Childhood reading must influence all writers, but to consider the influence of children's books on my own work may be to beg more than one question.

I came to reading by an unusual route, in that I spent more than half of my first decade suffering from a series of illnesses that kept me from school. Before reading, the world of story was oral: the telling of folk tale, fairytale and nursery rhyme by my grandmother. I looked at comics, especially The Dandy, The Beano and Knockout - long gone, but the most surreal and the funniest of all.

My grandmother's father, William Jackson, worked at the same paper mill in Tamworth for 70 years. He died aged 93 in 1942. I went to spend the summer with my grandmother in Tamworth, where she had been caring for her father in his last months. William Jackson was a Fabian, but his knowledge was that of an autodidact. For me, aged 7, the result was a treasure house, a magpie's library of unrelated books.

So, in a hot July and August, I swallowed The History of the Co-operative Movement, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, Elements of the Fiscal Problem, The Golden Bough, the corpus of Thackeray and of Spenser, Carlyle, Swift; British Battles at Sea, Nietzsche's Human All-too Human, The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, The South African and Transvaal War, Capital (“from the German”), and Engel's Communist Manifesto of 1848.

Then I found myself in the middle of wonders: a Hindu epic poem of some 48,000 lines, called Ramayana. Here were magic and demons and gods and talking animals and shape-shifters and mountain-movers. Now I did not binge. I read. And, when I came to the final paragraph, I felt my heart stop: “He that recites Ramayana should have rich gifts of cows and gold. Long shall he live who reads Ramayana, and shall be honoured, with his sons and grandsons, in this world and in Heaven.”

I ran upstairs, opened the front bedroom window on to the street, sat on the sill, and, like some Hindu muezzin, summoned the people of Tamworth to hear Rama's lay. I went on till my voice cracked. And my grandmother, wise and wonderful woman, said nothing throughout my daily sustenance of me, Tamworth, world, and cosmos. For it was not time wasted. By repetition, I began to see patterns more than of gods with blue faces, flying monkeys and many-headed demons. I saw more than one way to market.

So the question of “influence” or “books for children” didn't apply to me. All books were potentially equal. They were the vehicles of joy. I would read a dictionary with the same intensity as I read Enid Blyton's The Faraway Tree.

It was, of course, all in English; until I went to Manchester Grammar School. The folk tales, fairytales, nursery rhymes, The Ramayana, flowed naturally into Aeschylus, Ovid and Homer. The language of the King James' Bible and the Greek New Testament were also a part of the process. I came to know Shakespeare through acting his plays. In this way reading became, unwittingly, a spiritual need, and, later, writing itself a form of prayer.

Children. Books “for”. During the Second World War Cheshire County Council delivered a load of books to each school every fortnight, and I would get through one book every day. The books were all fiction and would have been chosen by librarians; they must have been “books for children”. I remember only one, or, rather, a series; and if any reader can identify it for me, decades of anguish will be relieved.

The novels were built around a boy's discovery that the doors of pillar boxes would unlock at unpredictable times to disclose a stair going down to another land. In it was a garden, and in the garden a girl. The other constant was a wise but erratic old gentleman, who led the children into magical dangers. The girl gave the boy a handkerchief made from her dress, and told him that as long as he kept the handkerchief they would meet again. Each book ended with the poignant separation on the stair. I have not seen the books since 1943, and I still have the handkerchief.

This illustrates my point. Here was a story that moved me then, and moves me now. It changes the term from “stories for children” to “stories that children will read”. Given that, I would present as models of their kind such books as John Masefield's The Box of Delights, Philippa Pearce's Tom's Midnight Garden, Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are and Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar. They are not “books for children”. They are books that both we and children need. To ghettoise them is to insult text and reader.

So where is the writer in this? After 52 years of doing little else other than battle with language, I have come to the conclusion that true writing is a pathological state. There is no option. It is what I do and what I am. The rest is not my business.

The Children's Writers and Illustrators Group Conference at Robinson College, Cambridge, will host a session on age banding on August 31

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