Starting out on the wrong foot

E. Nesbit once pointed out that, in order to write good books for the young, it is not necessary to enjoy a close relationship with children in adult life. The essential thing is to retain a true and vivid memory of one’s own childhood; not only of events and people, but of feelings and emotions, sounds and smells and all the minutiae of day-to-day life. Jacqueline Wilson, the enormously popular writer and most borrowed author from British libraries, is certainly a case in point. Her childhood covered much the same period as mine, and this account, written for her younger readers, brings back a host of memories.

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Ameer Kotecha

Lindt has cheapened itself

Many of the best descriptions of childhood are written by people whose own experience of it was miserable: Dickens and Kipling are obvious examples. Wilson’s account suggests a child who was anxious rather than unhappy. She was the only child of a fragile marriage, with a strong-willed mother and volatile father. Like many only children, she created her own world, parallel to the real one, where she lived in the company of an army of imaginary friends, based on her dolls, or the child film star Mandy Miller, or characters from favourite books, like Sara Crewe, from A Little Princess or the young Jane Eyre. They were all girls, and Jacqueline Wilson was definitely a girly girl, with a passion for dolls and frilly dresses and, in adult life, knucklefuls of exotic rings.

Although she had loved Enid Blyton books like The Magic Faraway Tree, she knew from an early age that she herself wanted to write books that didn’t seem to exist yet — ‘books about realistic children who had difficult parents and all kinds of secrets and problems’. She rejected the anodyne world of mid-20th-century’s children’s fiction, with its happy mummies and daddies, jolly uncles and holiday adventures in the countryside, preferring themes which had been popular a century earlier.