the Mau Mau had guns that could land a blow on an aircraft." Responding to that new information, Pullman wrote: "My father probably doesn't come out of this with very much credit, judged by the standards of modern liberal progressive thought", and he accepted the revelation as "a serious challenge to his childhood memory." In the 2017 BBC series documentary Imagine, Pullman said that he has since become aware that his father could have crashed his plane deliberately, saying "There was something odd about the crash ... he just took his plane up and flew into the side of a hill", citing rumours of his father having debt troubles and a problematic love affair. His mother remarried the following year and, following a move to North Wales, Pullman discovered comic books, including Superman and Batman, a medium which he continues to enjoy. In his early years, Pullman attended Taverham Hall School and Eaton House and, from 1957, he was educated at Ysgol Ardudwy in Harlech, Gwynedd, spending time in Norfolk with his grandfather, a clergyman. Around that time, Pullman discovered John Milton's Paradise Lost, which would become a major influence for His Dark Materials. From 1965, Pullman attended Exeter College, Oxford, receiving a Third-class BA in 1968. In an interview with the Oxford Student, he noted that he "did not really enjoy the English course", and that "I thought I was doing quite well until I came out with my third class degree and then I realised that I wasn't – it was the year they stopped giving fourth class degrees otherwise I'd have got one of those". He discovered William Blake's illustrations around 1970, which would also influence him greatly. Pullman married Judith Speller in 1970 and they have two sons. At the time of his marriage he began teaching children aged 9 to 13 at Bishop Kirk Middle School in Summertown, North Oxford, as well as writing school plays. His first published work was The Haunted Storm, which was joint-winner of the New English Library's Young Writer's Award in 1972, but which he refuses to discuss. Galatea, an adult fantasy-fiction novel, followed in 1978, but it was his school plays which inspired his first children's book, Count Karlstein, in 1982. He stopped teaching shortly after the publication of his second children's book, The Ruby in the Smoke (1986), which has a Victorian setting. Between 1988 and 1996, Pullman