![]() She had sat the 11-plus without any great hope of passing. “I just wanted to have a book on the shelf The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Secret Garden, a real book with my name on it.” I used to write it on my leg in felt-tip pen, because I wanted to have a book so much,” she says, with the pinpoint accurate recall of her childhood that many of the best children’s writers have. Murphy, 67, wanted to be a writer and illustrator since she can remember, putting together a series of 90 tiny books stapled together by hand as a child. One of them said to me: ‘How on earth did you get into this school in the first place did your parents pay?’ And then she looked me up and down and said: ‘Obviously not.’ Such a superb putdown! I wrote it down, because I was thinking I’d be a playwright at that point.” ![]() The nuns in particular were quite a ferocious strain … they could be very cruel. “That was how The Worst Witch was written because it was absolutely terrible, I couldn’t do any of it. “It was Mildred from there on,” she says, sitting in the bright, sunny room of a friend’s borrowed flat in Hampstead. ![]()
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