What price the old school tie (or the old school garter)?
* Michael Morpugo, who won the Children’s Book Award 2000 with Kensuke’s Kingdom, has written a novel about the impact of foot and mouth disease on the countryside. Out of the Ashes, published later this month by Macmillan, takes the form of a diary by a teenager whose family farm is ruined; and 50p for every copy sold will be donated to the Farmers in Crisis Fund. Morpurgo also runs the charity Farms for City Children.* David Irving, judged an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier in the High Court, is back soon with Churchill’s War: triumph in adversity. A new ad from his Focal Point company features a life-size image of Hitler inside a Waterstone’s bookstore. Does Waterstone’s know? Or care?* Since the jury of the Thumping Good Read Award this year comprised a panel of W H Smith Clubcard customers, no one can cry foul at the announcement that the £5,000 prize was won by Jeffery Deaver with The Empty Chair It is published by Hodder, part of the WHS group.

A gentle giant, the thriller writer received the prize from Vanessa Feltz, who pointed out that in her days as a student of English at Cambridge, “thumping” wasn’t in the critical lexicon.. Opposite me in a meeting room at Penguin Books in Kensington sits a neat, slight, open faced, grey-haired woman in her late fifties. Dr Beverley Naidoo could be an active granny drawn to illustrate one of her own language books, although that’s just the sort of blinkered labelling she detests. Opposite me in a meeting room at Penguin Books in Kensington sits a neat, slight, open faced, grey-haired woman in her late fifties.

Dr Beverley Naidoo could be an active granny drawn to illustrate one of her own language books, although that’s just the sort of blinkered labelling she detests.You could sit beside this gentle woman on the Tube without suspecting that she has just won this year’s Carnegie Medal, Britain’s most coveted prize for a children’s book – or that her winning novel, The Other Side of Truth (Puffin, £4.99), is a moving and challenging tale of young Nigerian asylum seekers, alone in an inhospitable London.”Those of us who have been through the South African experience have a responsibility to speak out against injustice,” she declares. Those calm eyes begin to blaze; she’s fierce, passionate and expansive. And not just about “racism”, around which she insists on inverted commas, “because there is only one race: the human race”. She also means discrimination on grounds of gender, disability, social class, or any orientation: “Anyone who writes this off as ‘political correctness’, and therefore dismissible, is just copping out of thinking about the real issues.”The daughter of a Jewish mother and a practising Anglican father, Beverley Naidoo attended a sheltered all-girls, whites only, convent school in Johannesburg in the 1950s. “No one at home or at school ever acknowledged the injustice of the apartheid system,” she says “Mary was our cook, cleaner and nanny. As a child I never questioned the fact that I called her by her first name when all white adults had to be called Aunty, Uncle, Mr or Mrs.

I never questioned that we called her by an English name when her first language was Tswana. I never questioned that her children lived 150 miles away, and she only saw them when our family was on holiday.”One awful day, when I was about 11, she received a telegram and collapsed in front of me. Two of her three young daughters had died of diphtheria, a disease against which I, as a white child, had been vaccinated. Her children had not.”Some 20 years later, she used Mary’s story as the basis for her children’s novel Journey to Jo’Burg, in which she told young readers the harsh truth about life for black South Africans under apartheid.

It was banned there until 1991.Once she had left school, Naidoo saw “the other side of truth” for herself. “My frugal mother sent me each day with sandwiches to the local university I used to eat my lunch on the grass outside the library. There I got the beginnings of a real education because there were a still a few black students about and we talked. My brother and I both got involved with Kupugani, a non-profit making food distribution organisation, which took me into Soweto.” The crackdown soon came: “We were both arrested in the Big Swoop of 1964 and, aged 21, I spent eight weeks in the white section of Pretoria Jail”. Her brother was sentenced to two years.She tried to re-establish contact with her friends, only to find that the resistance to apartheid had been effectively smashed.