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The Child
I was born in Sutton, Surrey, in the house where my parents still
live. My deepest wish back then (partly because my favourite TV
programme was The Munsters) was to have a weird family. I’ve
got two older brothers and a younger sister and we got on pretty well,
but they weren’t really weird – they didn’t have fangs or green skin
and they only had one head each! (I wrote about this later in my books
about Creepe Hall.)
My two passions as a child were football (my hero was George Best, I
even named my goldfish after him) and reading – especially the Narnia
books by C S Lewis, Michael Hardcastle’s football stories and Enid
Blyton’s Famous Five series. But my favourite books of all were a
Mannchester United Football Year Book from 1969 signed “To Alan
from George Best” and The King of the Castle by Meriol Trevor
that I came across quite by chance looking along a library shelf one
day. These books are still my most treasured possessions.
All of these books were a major inspiration to me and played an
important part in my development as a writer. I don’t believe you can
be an author without being a reader, we write books because we enjoy
reading them.
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