JK Rowling is not asked this question

But first, a word of warning. If you only want to discover the bare facts of how I broke into children’s writing then you’d be better off starting from the end and working backwards. That’s because I’m not one of those people who always knew they wanted to be a writer, the sort whose first memory is of sitting up in their cot clutching a soggy baby biscuit in one hand and a pencil in the other. Writing came to me pretty late in life: I had my first children’s book published at an almost venerable 46 years of age. If, on the other hand, you want to know how I slowly grew into becoming a children’s writer, then start here. It was a process, I now realise, which began from day one. That particular day was 12th May, 1946. I was born in a place called Forest Gate, a suburb in the Eastern quarter of London. Not long after, certainly before my earliest memory, we moved further east – only a few miles but enough to take me outside the boundaries of London - to a town called Barking. Barking wasn’t, and still isn’t, a glamorous place. Forget sparkling lakes, snow-capped mountains and the clean, fresh air of the wide-open spaces. In Barking the nearest thing to a watery heaven was Barking Creek where the River Thames sloshed past the flood barrier on its way out to the North Sea. As for peaks and smells, they were provided by the chimneys at the gas works and the sewage works next door! When I arrived on the scene the area was just starting to recover from the battering it had taken during World War II. It had escaped the worst of the bombing suffered by the East End of London, just 20 or so miles away, so thankfully my first real home wasn’t one of the prefabricated boxes it might have been. It was a real terraced house with all modern (then!) conveniences: two bedrooms, bathroom, small dining room, cramped kitchen. We weren’t alone. Everybody else’s house was the same. It was one of a few hundred on a council estate with roads named after various political luminaries in the British Labour Party. Ours was Bevan Avenue, after Aneurin Bevan the architect of the National Health Service. Although I lived on this little estate until I was 20 years old, it’s only now that I realise what a subtle part it played in my early life. For a start, it helped develop my love of sport. Sounds odd, I know, so let me explain. There were four roads in our part of the estate. They were arranged, not in the profit-maximising straight lines of today, but in an almost spacious oblong. The front doors faced out on to the road, and the back yards onto a wide concrete pathway. Naturally this pathway was oblong, too, perhaps a couple of hundred metres all the way round. And inside this oblong? Grass. Beautiful, green grass. In reality I suspect it was had bare patches and was littered with lumps of brick. But to me that oblong of grass was my first soccer pitch. More than that: my first stadium, with the surrounding concrete pathway just like the running track the athletes used at the Olympic Games. When I ran out of my house to play I wasn’t going to ‘the field’ as it was known. I was trotting out to the roar of the crowd, ready to perform on one of the great sporting stages of the world! The Melbourne Olympics in 1956; Wembley Stadium every soccer Cup Final day; Lords Cricket ground when the Australians were on tour. In my mind I played them all. I administrated, too. When a group of us held our own Olympic Games – competing in every event, from sprints to long distance (two laps!) to shot-putt (brick putt!) - I was the one carrying the borrowed stop watch, the tape measure filched from my dad’s shed and the clipboard to note down the details of every last result. This love of sport has never left me. I’ve enjoying playing soccer, cricket, tennis, badminton, squash, golf and bowls. Although I now have trouble running for a bus, I’ve still got the medals I won for being school champion in the 100m sprint and the long jump. I’ve watched my four children taking part in the sports they enjoy. And now I write about sport, too. My information series tries to convey some of the magic I felt about the game of soccer by relating the weird and wonderful history of the game and the personalities it has seen over the years. On the fiction side, my series about a junior soccer team called tries to bring out the humour and sheer fun that you’ll find at the heart of the game when it’s played by youngsters who don’t even know how to spell the word cynicism. Not surprisingly, I’ve also written about the fascinating (and funny) history of the Olympic Games in . There are many wonderful events in the sporting calendar but for me the athletics events at the Olympics are the most compelling of the lot. I know they’ve been blighted in recent years by drug cheats but for sheer drama they can’t be beaten. I know how I felt about winning my school events, so how a gold medal winner feels must be almost beyond description. That’s why I simply can’t understand why athletes try to improve their performance by using drugs. To know in your heart of hearts that you’re not really the best, just the best cheat, seems to me to deny everything that sport is about. TO BE CONTINUED ...