From my earliest memories of independent childhood—from the age of about seven, say—‘Narnia’ was an established part of my cosmos. It's not surprising. I learned to read when I was very young, I had an older sister who led the way in everything; which meant that I could and did tackle books supposedly intended for much older children. My parents were widely read themselves, practising Catholics, active socialists—the kind of pro-active parents, we'd now say, most likely to encourage their children's education—and the Narnia books were at this time new, in some circles very fashionable, and generally highly thought of good reading. Lewis would definitely have been on the National Curriculum list of approved children's writers, if there'd been one. Whether he'd get on there if newly published now, and on what grounds, is another question, which I'll return to later. What I'm going to do this evening is to tell you about my own experience, as a child, of these imaginary worlds—Narnia and, to a lesser extent, Middle Earth: and then, skipping over a few decades, tell you about my return to them, first as a children's writer myself; and finally when introducing Tolkien and Lewis's fantasies to my own child.

When I was a little girl, I read avidly. I read the same books over and over again, I drowned in books. I used to lie on the floor in the front parlour of my gran's house, a damp, Victorian labourer's cottage on what was then the northern fringe of Manchester's modest urban sprawl, reading Sherlock Holmes stories in swollen, musty old bound copies of The Strand —the parlour which was also my grown-up uncle John's bedroom, in that house where seven children were raised in two bedrooms shared between them and their parents; where my gran still kept hens in the yard when I was very small, and indoor sanitation never arrived (so that if you spent the night at gran's, you had the fascination of weeing into a red bucket that was kept under the bed). The description that Lewis gives of his formative childhood experience, those empty corridors, the sunlit silence of the big house, is materially very different from mine.