When I was growing up, many of the TV programmes and films I watched were set in London. The white stucco houses of Belgravia, the neon signs at Piccadilly Circus and the bridges across the Thames became almost as familiar to me as the ramshackle wooden bus shelter around the corner from my house, Brian Redfern’s hardware shop and the war memorial near where my granny lived. In my hometown it was big news if there was a jumble sale with a tombola at the Baptist church, or a country and western night – with an extension – at the town hall. In London, the people hurrying down into underground stations or jumping off the platform of red buses in crowded streets had more important things to do. And they always seemed to be having lots of fun, much more fun than I imagined you could ever have in Derbyshire.

On the day I arrived on a National Express coach at Victoria Coach Station, the newspaper headlines were dominated by Princess Diana’s pregnancy, the miners’ strike, Ronald Reagan’s relations with Russia – joking in a radio broadcast about bombing it hadn’t gone down too well in the Kremlin – and England suffering another heavy defeat against the mighty West Indies in the test series.

I was twenty-three and had come to London with a dream of becoming a writer and going to university to read English. Both things were inextricably linked in my mind. As a child, I had been a regular visitor to the local library. I devoured all the Enid Blyton Famous Five and Secret Seven stories and Richmal Crompton’s tales about William and his gang. In my early teens, I moved on to Agatha Christie’s murder mysteries, small, glossy World War Two booklets, and thrillers.

These books fed my imagination and I began to develop a love of writing. In fact, writing had been the only thing I felt I was reasonably good at. When I was eleven I’d had a number of letters published in the football magazine Shoot! and in some of the women’s magazines my mum used to read, and I got paid for them. It wasn’t the money that really excited me, it was seeing my name in print. That I suppose was when the writing bug bit me. In my late teens I got up to some mischief by writing letters to local newspapers under a bogus name and address, all of which were published. It was great fun, especially when one paper cottoned on and ran a front-page story headlined ‘Who is the phantom letter writer?’