Because he held this job, the family was able to take yearly trips to places such as Wales, Cornwall, and Devon, some of which were to become the settings of Cooper's stories and novels. Sharing music and poetry with her own children, her mother was a teacher of ten-year-olds and eventually became deputy head of a large junior high school. Like Cooper, her younger brother Roderick also grew up to become a writer, producing what she describes as "thrillers." According to Cooper, her writing talent probably came from her mother's parents: her grandfather, Frederick Benjamin Field, a stagestruck draper's assistant who encouraged her to read, and her grandmother, Mary Ellen Davies, who came from Aberdovey, Wales.
When Cooper was four years old, World War II began, an event which still affects her. "I am haunted by the sounds of war," she wrote, recalling the air raids and bombs she experienced until the war ended when she was ten. Her experiences growing up in the war became the basis for Dawn of Fear (1970), which she calls thinly disguised autobiography, and she admits that World War II probably influenced her portrayal of evil in the Dark is Rising series.
Cooper took an interest in writing as a child--creating puppet plays, newspapers, and a small illustrated book.
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