Jacky Daydream by Jacqueline Wilson

Like Enid Blyton before her, Jacqueline Wilson is a prolific and best-selling children's author. They have other things in common. Neither had particularly happy childhoods, and both wrote strictly child-centred stories. Now, in her autobiography, Wilson has produced a book containing as many photographs of the author as Blyton did in her equally generously illustrated The Story of My Life.

After that, the resemblance ends. Although Wilson pays tribute to Blyton, she preferred authors who provided a far grittier picture of childhood, just as she has gone on to do in her own novels. This gently amusing account of her first 11 years is written with apparent total recall. It also provides an excellent guide to the often overlooked changes for the better that have happened to most children's lives since 1945, the year she was born.

In the world she first knew, young married couples with families could barely afford to keep warm, even when father was working full-time. Homes were often shared with unwilling in-laws, with once-a-week baths and little privacy. Hospitals were remote places, where a baby born to a forceps delivery (as Wilson was) could then be kept away from her mother for her first four days.

On a later visit, to have her tonsils and adenoids needlessly removed, Jacky had to wait a week to see her mother again. Matron had decided that parental visits unsettled her small charges. School - like home - was often a place of blows and slaps, with teachers sometimes cruelly picking on vulnerable children. Midday dinners with their fatty stews were a particular torture, threatening attacks of nausea.

There were compensations. Wilson's parents were both loving in their way, but prone to increasingly fierce battles with each other and violent spurts of anger directed at their only daughter. Soon, again like Blyton, she started making up stories to provide her with instant escape. Dolls were important, too, until real friends took over, plus a few kinder teachers.

Each chapter of this book ends with a link between a poignant moment in Wilson's childhood and its re-creation years later, in a paragraph reproduced from one of her novels. Young fans will have no trouble recognising these, helped by Nick Sharratt's amiable illustrations. Adults should enjoy them, too: child-centred writing always has room for older readers when describing episodes common to so many, and doing so with such characteristic lightness of touch.