I Still Check The Back Of Wardrobes

I wasn't middle-class enough to be read to, instead, I perfected reading by torchlight so I didn't wake up my brother with whom I shared a room. My parents would turn a blind-eye to the little glowing tent I formed every evening. Today, such a glow would be emanating from a screen and Youtube but in the late 80s and early 90s, the glow was reflecting off the heavily thumbed pages of The Chronicles of Narnia.

I have no idea how many times I was discovered in the back of a wardrobe during my childhood. More times than I care to admit. I can tell you how many times I went to Narnia though... none. I never got there, despite all my best efforts and the consistent tentative knocking on wooden back panels.

The Chronicles of Narnia were my favourite stories growing up as a child. Before it was popular to wait for an owl to announce your departure to Hogwarts, there was a generation of children who wanted to become Kings and Queens in a far-off land and pay allegiance to a talking lion.

It was my first experience of the birth and death of a world, something that affected me deeply. I had been there at its conception in The Magician's Nephew and was there as the Pevensie children (minus Susan) sailed off to a brighter version of Narnia.

And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

I was in a state of profound grief for an entire world.

More than once I read all seven books back to back and started again from the beginning.

Narnia was my first experience of grief. Working-class families like mine tend to have children young and I had great-grandparents alive until I was in my late twenties. To learn the capacity for loss from a book was a formative experience and one that I struggled to articulate.

I believe it was Narnia that ushered in my emotional overinvolvement with fictional characters. Later in my life, I found myself profoundly upset by the death of Sir Terry Pratchett. One Psychology degree under my belt, I was better able to understand this facet of my personality that stems directly from bedtime stories.

I was not affected by the death of the author but by the death of the world itself. Unlike Narnia which Lewis constructed and closed, Pratchett's Discworld is frozen in time, the characters never able to reach their full potential.

I have still yet to read the last book in the series because I know how devastated I will be to finish and I am not yet ready. I am keeping the Discworld on life support until I feel able to let it go.

I credit world builders like CS Lewis and Terry Pratchett for guiding me towards a career in theatre and TV. These are the authors and writers who have spun entire universes out of words. They have created places and spaces we can escape to and feel safe, using nothing but twenty-six letters, some dots and dashes, and a space bar.

My bedtime reading, although not conventional and idyllic became a driving force for my imagination. I can draw a direct line between those secretive torch-light reading sessions and the publication of my first play. All modern writers owe more than we can say to those who have come before us.

I have read a lot of books — but the ones that lodge themselves in my head are those where an alternate world almost feels tangible. When people ask me what it's like to be a playwright, I tell them I build worlds and other people play in them.

It's for that reason that I still gently knock on the back of any wardrobe or closet I find when I'm travelling. You never really know when you might be allowed to play.