The trickiest time in my life — and how books saved me

As she joins Inspire as our new columnist, bestselling novelist GILL HORNBY reveals...

EvERy Saturday morning of my childhood, my mother took me and my brother Nick to the library. We would listen to Junior Choice on the radio on the way — Pinky And Perky, The Laughing Policeman, all the musical greats — then tumble out of the morris minor clutching our little brown cards and rush in.

more often than not, if she was busy — and, mysteriously, the older we got, the busier she became — she would leave us there.

That is probably not allowed now, dumping children in the young fiction section without any means of contacting the parent or carer. But back in the Sixties, fortunately for us, no one turned a hair.

It was the most wonderful freedom. It was the making of me. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that, a little later on, it was the saving of me.

The maidenhead Children’s Public Library became my manor. I knew every inch of shelving, every title on every spine. I had my own system. However many books we were allowed to take home each week, it was never quite enough. So I always had another one on the go I would read, in serial form, when I was there, tucking it away to stop anyone else taking it out before I was finished.

There, I discovered the narrative skills and creative genius of Enid Blyton. There, it was revealed to me that The Enchanted Wood was — still is, indeed — the greatest book ever written. There, I got hooked.

In my earliest years, there was nothing particularly unusual in my reading habit. It wasn’t as if there was much else to do.

We weren’t spoilt for canned entertainment. Children’s Tv was on for three nanoseconds per day, child-friendly films were released on every blue moon. There were only so many hours a day you could watch the Slinky going up and down the stairs.

In the year I turned eight, though, reading became a serious addiction. my conscious mind now can see clearly why that was, but at the time not even my subconscious knew what was going on.

I could feel there was a new, unsettling darkness about home, but I didn’t quite understand why. I did pick up that my father’s role in the family was changing, from a presence to an absence, but no one talked about it in words I understood.

By the time I was nine, my dad had gone from a parent who lived in our house to a man who turned up on the occasional weekend.

Where once he had walked through the door, thrown his car keys on the table and gone out to mow the lawn, he now hovered on the front doorstep too shamefaced to come in.

We no longer ate round the kitchen table; instead, he took just us kids out to uncomfortable restaurants. I was always, without fail, sick on the way home.

My mum was brave, but she was definitely altered. She went back to work in a job that made her feel knackered. We moved house.

And at no point during this enormous domestic revolution was it ever explained to me what was going on. And — call me dim — at no point did I ever ask.

Instead, as my world tipped into confusion, I tipped myself in to stories. Reality, it seemed to me, was baffling. With fiction, you knew where you stood.

The books that carried me through that time live with me so vividly still. I can remember everything about their Puffin jackets and their little pen-andink illustrations. I can recite whole sentences word for word.

All I wanted to read about was family. Family, family, family. And, luckily, that tied me down to the best sort of fiction.

I loved Eve Garnett’s The Family From One End Street, in their poor, but happy, overcrowded chaos. They didn’t have much, but they had two parents. I often returned to them.

Everyone loves The Little House On The Prairie series for all its frontier survival stuff — building houses, skinning rabbits — and its charming, unspoilt children. I loved it for their Pa.

He was the hero, in my view. yes, he was always making things and growing things and facing danger. But most of all he was always there. I spent a lot of my childhood with him.

But the book that meant the most to me throughout that murky four years was Erich Kastner’s Lottie And Lisa, on which the movie The Parent Trap was based.

It’s about identical twins separated at birth, each brought up by a single parent and kept in total ignorance of each other and their parents’ divorce. I couldn’t get enough of it.

The certainty with which the author steered those little girls towards their inevitable — spoiler alert — happy ending was the most enormous comfort to me.

And yet it never prompted me to examine what was going on in my own life. The murky unknown came to an end when I was 13 and my mum and I were at the kitchen sink. She was washing, I was drying, and she mentioned my father’s wife and two children. She thought I knew. I had no idea.

Once I had got over the shock, it was when reality finally seemed to make some sort of sense.

The following year, I went to stay with my father for the first time.

I met his wife, his six-year-old son, his four-year-old daughter. For want of knowing quite what to do in that situation, we all shook hands. And then, as families do, we just got on with it.

Instead of being part of a little, truncated family of three, I suddenly belonged to something bigger. Books have remained a place of refuge for me ever since — even when I no longer needed a place to hide.

my brother Nick grew up to be a writer, my husband, Robert Harris, happens to be one, too. Eventually, in my 50s, I joined in and am on my third novel.

my reading is wider (everything from Jilly Cooper to Hilary mantel), but I still think there is nothing more interesting or dramatic, unpredictable or important as the family, and my favourite books are still about just that: family, family, family.

I look forward to sharing some of them with you in these pages in the coming year.