Thinking and writing out of the box is the only way Percy Stewart can work. He attributes this to circumstances as as much as to genetics.

'My father certainly did teach me a somewhat unconventional way of doing things, a rather contradictory mixture of clear, common-sense logic and his own brand of whimsicality. I can see signs of this influence in something I still have from childhood, a balsa-wood model of Nelson's flagship, the HMS Victory from 1968 or so.

'Using skills which he had learned in maths lessons or at art-school, with a pair of compasses he scaled up my Airfix model to a manageable size, cut out and shaped the balsa-wood blocks for the hull, centred the holes for three masts and then left absolutely everything else to me.

'At that age I was useless with a ruler and at sixty-seven I still can't draw properly, because my right hand has always given problems. Perhaps I am naturally left-handed...another thing which was overlooked by parents and teachers in those days.'

'It might be hard to believe, but in an ironmonger's shop near the small-town Co-op where my father worked I found one of those little yellow cardboard boxes with two hundred copper nails. They have curious bevelled heads and tiny grooves which looked wonderful for the Victory's bronze cannons, and the scale is realistic. The proof is there in one of the boxes in my spare bedroom.

'Some things I got surprisingly right, perhaps because at that young age my brain wasn't cluttered with a lot of rules and prohibitions from school. My father seemed to take it for granted that I would make things with my own two hands, with no guidance at all from around that age. I just did whatever felt right, and so my judgement was often quite good. Apparently I was one of those boys who would sit with his tongue between his teeth, lost in thought.

'You could say that the genetics established the foundations of a house which was built by circumstances, as was the case for so many mid-century working-class children who were the product of grammar-school education. We had parents who passed on to us an active mind and a fairly enlightened understanding of the outside world, but who lacked the really solid knowledge, skill and confidence needed in so many artistic and professional disciplines. So even though I won a scholarship to Cambridge in 1975, it had never entered anyone's head that I could be a doctor, or a lawyer or a university lecturer...or a writer who makes his living from his own books...it simply wasn't possible, for economic reasons as much as socially.

'We lived in a small and rather backward town, with nothing as fancy as any kind of arts and crafts shop, any at that point my father only painted in oils, with thick hog's hair brushes. I knew nothing at all about painting fine detail, and lacked the brushes which have to be used for something tiny and intricate because we were poor and in those days before synthetic sable brushes reached local ironmongers' shops, you had to make do with something awful which cost pennies.  The wobbly, smudged yellow and black stripes on the sides of my version of the Victory would have Nelson laughing in his grave...and with a hero like that, is it any wonder that I usually sail against the tide?'

'The Victory was actually my second model of that type. The first was of Sir Francis Drake's Golden Hind, made entirely from memory and imagination with no help whatever from anyone else...except that somewhere I had learned how to make the rigging from black cotton and glue. A child's eyes are sharp and their fingers are tiny, so little miracles can happen if given a chance.'

For some reason which he cannot precisely fathom, Percy Stewart finds that such childhood experiences focus his mind on other people's problems, rather than his own. He thinks that this is what has created 'the writer known as Percy Stewart'.

'Circumstances, family and marriage forced me into teaching very much against my natural inclinations and capabilities. In many ways it was fifty-two years of torture, starting with the yawning boredom of trying to help reluctant primary school children to learn to read books in which they had no interest whatever...they just wanted to play football.

'But now that I am writing full-time, the depth and breadth of that experience is proving invaluable, especially in the understanding I have of little details which determine the course of someone's life. It can be something as simple as spelling mistakes, or shaky handwriting, which have nothing whatever to do with natural intelligence or even determination and hard work.

'If you are the child of a doctor, terrible handwriting is no barrier to a terrific career, but if your single parent works at the local chip-shop, your future might have to take a different direction.

'If I were to think of myself in terms of my own life under my own real name, so much baggage from the last sixty-five or more years would clutter up the page. It would be all too easy to wallow in autobiographical details which might make juicy gossip, but which would be far from the whole purpose of these books...which is to write about the countless small miracles of life in our shared world.'