I grew up in Bushey, just outside Watford, which in those days was almost the countryside. I was one of three sisters and we lived in a cramped but picturesque Regency cottage with turrets and gargoyles. The suburbs were encroaching but we didn’t notice this; we lived in our own little world.
It was the 1950s, when children still roamed free. Our primary school was across the road, and behind it was a buttercup field where we kept our pony, Silver. My eldest sister rode her for miles, right up to the Elstree bypass, through fields that have long since been obliterated. Not surprisingly we were pretty popular because we gave our friends pony rides.
My family was considered bohemian because my parents were both writers. My mother wrote and illustrated children’s books, (with plenty of ponies in them), and my father wrote everything from speech bubbles in comics to naval histories. They didn’t have much money and sat side by side on the veranda at the back of our cottage, tapping away at their typewriters as the manuscripts thickened beside them. Such is the solipsism of youth that I presumed all parents did this.
We were also considered rather eccentric, because my parents sunbathed naked and, for our birthday parties, made up elaborate treasure hunts with rhyming clues that scattered our classmates across half of Hertfordshire. The exhausted children returned hours late, sometimes after darkness had fallen and, on one legendary occasion, in deep snow. I’m sure their parents were appalled.
Weirdly enough, despite being writers, my parents weren’t particularly literary. Nor was I. Of course I read the Beano and the blissful Just William books, and no doubt my mother’s stories, though I can’t remember those. Basically I played with Dinky cars, because at one point my father was the Guardian’s motoring correspondent and had written some now classic children’s books about cars – Speed Six! and Four Wheel Drift being the best. I spent the rest of the time playing cowboys and Indians with my middle sister Alex, which simply consisted of shooting each other dead.
I wasn’t, like many budding novelists, shy and introverted and afflicted with asthma, sitting in a window seat watching the rain and spinning stories; I was cheerful, outgoing and totally unimaginative.
I do remember being excited by words, however, and especially loving writers who treated children like grownups. Beatrix Potter thrilled me by writing about “soporific lettuces” and Just William’s creator Richmal Crompton used adverbs such as “testily” and “unctuously”. I rolled the words around on my tongue, without really understanding what they meant.
And it was words that finally ended my Bushey childhood. One of my father’s books hit the jackpot; it was serialised in the New Yorker and made enough money for us to move from the suburbs into London. I was 11, and still not creative. The height of my imaginative life was whinnying around St John’s Wood, pretending to be a pony. Making things up came later.
• The Carer by Deborah Moggach is published by Tinder (RRP £16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.
