bran, a dog Coral Atkinson once owned.
Bran was born in Christchurch. His mother was a vizla and his father a German short-haired pointer. Bran was a very intelligent, dark brown dog.
Bran spent the first few years of his life in Lyttelton with a number of holidays on the West Coast. He later lived in France where he had numerous adventures; these included walking the famous Santiago de Compostela pilgrim route from France over the Pyrenees to Spain.
In the movie Dean Spanley a character declares that there were always seven great dogs alive at any one time. Bran seemed one of these exceptional animals. It was heartbreakingly sad when he died of poisoning in Portugal in 2003. He needed to be remembered in some tangible form and so he found his way into Copper Top.
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