Education
Born in Scotland and brought up in various parts of the United Kingdom, she attended Saint George"s School, Edinburgh, and Harrogate Ladies College.
(Sheila Burnford, the author of The Incredible Journey, of...)
Sheila Burnford, the author of The Incredible Journey, offers the spellbinding tale of a small dog caught up in the Second World War, and of the extraordinary life-transforming attachments he forms with the people he encounters in the course of a perilous passage from occupied France to besieged England. Nameless, Burnford’s hero first turns up as a performing dog, a poodle mix earning his keep as part of a gypsy caravan that is desperately fleeing the Nazi advance. Taken on ship by the Royal Navy, he is given the name of Ria and serves as the scruffy mascot to a boatload of sailors. Marooned in England in the midst of the Blitz, Ria rescues an old woman from the rubble of her bombed house, and finds himself unexpectedly transformed into Bel, the coiffed and pampered companion of her old age. Bel Ria is an exciting story about a compellingly real, completely believable dog. Readers of all sorts and ages will find in Bel Ria a companion to take to heart.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1590172116/?tag=2022091-20
Born in Scotland and brought up in various parts of the United Kingdom, she attended Saint George"s School, Edinburgh, and Harrogate Ladies College.
During World World War II she worked as a volunteer ambulance driver. In 1951 she emigrated to Canada, settling in Portuguese Arthur, Ontario. Burnford is best remembered for The Incredible Journey, published by Hodder & Stoughton with illustrations by Carl Burger in 1960.
lieutenant is marketed for children but Burnford has stated that it was not intended as a children"s book
lieutenant was a modest success commercially and became a bestseller after release of the 1963 Disney film, The Incredible Journey (which was remade in 1993 as Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey). Another book, Belorussian Ria, about a dog"s survival in wartime, was based on her own experiences as an ambulance driver.
Burnford later wrote other books on Canadian topics. Another was One Woman"s Arctic (1973) about her two summers in Pond Inlet, Nunavut on Baffin Island with.
She traveled by komatik, a traditional Inuit dog sled, assisted in archaeological excavation, having to thaw the land inch by inch, ate everything offered to her, and saw the migration of the narwhals.
This is a world that has experienced unlimited change, but Burnford saw the best and worst of Pond Inlet at a time gone forever. She died of cancer in the village of Bucklers Hard in Hampshire at the age of 65.
(Sheila Burnford, the author of The Incredible Journey, of...)
(Follows the wanderings of a little performing dog in Fran...)