ABSTRACT
I had been writing for children – and for adults about children – since the early 1950s, when my books were first published by the Oxford University Press, and I twice was startled, once when ‘the gentlemen at Oxford’, as my editor John Bell put it, said they would publish my book if I agreed to alter ‘bottom’ (which occurred three times, I think) to ‘behind’, and again when my books came out and I found they cost sixteen shillings each, which then was a great deal. I realised I was writing for the elite.
