I was 19 by the time I found a copy of Peter's Room in a charity shop for 50p (this is the only sought-after book this has happened to me with and it's happened twice) and by then I'd read quite a lot of Brontes, as well as Pauline Clarke's children's book The Twelve and the Genii, which involves the toy soldiers and the imaginary worlds. I'm not sure what I'd have made of it without all of that background information.

I had imaginary boarding schools with registers and school play cast lists and dormitory lists and floor plans and complicated timetables but I would have died rather than admit this to anyone, let alone pretend it with people listening. My sympathies in PR are entirely with Nicola and for years I skipped the fantasy sections altogether because they were just plain silly.