Until a very few years ago I imagined that I would spend my declining summer evenings strolling along the shore of some quiet coastal town while a fat old sun sinks slowly below a glittering horizon. But then, one day, it occurred to me that it isn’t a coast I should settle beside in my fast-approaching dotage, but a quiet stretch of river deep in the country. I was eating a sandwich on a bench by just such a stretch at the edge of a certain Cambridgeshire village where I’d come to seek the former home of a famous children’s author. The day was warm and golden, a low breeze shuffled the reeds, willows draped the water, and as I sat there I realised that it was a very long time since I’d felt so at ease, so content.

The house I’d come to find was, and is, called The Manor. In one guise or another, The Manor played a part in almost all the novels of Lucy M. Boston, its best-known incarnation being ‘Green Knowe’. The village doesn’t celebrate its late resident, or even point the way to her home, but this isn’t surprising. With a handful of notable exceptions, children’s writers aren’t big cheeses in the world at large. For the most part they're merely names on the covers and title pages of books discovered in childhood which, when childhood fades, are packed away in an untidy little box-room in the back of the mind. Through succeeding decades the box-room remains firmly locked to most of us, while a few creep in every now and then, brush the cobwebs off the old books, and settle back with a sigh as childhood returns in an intoxicating rush.

I never cease to be amazed by those lofty ‘grown-ups’ who dismiss children’s literature as some lesser genre. I remember a review of a biography of Roald Dahl which ended on that very note. Before Dahl acquired international fame as a children’s author he produced beautifully crafted, deliciously ironic stories for adults. The review that sticks in my mind concluded with: ‘What a pity Dahl wasted his talent on writing for children.’ This suggests that he was writing beneath his ability, for readers who couldn’t begin to appreciate his true skill or worth. Personally I prefer the adult stories to his children’s books, but Dahl certainly didn’t ‘waste his talent’ by writing for children. He hit the spot for millions of kids worldwide. Many readers will remember his stories fondly to the end of their days. Quite a contribution to make to anyone's life, I would have thought.

Lucy M. Boston’s following might not be as vast as Roald Dahl’s (and a fraction of JKR's) but it is considerable, and goes back quite a way. There are websites devoted to her and her books, and quite a few devotees – child and adult – find their way to her beloved house each year. I knew that The Manor couldn’t be far from where I sat by the river feeling so unexpectedly content that fine summer day. I imagined it would be up there on the right, where substantial houses stood on broader banks. I would head that way in a minute, but first I wanted to take a look the other way, to my left, where the towpath quickly vanished into a knot of ragged bushes and overhanging trees. (I never could resist hidden paths.) I set off, intending to return very soon, and almost at once came upon a little wooden gate in a stone wall. Looking over the gate I saw a large colourful garden, with yew trees shaped like chessmen flanking the approach to a house I’d seen before, in the drawings of Peter Boston, Lucy’s son.

Lucy Boston bought The Manor in 1939 and died there in 1990 at the age of 97. In her early days there she removed several latter-day windows and structures, restored hidden rooms, uncovered old fireplaces, doorways and floors, discovering in the process, to her delight, that parts of the original building dated back to Norman times. She came to love the house so much that when she started writing at the age of 60 it seemed a natural setting for her stories. Thus she added a history of her own to its already ancient fabric.

My own sudden longing for a riverside house is easily explained. I was born in one. The modest Victorian mansion in which I spent the first four or five years of my life was my grandparents’ house. Today it stands neglected and dull, in an unkempt garden with fallen fences, rusting vehicles dumped near the back kitchen, but once upon a time – of course! – it was a grand place, ivy-covered, with smoke tumbling from the tall chimneys, bedroom windows with creaking shutters overlooking the lily-covered river. We kept chickens and goats and my older cousin, who lived there too, had a pony. On occasional Sundays there were family picnics in punts on the river.

It seems odd to me now, but I'd never previously attempted to write about that house, except in a very long poem published many years ago in an obscure magazine (and rewritten a hundred times since). But that day, minutes before I entered the grounds of The Manor for the first time, I decided that my own childhood home was the ideal setting for the trilogy I was planning. And so it became. That old house is now Withern Rise, where all the comings and goings in the parallel and not-so-parallel realities of The Aldous Lexicon take place. Like Lucy Boston I've made a fiction of a house and garden that played a very important part in my life. I find this strangely pleasing.

Me with my gran and grandpa at 'Withern Rise'