I had one older brother, but to all intents and purposes I was an only child.’ One moment we’d be enormously wealthy, and the next we were in the most dismal debt. My mother was always highly critical of him. `My father was a businessman, and he wasn’t a very good one. He was born in Brighton in 1921, and his family background could have come straight out of one of the novels he was later to write. He won the first Guardian fiction award with his second book, Devil-in-the-Fog, and he’s also received the Carnegie Medal (with Edward Blishen for The God Beneath the Sea) and the Whitbread Award for John Diamond. He is now almost as much of an institution in the world of children’s books as St Paul’s Cathedral is in London. Garfield hasn’t always lived in Highgate, even though that particular area of London – and the city itself – has played such a large and important part in his work. But then a broken gate which hangs on its one remaining hinge might make you feel that about any house. Leon Garfield’s house, albeit one of the youngest in the street – about 80 years old – has a pleasingly rural aspect. Only the cars parked carelessly outside the Georgian houses and the roar of pneumatic drills spoil the illusion.
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