WHEN I WAS GROWING UP IN AWFUL Accrington in the 1960s — well, it said on the calendar it was the 1960s, but nothing about the Sixties penetrated Mrs Winterson’s blackout curtains, or flavoured her wartime cooking. Anyway, whatever decade we were living in, the first book I read by myself was Kathleen Hale’s Orlando the Marmalade Cat. Books were not popular at our house, and so they immediately became desirable objects. Reading Orlando, out loud, finger underneath the line, sitting on the backyard wall of a friend’s house, was an hour of pure happiness — and perhaps something more important — freedom. Books, like doors, are there to be opened. Go through, and there is another world.

Can you remember what you read and loved when you were a child? And do you know what it was that marked out one kind of book from another? Why do some of the books we read as children stay with us all our lives? Does it matter if the book is part of your generation or not? Harry Potter belongs to now. When I read Orlando, it had been published in the 1930s and it was my friend’s mum’s copy. It didn’t feel old-fashioned, but I don’t know if that was the Accrington effect, where everything was out of date, or the timeless appeal of talking cats.

Later, I came upon the sublime Finn Family Moomintroll saga — and I honestly think it was the episode with the Hobgoblin’s hat that woke in me the sensation, better word here than realisation, that words were alive. Moominpapa throws the dictionary into the Hobgoblin’s hat that the Moomins are mistakenly using as a wastepaper basket. That night, all the words climb out of the dictionary, over the walls, under the pillows, into the dreams of the sleeping Moomins.

I suppose the books we remember have somehow crawled under the pillow and into our dreams. Goethe used to use a book as his pillow, and when poor Dr Johnson was compiling his dictionary, he stuffed his pillowcase with annotations, lest he should be wakeful during the night and wish to come to his work without the misery of climbing out of a warm bed into a cold room.

Reading in bed is a pleasure best discovered as a child, when the bed itself is complicit in the process of hiding under the covers and ignoring life outside. Children have immense and intense powers of concentration if they are allowed to use them, and reading, unlike TV and video games, staves off both boredom and distraction. A habit of reading is a gentle discipline, and night-time reading — if it’s the right kind of book, of course — can fill the mind with images to use throughout the strange mystery of the night.

Children need this as much as adults do — perhaps more so, so that their minds are not too full of facts too soon. Stories make a gentle antidote to our daily overdose of fact.

I was writing a kids’ book recently, and it was not easier than adult fiction, or less demanding, or simpler to invent. The only difference I could find was that there has to be an inherent optimism — which is not the same thing as a happy ending. Sadness, difficulty, fear, danger, loneliness, sacrifice, none of these are impossible for kids to cope with, but bleak hopelessness, and the cynicism that comes with believing that nothing can be done, are not the stuff that kids are made of — we do that to them later on.

I suppose that when I was writing Tanglewreck for my godchildren I wanted to protect that place of optimism — not with cheap sentimentality, but with the same kind of boldness that fairytales offer; the kingdom is sick, the dragon needs to be destroyed, the treasure must be found; enter the runty, overlooked third son who will win the day against the sages and politicians and army men.

It seems to me that the condition of childhood, because it is about powerlessness, is like the overlooked runty third son of the fairy- tales. This character will always find an animal helper — maybe a talking cat or bird — and be wise enough and small enough to do what grown-ups rarely manage, trust their dreams, listen to the cat, know that an acorn is really a forest and remember to believe in magic. Just fantasy? I don't think so. If you chuck something into the hobgoblin’s hat, who knows what will happen next?

Tanglewreck is published by Bloomsbury

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