“There was once a small boy called Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge and what’s more he wasn’t very old, either. His house was next door to an old people’s home and he knew all the people who lived there…”

Of all my books, this is the one adults love most. (Which is not to say that children don’t love it too!) My grandfather, Wilfrid (note the spelling) Partridge, lived in an old people’s home. When I visited him I noticed and mourned the lack of children. Old people and children get along brilliantly, yet here they were, separated from each other by the craziness of our society. So I decided to write a book that brought children and the elderly together in the hope that teachers would initiate similar contact.

My granddad never lost his memory. He was sparky and wonderful to talk to. I visited him weekly until he died suddenly of pneumonia aged 96. That’s why Miss Nancy in the book is 96. The other old people in the book have the dignity and characteristics of the people who lived in the same home as my grandfather. ‘Mrs. Morgan’ lived next door to him and played her organ for hours, crying from ‘melancholia’. ‘Mr. Bryant’ was very tall. ‘Mr Hosking’ wasn’t an old person—he was one of my favourite colleagues. The big brother who never came back was based on my mother’s first husband who was killed in the war, as was my mother-in-law’s brother, which is why they ‘never came back.’ My granddad gave me his war medals so I included them in the sad memories. Chloë had a puppet on strings and I remember her sneezing with a mouthful of porridge so I combined those two things in the happy memories. My dad’s name is the full title: Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge. Miss Nancy’s equally long name is made up from my mum Nan, my little sister Alison, and my middle sister Jan Delacourt, who was then married to a man whose last name was Cooper.

When I wrote this book no-one in ,my family had ever had Alzheimer’s but sadly long after the book was published my father did develop dementia. My dad is now 88, (2001), and my mother is 86, (2001). It looks as if I’ll be living for a good long time myself.

Copies of Wilfrid are currently available in both Spanish and Portuguese. Contact the US publishers for further information abut the Spanish edition and the Australian publishers for further information abut the Portuguese edition. Wilfrid is also on tape (read by me) available in Australia only, from the ABC shops. Wilfrid was made into a very moving play which toured Australia in 1988. Kids laughed all the way through and adults sobbed. Wilfrid is also in a new dinky little edition under the Omnibus Bright Stars imprint. Contact Scholastic Australia or Omnibus, Australia for further information.

Wilfrid was the first of my books to be published in the States and has sold almost over half a million copies in that country alone.