A PENSIONER is reliving his childhood after publishing his first children’s book based on a collection of happy memories as a youngster.

Les Yates spends most of his time caring for his wife Ann, at their home in Croftlands, Ramsbottom, although the 75-year-old still found time to write his first fictional children’s book called Creepycrawlydale Tales.

Written with humour, the story is aimed at making it enjoyable for adults to read to children, and he even featured Ramsbottom as the capital of ‘Beetleshire’, the book’s fictional county.

The story revolves around the antics of a family of bees and the escapades of their daily lives.

Mr Yates, grandfather to eight-year-old Lily Sofia and Elliot Zachary, aged five, said: “Ann contracted multiple sclerosis in 1995 and the disease has got progressively worse, which means that we are more housebound in our retirement years than we would like.

“It was during some of this time spent caring for Ann that Creepycrawlydale Tales came into being.

“The stories reflect the happy times of childhood when I played in the surrounding woods, streams and hills.

“The 1940s and early '50s were times when there was much more freedom to slip out of the back gate after a hasty tea and roam the countryside, building dams, climbing trees or playing rally-ho, a game which involved chasing and searching all over town for the opposite team into the late hours of the evening.

“When I wrote my first Creepycrawlydale tale and read it back to Ann, she nearly fell off the chair laughing, which surprised me, because she doesn’t often laugh at my jokes. The reaction from Ann encouraged me to write more.”

Creepycrawlydale Tales is being released today (July 30) and can be ordered from Waterstones or Pegasus Publishers at www.pegasuspublishers.com