PEOPLE often talk about escaping into a good book but for Philip Caveney reading was more about survival.

The award-winning author was sent to a boarding school in Peterborough when he was a teenager and had a miserable time.

His only solace was the school’s library where he discovered Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes and fell in love with the art of storytelling.

Philip said: “For most of the punishments we were beaten with a stick and even the prefects could deliver a beating with a slipper. It wouldn’t be allowed now of course but it was a grim place.

“But here’s the irony: I often think if I hadn’t have gone to that school would I have become a writer? Because reading and the process of writing is about escape. It gives you a passport to anywhere in the world and sometimes out of the world and backwards and forwards in time.

“I needed to escape from this really brutal regime. I can’t really describe it in any other way and writing was kind of my salvation and my way out.”

So when he was just 13 Philip started writing short stories for other kids in the dormitory.

He added: “I would read out to them at night by the light of the smuggled-in torch. They would generally be these short horror stories that always had a twist in them. It was probably the school that gave me this kind of gloomy outlook. I would get their reactions to what I was writing so I suppose even then I was already doing that thing of trying to please an audience.”

Even his cruel English teacher could not put him off.

Philip said: “Now in any school if you show promise as a writer they’d encourage it but I was treated with ridicule at that school. My English teacher used to read out my attempts at stories in a funny voice for the other kids to laugh at.”

That was not the last of Philip’s obstacles. There was 10 years of rejections from publishers before The Sins of Rachel Ellis was accepted in 1977.

Philip added: “I went to London with the specific intention of finding an agent as everyone kept telling me you can’t get a first book published without an agent. How true that is now I don’t know.

“So I went down to London. I was playing drums in a rock band. We were doing the music for Godspell. When the show finished the bass player and I decided to stay in London. We lived in a Hillman Imp for months. We used to park around the back of Barnardo’s and the kids used to bring us sandwiches because they felt sorry for us at how poor we were.

“I tenaciously went to virtually every agent I could find and finally I managed to secure one. It still wasn’t easy because she couldn’t sell the first two books I gave her.

“The third and final attempt – where I thought this is do or die – was the one she sold.”

Philip, who used to run Manchester Writers’ Workshop, was 26 when he became a published author.

He said: “That day when a jiffy bag comes through the door and there’s your book with your name on the cover – it never gets better than that. I felt on top of the world.”

Since then Philip has written more than 40 books – but a big change came in 2007 when all of a sudden he started writing for children.

The 65-year-old added: “That came about as my daughter Grace who was 10 at the time wanted to read one of my thrillers which was totally inappropriate.

“I was in this situation where my little girl looked like she was going to cry because I snatched a book out of her hands. So I wrote a book called Sebastian Darke for her.

“I started writing it chapter by chapter and giving it to her to read. Luckily she kept coming back saying: ‘This is great. What happens next?’ And so almost without planning it I was suddenly writing for younger readers.”

Sebastian Darke is now a series that is published in 20 countries and Grace, now 24, continues to read all his books and is following in her dad’s footsteps as an author.

Philip, whose novels have previously been optioned for films by Ron Howard and The Jim Henson Company, is also the man behind Danny Weston. He created an alter ego for his children’s ghost stories and the first Danny Weston book, The Piper, won the Scottish Book Award 2016.

Philip will be giving a talk at Lymm Festival on Saturday, mainly focusing on his latest release, The Haunting of Jessop Rose which has been shortlisted for three awards.

The former commercial copywriter said: “I wish I’d started writing for younger readers earlier because when you write for adults you pretty much write in isolation.

“But when you’re able to go into schools and festivals and meet the kids and work with them that is really fabulous because they have no compunction about what they’ll say to you. They will ask how much you earn, what car you drive and it’s really refreshing that they will take you down a peg or two if you’re getting above yourself.

“They’re not afraid to tell you if they don’t like something. You never get that sort of truth from adult readers. And there’s nothing better than when a young kid comes over and says I love your book. I’m going to be a writer too...”

n Philip Caveney will be at Lymm Library on Saturday at 11.30am. His talk is suitable for children aged between eight and 12. Tickets are £3. Visit lymmfestival.org.uk