Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be as I go back to school for World Book Day.

It is thirty-five years since I set foot in my old school. Later this  week I shall be back to give a talk to pupils. My visit coincides with World Book Day and they want me to tell them how I came to be a published author. When I got the request to visit, I felt like asking, ‘How did I do it? How long have you got?’

I’ll crunch it down so they don’t drift off to sleep and will try to lay down the toughness of the business without dimming anybody’s dreams and ambitions. One thing I will say in regular beat is, if you want to write, you really do have to read. Not tweets or Facebook feeds but books with beginnings, middles and ends. Lots of them. That message seems to chime perfectly with World Book Day  which, in the UK takes place on March 6th.  It isn’t just a celebration of books; it’s a multinational push to get the written word to millions of people who find reading hard to access.  Nor is it just for the developing world;  there are children at home who regard reading as an alien occupation. Good for World Book Day, then, for injecting fun and fizz into literature

As I step up to the podium to deliver my talk I will be staring over a generation gap. The oldest girls in the audience will be seventeen. Quick maths . . . when I quit those echoing cloisters in 1979, they were seventeen years away from being born.  When I left school, the world was a different place. The Iron Curtain was still drawn, the Cold War had yet to thaw. The online and ebook revolution wasn’t on the radar. 

I’d love to revisit the old attics above the school’s Victorian wing where all the books were stored. It was a treat to be sent up there because it got you out of lessons and let you poke around in areas that were otherwise off-limits. Those attics, which had once been the servants’ bedrooms of a wealthy town house, seemed to possess watching eyes.

Shelving bowed under their burden and every inch of floor was taken up with wobbly columns of text books that would  crash down if you were clumsy with your elbows. French, German, Latin readers, classic novels from Alcott to Zola, all had sheets pasted into the flyleaf listing the names of girls who had previously used them. Some of those name went back to the 1940s.  ‘Edna Metherell’ ‘Winifred Youens’ ‘Muriel Trubshaw’ – you can put faces to girls with names like that, and even hear their voices.  

Going back to my High School is no nostalgia trip, though.  I owe my school thanks for the solid grounding it gave me in the arts. Grammar, syntax, spelling, a love of the classics, come from my time there. But it didn’t make me a writer. I became a writer in spite of the disapproval that my hand-me-down uniform and holey socks generated in certain teachers, and the rule-bound ambience which I coped with by tuning out, and which left me creatively paralysed for years.  No, I won’t cry sentimental tears  but I will check to see if they have got rid of the bottle green tiles that brought a sense of undiagnosed depression to the corridors. I will remind myself that I’m here to talk about books, and about my own mid-life success as an author. I may even murmur a quiet ‘Yay’ at the irony of being invited back to give a, hopefully, inspiring speech after my own uninspiring years there.

But I realise as I write this that I’m grateful for my abrasive schooling and home life.  Writers rarely sprout in comfortable soil and it’s the harsh east wind that makes the tree grow into an interesting shape. The girl who spends her time staring out of windows will be the first one to see the rainbow. Or the plane crash, if I’m going to be dark  (blame those bottle green tiles.)   I will celebrate World Book Day by telling the girls how much I loved books. Crime, mystery, romance, most of Dickens and anything by Jane Austen – between them they got me through.  When, after leaving school, I found myself alone in London, jobless and scared stiff, a pile of novels on the bed was my happy place.

And if I see the ghost of my younger self sitting in the audience, I’ll give her a wave and send the silent message, ‘Keep reading, and keep writing. One day, they’ll be inviting you back to speak on World Book Day.’  She won’t hear me. She’ll be making the hole in her sock bigger and staring out of the window.

Natalie Meg Evans is published by Quercus Books, London.  The Dress Thief comes out on 5th June 2014