So I told it without hesitation, utterly believing every word I spoke and they seemed to like it. When I tried it out on my class it was both terrifying and exciting. So I lay awake all night, as I often do, and by morning had sketched out a story of my own. When I went home I told my wife, who suggested I tell a story of my own. One afternoon, I began reading a new story and I could tell my class of year 6s were not enjoying it at all. It began for me when I was teaching at a primary school in Kent where the head had asked the teachers to read to the children at the end of the day. I could scribble a story, and illustrate it, too. And from all they see and hear in the exhibition, many will leave thinking: I could do that. It is travelling down from Seven Stories in Newcastle upon Tyne, which looks after all my manuscripts and papers in its archive, and from these has created an exciting exhibition, which I hope gives young visitors new insights into what it means to be a writer. Later this month, the V&A’s Museum of Childhood in London is showing an exhibition around my work and my life. Sadly, vestiges of this kind of teaching through fear still linger on – in a different way, maybe, but fear all the same – the curriculum exam-driven, the reputations of teachers and schools judged overwhelmingly on the success of children under pressure with the clock ticking. I learned that if I wrote in really big letters, with lots of punctuation and multiple paragraphs, I could cover the two pages, and get away with it. In the end, I learned only one thing from this process: how to avoid detention. I struggled for an idea, for words, for the confidence to begin, and all the time as I sat there, chewing my pencil, trying to sneak a look at what Belinda next to me was writing, the clock on the wall was ticking away.

Usually, the teacher would write a title for us on the blackboard. This was my introduction to writing stories at my junior school in west London.

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