Author (1920-1990) Jim Smith was born in 1920. He left school at the age of 14, worked as a delivery boy and cinema projectionist, before joining the RAF as a radar-technician. He survived three years as a Japanese POW (partly through his skills as an artist, by doing pictures for his guards); returned home and married Mary (who he'd known for just three days prior to the war, and with whom he was later to have three children); opened 'The Little Junk Shop' in Salisbury with Mary, and wrote and illustrated a series of children's books. Jim died in 1990. Tisbury Blue was last children's book.