I recently posted a piece on my OTHER blog (JAMES MAYHEW) about a piece of art being auctioned tonight to raise funds for Lister Hopsital in Stevenage. And I was reminded that the book it came from had a complicated history. Katie and the Dinosaurs was the second Katie title, and in those days I had no idea that there would be whole art series. Rather, I imagined Katie would skip from museum to museum: Science; Geology; Anthropology… all awaited her inquisitive eye. But things went in another direction of course!
Katie and the Dinosaurs began as a story in which the Natural History Museum reveals a terrible secret: that it has a forbidden door to the past. And having passed through, Katie had a dangerous and exciting adventure. Here are the rough sketches from the original dummy book, created a full twenty years ago.
Unfortunately the story was TOO adventuresome for my publisher, Orchard books. And big changes followed.
In the original, Katie is left alone as Grandma snoozes. She then steps through a door clearly labelled “No admittance Whatsoever” and discovers a prehistoric jungle on the other side. Naturally it is inhabited by (rather benevolant looking) dinosaurs. Katie is scared and climbs a tree to escape them, only to be carried up into the sky by a passing Pteranodon. Such is her squirming, he drops her and she lands on a Brontosaurus (sorry all you paleontologists; I know they never really existed). She slides down his back and tail straight into the clutches of a hungry Tyrannosarus Rex (apologies again; wrong era – Sauropods and Tyrannosaurs never co-existed apparently). And Mr Rex then does something unforgiveably wicked. He EATS KATIE. Yes it’s true!!! If you look through the images you will see an image of Katie tumbling into his crimson belly.
I was thinking Jonah… Pinocchio… 
For Katie escapes; she has with her a “trannie” (or a CD player), and plays rock music at such a volume as to cause a bit of prehistoric indigestion. Tyrannosaurus loses his (thankfully unchewed) lunch and regurgitates Katie intact. She teaches T Rex to dance and the other dinosaurs gather and begin to tap their feet to the beat. None of them have heard any music before and they all have an irresistable urge to dance.
Katie foolishly runs off – with the CD player – and is chased. She assumes she will be, once again, eaten, but they only want her music.
So the story ended with Katie giving her CD player to the dinosaurs to keep, so they can enjoy a dance whenever the mood grabs them. Katie then returned to the museum and Grandma (who may well have had something to say about the missing CD player!)
Perhaps unsurprisingly, when I visit schools, children much prefer this to the published book, which is an entirely different story. I can understand Orchard’s reasoning that this original is too scary for the very young. In the finished book Katie isn’t eaten and in fact meet a baby herbivore Hadrosaurus who accompanies her. A Tyrannosaurus Rex does appear, but is rather easily pacified with Katie’s packed lunch.
I wonder what the fate of the book would have been if the original had gone ahead. More than once critics reviewing books of mine have said the stories are a bit ordinary and lacking in real excitement. If only they knew! Meanwhile I have happily returned to prehistoric beasts for Katie In Scotland; the finished art is underway and I’ll be posting stuff regularly so you can see how I’m getting along…
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