The haunted house is based on the one in Preston where I lived until I was eleven years old – Number 1 Water Lane. It had two small rooms down stairs, two bedrooms and an attic which we never used. For some reason the door was nailed shut. As far as I know the house wasn’t haunted but it is where I had the recurrent nightmares that are featured in both ‘The Spook’s Apprentice’ and ‘The Spook’s Tale’. It didn’t have a cellar (I added that to make the story more interesting) but it had a dark space under the stairs in the kitchen – what we called the ‘coal-hole’. Cobs of coal would be delivered by horse and cart and the coalman would carry his bags through our small front room filling it with coal dust.

It was a house originally built for mill workers and Water Lane even had its own ‘knocker-up’, a lady who would walk down the street early in the morning and rap on the upstairs windows with a long stick to wake you up for the early shift.

The picture is of me sitting on the front-step of that house. I’m either four or five years of age and it must be Easter because I’m guarding a chocolate egg.