The Runaways by Victor Canning was first published in Great Britain by William Heinemann Ltd., in 1972, and again as a Puffin Book by Penguin in 1978.
The Puffin paperback (190 pages) has the following introduction:
The Runaways
‘Samuel M.,’ he said, ‘you got to think this out. You’re wet and muddy and half naked. Your clothes is all soaked and your belly’s rumbling a bit now and then because all you’ve had in the last two days is them eggs just raw and nothing to write home about. You are wanted by the police. Like a real criminal, which you aren’t.’
On a night of wild storms, Smiler (Samuel M.) escapes from a police car – he’d absconded from an approved school and the police were taking him back. On the same night, only ten miles away, Yarra, a female cheetah, escapes from the Longleat Wild Life Park.
Both boy and cheetah are determined to stay free – Smiler because he’s waiting for his seaman father to return and help to prove he is innocent of the charge that landed him in trouble, Yarra, because she wants a safe, private place in which to have her cubs.
The hunt goes up both runaways – and as the days pass, Smiler feels that Yarra is his mascot. That while she’s at liberty, all will be well for him. Yet both are in considerable danger, from other people and from each other, as they find out how to live their separate secret lives on the edge of Salisbury Plain. This story combines an exciting adventure with a love of animals and of other wild things. It is the first in a series of three stories about Smiler. The others are Flight Of The Grey Goose and The Painted Tent, also now published in Puffin.
Danny Howell writes: Victor Canning was born in 1911 and died in 1986. He wrote over 60 short stories, novels and thrillers. Although The Runaways is fictional, the text mentions Longleat, Warminster, Crockerton, Heytesbury, Imber and the Wylye Valley. At one point in the story, the lead character Smiler goes into the Warminster branch of Woolworths to buy an alarm clock. The postscript to The Runaways reads: ‘Joe’s old green van was found by the police late that afternoon. It was abandoned in a lay-by on a main road twenty miles from Longleat. Lying on the driving seat was a note that read: This van belongs to Joe Ringer of Heytesbury. Say to him the old grey goose is still flying.’
Danny Howell adds: A tv movie was made of the book, filmed at Burbank Studios, California, produced by Lorimar, and was released in the USA in 1975. But later on, and it must have been in the late 1970s or the 1980s or 1990s, The Runaways was made into a children’s tv series and broadcast on British television at teatime. It was filmed locally. I can remember seeing how the production team made a community camp at Norton Common, Corsley, for filming some scenes and when I watched the series on tv (at which time I was an adult) I was able to recognise many places and roads in the Warminster area. Does anyone else remember this series, whether it was called The Runaways or something else, who filmed it and who were the actors in it?