Geoff Parker spent most of his early childhood in bed, sick.

He had asthma, triggered by dampness in his home near Devonshire marsh.

He started writing to cope with the boredom.

“I wrote my own little books starting at age 7,” he said. “When you’re laying there and can’t do much ... there wasn’t much else to do.”

The asthma was finally controlled, in part, by a move away from the marsh.

“I haven’t had an attack since I was 12,” he said. “A doctor advised me to get my fitness level up if I wanted to outgrow it. I did that.”

He loved football and track and field, but his speciality was the hurdles.

In 1964 he was training for the Olympics in Japan when he contracted German measles four months before the games.

“I could not get my strength back in time to qualify for the hurdles,” he said.

He’d stopped wheezing by the time he became an adult, but was still passionate about writing. After his retirement from marketing in 2010, he started writing a children’s book series about a dog called Happy.

“I had all these stories in my head that I wanted to get out,” he said.

Happy and the Great Hurricane is his latest. It follows Happy and the Christmas Gift and Happy as a Fox.

“This story is the story before the story,” said Mr Parker. “It explains how Happy got together with the other characters in the book.”

The Yorkshire Terrier is swept into the ocean in a hurricane, rescued by dolphins and eventually found by a little girl and her grandmother.

“I wanted to write something about hurricanes,” said Mr Parker.

“Not much is written for children in Bermuda on that topic. I wanted to warn them of the dangers but also let them know good things could come out of it.”

The author has two young grandsons who now enjoy reading his books.

They’re too little to remember the real Happy, who died unexpectedly in 2010 at 8.

“He got to see my first book,” said Mr Parker. “I got the proofs for Happy and the Christmas Gift. He sat on my lap as I went through them on the computer. He died three days later.”

The Parkers still don’t know the cause of the dog’s death as Yorkies normally live for much longer.

“It was soul destroying,” said Mr Parker.

The dog had belonged to his mother-in-law Winnie Ferris, who died last year.

“He was 4 when she got him,” said Mr Parker. “She took care of Happy while housesitting for friends for six weeks. When they came back they asked her to look after him for another six weeks as they were going away again. She said no, as she was getting too attached to the dog. They said, why don’t you just take him, as we’re travelling too much to properly care for him?”

The pair became well known for their daily walks along the South Shore in Warwick.

“People would toot when they went by,” said Mr Parker. “When he didn’t go for a walk people would call us to find out where he was.”

Happy was the first dog he’d really connected with since his childhood.

“My first dog was a collie mix called Sandy,” said Mr Parker.

“My parents got him when I was born and we grew up together. We went everywhere together. My parents put him to sleep when he was 17.

“I never got another dog. At first I was a teenager and too busy with my life. When I got older I travelled extensively for my job. I still travel too much. My wife Liz and I have a house in New Hampshire and I wouldn’t want to be taking a dog back and forth. People around me owned dogs though.”

The book’s illustrator, Lisa Fox, lives in Wales but visited Bermuda to make the art for Happy and the Great Hurricane.

“We’ve known each other for about five years and last year was the first time we met,” said Mr Parker. “We’d always spoken over e-mail or the telephone.

“I invited her to come to Bermuda for a vacation. I wanted the drawings in this book to be authentic to appeal to tourists.”

His first two books, particularly Happy and the Christmas Gift, have proven popular with Bermuda’s visitors.

“It’s a Christmas book, but they’ll buy it at any time of the year,” he said.

Happy and the Christmas Gift and Happy as a Fox, respectively, won the 2012 and 2013 Gelett Burgess Children’s Book Award for Excellence in Children’s Literature from the Gelett Burgess Centre in Portland Oregon.

Happy and the Great Hurricane is available in English, Spanish and Portuguese at the Crafts Market in Dockyard, 1609 Designs at 49 Front Street, and at Pampered Pets, 15 Wellbottom, Warwick.

For more information see www.happytalespublishing.com