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Many of the best descriptions of childhood are written by people whose own experience of it was miserable: Dickens and Kipling are obvious examples. Wilson’s account suggests a child who was anxious rather than unhappy. She was the only child of a fragile marriage, with a strong-willed mother and volatile father. Like many only children, she created her own world, parallel to the real one, where she lived in the company of an army of imaginary friends, based on her dolls, or the child film star Mandy Miller, or characters from favourite books, like Sara Crewe, from A Little Princess or the young Jane Eyre. They were all girls, and Jacqueline Wilson was definitely a girly girl, with a passion for dolls and frilly dresses and, in adult life, knucklefuls of exotic rings.
Although she had loved Enid Blyton books like The Magic Faraway Tree, she knew from an early age that she herself wanted to write books that didn’t seem to exist yet — ‘books about realistic children who had difficult parents and all kinds of secrets and problems’. She rejected the anodyne world of mid-20th-century’s children’s fiction, with its happy mummies and daddies, jolly uncles and holiday adventures in the countryside, preferring themes which had been popular a century earlier. ‘I love stories about sad, spirited children going through hard times.’ This is the secet of her popularity. Many of her characters have a bad start in life. April, in Dustbin Baby, is abandoned at birth. Tracy Beaker contends with life in an orphanage. Andy, in The Suitcase Kid, is shuttled to and fro between divorced parents. But they are always fighters and their darkest moments are lit by mordant humour.
Children relate instantly to Jacqueline Wilson’s characters and recognise in them aspects of themselves. Although she claims not to put herself into her books, it is obvious from this account that she has found her own experience a rich source of material, transformed and ornamented by her imagination. Each chapter ends with a question relating the autobiographical text to one of her stories. ‘This is a very easy question. In which of my books does a little girl wet herself on stage?’
The book is splendidly illustrated — as are her other stories — by Ned Sharratt, and also by a charming collection of photographs from the family album. Her unwardly mobile mother has made sure that Jacqueline is always preternaturally neat and tidy in the latest smocked dress or school uniform, but there is something in the bright little six-year-old face, gazing out at us from beneath the school beret, which holds the promise of great things.
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