Not in front of the children

The news that the parish priest-turned-children's author GP Taylor had been shown the door at the Penair comprehensive school in Truro, Cornwall, for using "language that was not appropriate for his audience", made me feel a twinge of sympathy for a fellow scribe. But I wasn't altogether surprised at the reaction.

Last year, I published my own first children's book, Children of the Lamp: The Akhenaten Adventure, and, finding myself signing a couple of hundred books in the children's book section at Harrods, I began to wonder what I was doing there. Me, a children's author. I'd never have believed it possible. Once upon a time I had thought all that stuff was for spinsterly women with a pet cat, a shawl and an early menopause. How was I going to handle this?

I had seen a television documentary about JK Rowling (the author of the Harry Potter series of books), and I couldn't help remembering how very nice she was to the children and the warm way she smiled at them. When I smile at the little brutes, they tend to say "what big teeth you have", and move smartly away. It's no accident that my five-year-old daughter Naomi's favourite game is playing one of the three little pigs to my Oscar-winning Big Bad Wolf. Huffing and puffing and blowing her house down seem to come more naturally to me than reading one of those ghastly Biff and Chip stories.

All of this prompted me to ask myself about my own authorial persona, and about how I would speak to the children when I met them. A three-week tour of American schools in 2004 left me convinced me that it is impossible to be too conservative when it comes to speaking engagements involving children.

Quite quickly I resolved always to avoid alcohol before visiting schools and any kind of remotely inappropriate or bad language while I was there. In short, when visiting schools as an author, it's always wise to think of yourself as a kind of visiting teacher, and not as the school comedian.

It was fortunate I'd been at school myself and I remembered what some teachers are like. But just how child-friendly could I make myself? If, as seems likely, I couldn't ever make myself more avuncular than the Child Catcher, as played by Robert Helpmann in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (a bit of a hero of mine), where was the children's author - living or dead - with whom I might find common ground? A cursory examination of the biographies of several of the most popular children's authors convinced me that what a children's author ought to be like is actually very different from how they really are. Or were.

Indeed, the impression I've quickly gained is that the most popular children's writers were anything but the cosy aunts and uncles who would have welcomed a child on their laps to tell them a story. Unless they were Lewis Carroll or JM Barrie.

And putting a small child any where near their X-rated, Humbert Humbertish laps was perhaps not something any responsible parent would have felt entirely sanguine about, although, to be fair to them both, paedophilia (as described by Havelock Ellis and Krafft-Ebing) hadn't been invented back then.

Carroll and Barrie are probably the two queerest fish flapping in the sandpit of children's literature. But there are plenty of other children's authors who were not without their funny little ways. Pamela Travers, the author of Mary Poppins, is not just a case in point, she is a suitable case for treatment. Wanting to adopt a child, she chose to adopt a boy. Nothing wrong with that, except that the boy just happened to have a twin whom Travers chose, weirdly, to leave behind at the orphanage. Now that would make a good children's book.

Whisper it quietly, but the Biggles creator WE Johns was a bogus RAF captain who might have been a little bit of a racist. L Frank Baum, the author of the Wizard of Oz stories, was also accused of racism, and his books were all removed from American public libraries. Frank Richards (real name Charles Hamilton) thought greedy people - greedy fat people with glasses called Bunter, to be precise - were a bit, coo-er, funny. That was 50 years ago. These days it's the thin boys, not the fat ones, who look out of place in schools - especially American schools.

And then there was Enid Blyton, who was not, according to her daughter Imogen, such a great mother. "Most of her visits to the nursery were hasty, angry ones, rather than benevolent." Most of my visits to the nursery involve buying plants for the garden, but I can understand poor Enid's problem.

It's tough writing with three kids in the house. However, it does seem possible that Enid didn't really like children very much at all. AA Milne (Winnie the Pooh) wasn't all that fond of them either. It also turns out that Robert Louis Stevenson (Kidnapped, Treasure Island) was more of a Mr Hyde than a Dr Jekyll, with a penchant for ladies of the night, while Hans Christian Andersen was similarly sex-fixated. Let's not forget Oscar Wilde (the author of and The Selfish Giant).

Wilde's fondness for gilded youth and boys got him into lots of trouble. Roald Dahl seems to have put it about a bit as well before turning into the curmudgeonly old git we all loved. (I rather see myself as the curmudgeonly old git kind of children's author, as it happens.)

Ian Fleming (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) also put it about a bit, and smoked like a chimney to boot. On my recent book tour of the States I often entertained myself by thinking of how he would have handled an American book tour in 2004. Or, rather, how they with their absurd fears about passive smoking would have handled him and his 40 Morland Specials a day. They'd have probably confiscated his ebony holder at the airport.

Equally, I wondered how American immigration officials would have dealt with Arthur Ransome (Swallows and Amazons). Have you ever been a member of the Communist party, Mr Ransome? 'Er no, but my Russian wife, Evgenia, was Leon Trotsky's secretary.' They'd have put Arthur on the first boat back to England - especially knowing he could have sailed it himself.

The authors of more recent children's books seem also to have been doing their bit to keep things colourful. Madonna, author of The English Roses, swears as handsomely as any trooper on TV and, until a few years ago, she seemed no less interested in sex than the likes of Andersen and Wilde. Louisa Young (Lion Boy), even more gorgeous than Madge, used to be a belly-dancer. Now that is impressive. The actress Jamie Lee Curtis, who was once famous for taking off her top, is now famous for writing children's books. As for the Duchess of York - well, what can one say about poor, toe-sucking Fergie, author of the Budgie books, that hasn't already been said in the News of the World

All of this has left me feeling reassured that, just because I have written a children's book, there is no need to try to live like a saint. Anything but. The more I have glanced into the private lives of children's authors, the more I have realised that many of them swore a lot, held some very dodgy views, smoked the odd ciggy, slept with people they weren't married to, and have been overly fond of the bottle.

And lest we judge poor old Taylor too harshly, it's worth remembering that most children's authors were children once themselves. Indeed, it may even be that many of their idiosyncrasies are referable to a certain Peter Pan-like unwillingness to abandon the world of childhood and grow up at all. That's certainly my excuse.

'Children of the Lamp: The Blue Djinn of Babylon', by PB Kerr is published by Scholastic Books, £9.99