SITTING IN A BORDELLO OF AN apartment surrounded by empty beer cans and overflowing ashtrays, I gripped the arms of the sofa as I watched Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. It was Christmas 1975; the snow chilled the walls and dampened the flames of the aged gas fire in the corner.

For me, a kid of 17, it was a moment that catapulted my thoughts to another land. I had never before had any real interest in reading books but in those moments as Gene Wilder smiled, grinned and appeared to do away with several children in dastardly, often sadistic fashion, I was hooked.

Along with Lord of the Flies and Narnia, this was really worth checking out. When I found out that it was written by some old guy in a shed at the bottom of his garden, hand-crafted in pencil and first published years before, I was amazed. What impressed me the most was that the adults hated it. Here was Dahl, sticking two fingers to every librarian and liberal with irreverent, non-PC antics of fat kids, beastly bullies and gruesome trials for all the villains. Oompa- Loompas paid with beans and kept from society in a secret factory caused such a stir in their original, African pygmy form as to cause outrage among the socially conscious literati.

One furious American librarian locked away the book in her Colorado library because she thought it espoused a poor philosophy of life. After all it was 1988, 24 years after the book first appeared. This incident serves as an example of “adults know best” or, as it is known, the curse of the children’s writer.

As a writer of children’s fiction, I have experienced this many times. In any signing queue for your latest bestseller there will always be one person who is the arch-wizard of the craft of author destruction. The enraged parent, waiting red-faced to tell you how ghastly, perverted and unsuitable your last book was. Often they will bring with them their child who will give you a pleading grin as if to say: “I thought your book was great and I’m sorry for the social monster who escorted me here.” Now in the age of e-mail they have an instant access to you as they e-bomb your server with comments of your misdemeanours in print and how they were terrified when they read your book.

The trouble is that they have forgotten what it’s like to be a child. Dahl could never be guilty of this. Even at his most aged, he never failed to remember what the key elements to a good tale were. Scary monsters, super creeps, vile and villainous murders and gruesome goings-on at the hand of giant peaches or whizzing fans about to slice you to pieces. For the creator of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory it was open season for human experiments, drugging animals and killing off your enemies and all in the name of entertainment — the children loved it.

Violence abounded, as reviewers (adults who would like to write books but can’t) denounced Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as sadistic, racist, brutal and extreme. Children read it as adventure, getting your own back with the subtlest and most enjoyable revenge on the type of kids you really hated.

Augustus Gloop, Veruca Salt, Violet Beauregarde and Mike Teavee get their comeuppance in such a joyful way. They were proud, greedy and avaricious, every one of them expelled from the factory by the dastardly Dahl’s pencil. Adults may have sought to equate these vices with the seven deadly sins but for children all that happened was that they all received what they deserved and not a moment to soon.

It had far less to do with violence than justice and everything was tinged with a great sense of humour. How many children do we know who are sucked from a factory through a tube or vanish into the sewer? Trouble is, adults insist on reading stuff that isn’t for them. They come along with all their own baggage of every horror film they have ever watched and every prejudice they have absorbed and project it on the story. As adult fiction increasingly moves towards the banal demands of large chains selling the literary equivalent of soma, so it is the realm of the children’s author to deal with the more weighty matters of life, death and the reason for living. I was shocked when a recent survey declared that 60 per cent of my readers were adults with an even male-female split. The same goes for Philip Pullman and J. K. Rowling. Many adults help to provide the material for my 3,000-a-month e-mail habit.

One cold winter night, soon after the publication of Wormwood, I received two e-mails from the same web address. The first was from a parent telling me that they had just read my book and now slept with the light on — the second from their daughter pleading with me to make my books more frightening. Same book, two different perceptions. One read on the level of the adventure with ghosts and epic struggles, the other loaded with life history turning me into the new Stephen King. This is just a matter of troubled imagination. A child can read a passage and be taken away to an adventurous land while the parent reading the same book worries about how they will get back to normality. Children read Dahl on the level of dark slapstick while their older housemates see every black nuance and hidden meaning — often so hidden that even the writer never knew it to be there.

In Dahl’s writing, as in mine, nothing new has been done. All he crafted were stories that follow a long tradition of fascination for the macabre that children have read in preparation of life. Writers through the ages have supplied us with wolves, spiders and cross-dressing flute players who eat our grandmother, attack the local virgin and steal our children. Just look at any fairytale: The Tinderbox by Hans Christian Andersen has theft as a central theme and Jack and the Beanstalk by the Brothers Grimm is about goose rustling and murdering a big bloke who lives upstairs. Even Mary Poppins is tinged with subtle threats and whisperings of dark magic. Never go with strangers, declare the troubled parents, who then laugh as Mary and her two charges disappear into a never-land of a chalk painting and visit an old drunk who is so high he has to think depressing thoughts to get himself down from the ceiling.

Even in this modern world, Robert Cormier investigates bullying, while other brave authors deal with kidnapping, seen from the eyes of the child hostages and the teenage kidnappers, sufferers of a murderous corporation and the victims of teenage attackers.

What adults have to come to terms with is that children often demand stories that are unsavoury, gory and down- right unpalatable. Dahl was a master of this, as his farting and gluttonous characters showed. Children like to be scared and here writers have the right to scare but not terrify. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach and many other Dahl classics are fine examples of the laughing scream. They are finely crafted pieces of strength that have stood the test of time and Hollywood.

Leave it to the children’s book to tell your youngster how to deal with the school bully, your impending divorce, the corpse in the kitchen and the demon lurking in the bedroom. It’s all there and waiting for you to turn the pages as you kiss them good night.

G. P. Taylor’s new children’s novel, Tersias, will be published next month by Faber & Faber

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