Michael Morpurgo
I used to be a primary school teacher and I took 40 kids to the Tower of London when I was teaching them about execution. When we got back to the school we made some heads out of papier maché, then we put them on poles and the five year olds' favourite jobs were painting the little red bits that dribble down from the bloody heads. We also made full bodies, but they were of the people that survived. The favourites turned out to be the heads, of course, and they all had names above them. The second person was Sir Walter Raleigh, hence the name ‘My Friend Walter’.

Why are so many of your books set in London?

Because I was brought up in London and I have spent a lot of my life in London, so I have a lot of memories from there.

Where did you get the inspiration for ‘Waiting for Anya’?

Once when I was staying in a little French village, I found an iron cross. I didn’t know why it was there, because it was quite a long way away from the Church. When I asked a local about the cross, they told me that there was a time during the Second World War when German soldiers had taken the village, but nobody really minded. You don’t normally associate the war and all of the terrible things that happened during the war with little villages in France.

Like I said, the villagers didn’t really mind about the intrusion. In fact many of them became friends with the soldiers, like Hubert, who had Downs syndrome. He became very good friends with a particular one of the soldiers and when it came to the time that they had to leave, all the villagers had a big party. Everybody knew that Hubert wasn’t meant to drink, but on that night everybody drank too much, so he drank too.

It’s believed (so the story goes) that he went back to his house and got his grandfather's gun. He then went to the top of the hill, after the soldiers, so he could say goodbye to his friend. Then he shot the gun into the air to catch their attention. Unfortunately it all went a bit pear-shaped because the German soldiers thought they were being attacked and they saw an outline of Hubert and shot back. People say that his German friend shot him and that’s where I got the inspiration for the book.

Which boarding school did you go to?

I went to The Abbey in Sussex, which is now closed. My secondary school was King's School, Canterbury. It was much nicer than my first school because there was more Art and Drama.

Were you there when your mum died?

Yes I was there when my mum died. Seeing someone die is very factual. She started breathing very slowly and I just wanted her suffering to be over. My dog died about a week ago and it had a heart attack like my mum. My friend also died a while ago: he was 85 and he just fell straight down dead. When the ambulance came the doctor came up to me and said that out of all the ways to go, dying straightaway was best. When I asked her how she knew he’d died like that, she said that she could tell because of the way his stick laid.

It was rubbish; I’m not going to tell you what it was.

The book I’m writing at the moment will be my 97^th. I write, on average three a year: one big one and two small ones.

Is it easy to write a successful book?

It is easy to write a book that will sell; but to write a new book, I need a new idea every time. Some people are very good at creating fresh characters and new ideas every time they write a book in a series but I need to have a new idea because I can’t keep the characters going. People who write books have to be good at daydreaming. I spend three quarters of my working life daydreaming!

Did you always want to be a writer?