John Halden

Hi! And thanks for reading this.

I was born in Brentwood in Essex, though I never lived there. Now living near London in South West Essex.

I grew up in East London. Until I was 12, my parents had a corner shop in Highams Park. We sold food, cigarettes, ice cream - and sweets. I used to have to help in the shop. Sometimes, I would serve customers, but mainly I used to stack shelves.

My friends at school used to think it would be great living in a sweetshop, because I would be able to have all the sweets I wanted. It wasn’t true, of course, because my dad had to buy the sweets so he had them to sell. In any case, just imagine how fat I would have been if I’d eaten sweets all day – not to mention getting bad teeth!

Perhaps it’s because I grew up in a sweet shop that I don’t like sweets! (Except for chocolate – I really love that.)

Strange child

Before I was old enough to go to go to school, I used to talk to the dustmen who came to empty our bin. Sometimes, when they we in our street, they would let me ride in the cab and watch them at work. When people had thrown away interesting items, I was allowed to have them if I wanted. I remember bringing home a violin in a case – but I never learned to play it. My parents were not too pleased when I brought home a shabby Victorian glass case containing two stuffed birds. My dad suggested that we keep it in the garden shed. I seem to remember that it disappeared quite quickly.

At the bottom of our garden was the river Ching. When I was about 5, my mum bought some fish for our dinner. She cut the heads off so she could cook the fish. I wanted to see whether fish heads would grow new bodies and tails, so I put them in the river. Yuk! The next day, I went back to see. Guess what! Fish heads don’t grow bodies and tails.

TV star?

Two special things happened to me when I was 12. The first was on my 12th birthday itself, when I went to a Beatles concert. It was very exciting, but the girls screamed so loudly that you couldn’t really hear the Beatles very much.

The second thing that happened was that I was on TV! I was on a children’s quiz show called Junior Criss Cross Quiz. It was really a game of noughts and crosses, but you had to answer questions to put your nought or cross on the board. I won my first game – but lost the second one – so I didn’t win a prize; although I did get a book voucher.

Author

When did I first want to be an author? Well, I don’t really know. When my children were small (we have two daughters who now live in other parts of England), I used to tell them bedtime stories. When they got too old for the stories, I wrote them down. After that, I started to write for adults, but didn’t enjoy that very much. It's much more fun writing for children/young people.