‘How,’ asks Art in Knight Crew, ‘do you describe someone you’ve loved as long as I loved Quin?’

How do you describe anyone you’ve known a long time, in fact? And that certainly includes yourself. I might put something down today which won’t be true tomorrow. I hope I don’t do that. But I might. There is always the possibility for change. There are also, always, some facts.

So let’s begin at a beginning – a beginning because, as I’ve discovered, a story rarely has only one starting point. When I was six, I won a bar of chocolate for a story I wrote about a giraffe. This is easy money, I thought, I’ll do this again. My school thought so too and entered me for essay writing competitions sponsored by… Cadbury’s chocolates. Every year I won a box of chocolates, actually it was a tin in those days. I ate the chocolates, kept the tin and planned a life in writing. Two other things happened, I acquired a raft of younger sisters and, when I was fourteen, lost my father. That sounds like I mislaid him. I didn’t. He died very suddenly, very unexpectedly and he didn’t say goodbye. I often think all of us are born storytellers but those who become writers have a trigger, and it’s often a cataclysmic childhood experience. For me it was that death. I could talk more about that, but I won’t here. I would if I met you because I like talking about difficult things - that’s also what makes me a writer, I think.

Then there were the sisters. My mother had enough on her plate trying to feed and clothe a brood of five, my brother (aged 15) and then the four girls, from me at 14 to my youngest sister just 9 months old. Often, when my mother was still on kitchen duty, I went to put the middle sisters (9 and 5) to bed and part of that routine was storytelling. I developed a set of characters for each of them. For my sister Jane, a host of lunatically larger-than-life comic personae which reflected her big personality and made her laugh so convulsively I thought she had some variation of whooping cough. For my younger sister, Ros, I invented, with her help, a much safer, quieter set of people, animals mainly, taking part in cosy stories with unfrightening ends. Truth is, I even rigged up an intercom once between my bedroom and that of my elder brother and told him stories too. Or one story – I told it for hours (I think about three) and when I finally finished and asked him what he thought of it, he didn’t reply on account of the fact that he was fast asleep. Turned out he’d only heard the first five minutes of it, so I cut the intercom cord. I’m a sore loser.

Anyway – there I was, a writer in the making, when my godfather ambled into view with the idea (he was an organist) of writing a cantata for children. He needed someone, he said, to write the words. I was 16. Jonah and the Whale was my first published work. I earned just over £19 for this – a fortune then.

After that life took over for a while and I went to university (where I studied English, of course) and then I arrived in London and worked for a time in the Talks department of the ICA, meeting writers like Salman Rushdie (in fact I have a signed first edition of Midnight’s Children) and Graham Swift and Normal Mailer, and writing seemed a perfectly normal thing to be doing. So I wrote a few short stories. Two of them got broadcast on the radio in those heady times when radio did stories by total nonentities. One story was also runner-up in the Fiction Magazine competition as judged by Kazuo Ishiguro. That story – The House is Us, was actually printed in the magazine. When I got the letter from the editor – Judy Cooke – to say she would be publishing I blotted her signature to see it it was real. I thought one of my friends was winding me up.

Then, of course. I started on my first novel. I had difficulty moving people around, so I made them sit at dinner for most of the book. I also made them talk about Very Important Issues, such as Ban the Bomb, and rather missed the importance of character development. The agent who was kind enough to read the book told me it was best left in a drawer. But he added encouragingly, ‘Lots of people want to be writers, but very few actually put in the work. You have made it to the end of a book, so you’re ahead of the game’.

Oh poor man. I wrote another book. This was called To Still the Child and it was mainly about my mother’s death. Worn out with raising five children on fresh air and a bag of beans, my mother had finally succombed to cancer, orphaning the family when my youngest sister was still only seventeen. The agent didn’t like this book either. But I was bolder by now. I asked him if he’d ever been wrong about a book. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I turned down Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis.’ Armed with this information I sent To Still to a second agent – and had contracts in six weeks. I still remember the thrill of holding that book in my hands.

To Still was for adults and I was to write 3 more novels for adults (To Have and To Hold, What She Wanted and My Mother’s Daughter) and two books of  non-fiction The Tiny Book of Time (with Kim Pickin) and The Little Book of the Millennium (with my lovely little – but not so little anymore – sister,  Jackie Singer) before I turned my hand to writing for young people.

Why did I want to write for young people? Well, there’s the after-the-event rationale (which is nevertheless quite true) which is that the dividing line between truth and fiction for young people is much thinner than it is for adults so you can push all sorts of limits, which is very exciting for a writer. And then there’s what actually happened. It began like this…

My son (Oh yes – by this time I was grown up enough to have a child of my own) had to go into school school one term and bring with him a book review. On the basis of his review, five other children went out and bought the book – (not borrowed the book off him, only one cheapskate did that, no, they bought the book). I said: ‘Roland, you’re doing better than my agent and my publisher put together, why don’t you become my agent?’

And he replied, ‘I will if you write something for my age group.’

So there was the challenge. If you want to find out what happened next, you’ll have to go to Feather Boy.