I’ve never thought of writing for children.”, responded Streatfeild. Couldn’t you write such a book?” Carey asked. “I’m certain the world is full of children who would enjoy a book about the theatre, preferably about children in the theatre. She was originally asked to write a children’s story about the theatre by Mabel Carey, the children’s editor at Dents. Although her love affair with the theatre only lasted for ten years, her experiences provided her with the material for her first children’s novel, Ballet Shoes, published on 28 September 1936. She decided at an early age that she wanted to become an actress, successfully graduating from the Acadamy of Dramatic Art and joining a touring repertory company playing alongside such luminaries as Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud. This belief in family, in its loyalties and customs, the general feeling of “belonging” regardless off any private rebellions or misdeeds, is central to much of Streatfeild’s literature for children.
Despite her resistance to authority and her later descriptions of an unhappy childhood, she knew she was at all times in a secure and trustworthy family environment. Born on Christmas Eve 1895, the second child of five children, she became something of a rebel, reacting against her family’s strict parenting with its heavy religious observances and developing a dislike of formal education, getting expelled from her first school and resisting any attempts to teach her anything at her subsequent school. Noel Streatfeild once wrote that to be an outstanding children’s author, the writer should have an “ability to remember with all their senses their own childhood, and what it felt like to be a child”. "I find that it takes me nearly a year of thinking about my people before I know them well enough to write about them.”
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