To say that I grew up in Evesham would not be entirely accurate. As a writer and illustrator of children’s books I live in a world that still holds much of the wonder and astonishment of childhood. More accurate to say that I lived my early years in the small English market town of Evesham.

I remember the town with great fondness, with its butcher and baker and fishmonger, half-day closing when all the shops shut early and the town would seem to be asleep. I remember the old library with its maze of  tall shelves and sleeping books full of hidden treasures.

My world was so small to begin with. The square of garden expanded to the walk to school in Swan Lane, and around the park with its swings and witches hat round-a-bout and the tallest slide in the world that seemed so high, so dangerous. It was at Swan Lane School that I announced to the teacher, at the age of six, that when I grew up I wanted to be an artist.

I loved the river, watching the water flow through the town, weeping willows on the banks like green leaf tents. I loved the bright kingfishers, the herons and most of all the beautiful bright button eyed velvet water voles. I loved the way the river looped around the town holding the houses in its curve.

In spring I remember, or maybe I imagine, the town seemed full of the smell of blossom from the orchards that edged the vale. White pear blossom, pink apple and delicate cherry, all like heavy snow on the dark and twisted trees. In the park the chestnut trees would grow sticky buds that made their way each year into the classrooms, then bright candle flowers. ( Every autumn the conkers would fall, so beautiful and shining bright when prised out fresh from their spiked green coating) In the early summer we would feast on cherries from a friend’s orchard, red cherries with tight skins and the sweetest juice, straight from the trees from hands stained and sticky. Already many of the orchards were being grubbed up. Already it was not worth the farmer’s while to pay for fruit pickers to harvest the crop he would sell at a loss. So they were left to rot and fall in the orchards where wasps held sway. The cherries would rot along with the plums.

I remember picking apples with my father, great brambleys as big as my head, the weight of the fruit as it fell, with only the slightest twist, from the branch into my small hand. Baskets of emerald apples, blackbird song and songthrush and the orchards decorated with silvered spider webs and late summer butterflies.

In the evenings I would kneel on my bed and watch the light drop from the day. Across a small strip of allotment The Almonry Museum held secrets and stories wrapped in its black and white walls. The Bell Tower and the Abbey Gardens with their whispering ghost monks was a direct link back through history to the days of Henry VIII and the dissolution of the monastries. I would try to imagine the medieval splendour that Evesham would have been if she had held fast to her abbey.

As I grew up the world seemed to get larger. We would walk further along the river, to Hampton Ferry where the ferry house always seemed so very romantic to my child’s mind. We would wait for the ferry to come and pay our pennies to be taken across to the other side where we would walk along the old disused railway where in memory it seemed that the hedges were always filled with the biggest blackberries and the sweetest birdsong. In Spring my father would show me where to find bird’s nests that cupped delicate porcelain eggs of speckled blue in soft hollows lined with feather and moss. Sometimes we would walk across the very tops of the Malvern Hills where you could see for miles and the air was thick with skylark song. In my memory the sky was always blue.

In my early teens my parents made a welcome move to Broadway. I loved the honey coloured houses and the sheltering hills with their close cropped grass. Here I began to walk further afield, daring to dream of being a painter, reading “Cider with Rosie” for school, amazed at my own arrogance that I thought I could be an artist. It was not the crowded “village” that I loved, but the hills around and the woods, St Eadaburgh’s church, the wild foxes and the hares on the hills, magical glimpses of wild deer, snow on the hills and the trees like black bones. I loved the way you could walk on the high hills and find a honey coloured stone shells, fallen through time, from a distant sea bed.

Now I live by the sea in Wales. I do miss the trees. The landscape here is much wilder and I love the sea. I still come back to Evesham and Broadway to visit my parents. Some things have changed, not many. The chances of seeing the watervoles is so small. In Broadway new houses creep further out into the fields each year.

Not so many children walk to school these days. The uniform has changed little. I wonder what they dream of and hope that they find the courage to follow their dreams too and I wonder where they will be in thirty years time.