Michael S. Porter

"When the three kids were small," says Mike Porter - who was once a reporter on a Johannesburg newspaper (the Rand Daily Mail) - "I would go to their room each evening when they were in bed, and tell them a story".

Without knowing which way he would go, he would start on a new adventure of the circus kids. "Somehow it all worked out, the kids would be happy, and afterwards would go off to sleep".

This was in Israel, of course, and he taught all his children to speak English from an early age, even before they began picking up Hebrew in their daily contact with their fellow pupils at school.

"Pity I didn't write the stories down," he says today. It was about 30 years afterwards that he managed to remember a few, which he wrote down, and even wrote one more story for this book.