Tracey Emin: 'Eventually we ripped up the porno magazine into tiny pieces and let it blow away like confetti'

I was thinking about my dream that I had last week, about its intensity, how I had managed to conjure up such strong vivid images of my childhood haunts. Today I spent time thinking about the places that meant something to me as a child: secret, closed, open, wild, scary, wonderful, magical spaces. All the names, Trinity Square, Dane Park, The Lido, Walpole Bay, all these places immediately evoke strong, clear – I was going to say vivid – memories, but it isn't vivid memories, it's also feelings. I can see myself clearly at the age of 10, swimming in the early evening at Walpole Bay. Walpole Bay had a fantastic Victorian sundeck, the cast-iron pillars rising up above me, and as I lay on the sand I realised that they would go maybe 20 feet into the sand. There was something magical about the sundeck because of the shade and the darkness underneath and the vast amounts of lively activity on top. There was no comparison between what went on underneath and what went on above.

Walpole Bay had a stone Lido, which was a square sea wall that would hold the seawater in when the tide had gone out. There was always this brilliant moment when the tide was either on its way in, or on its way out: quite a dangerous moment for a child but, nevertheless, we used to prance and dance and walk along the wall as though we were Jesus, knowing that for anyone watching from the sundeck it would appear like we were walking on water as we made our way around the wall.

As a child I grew up staring at a place called The Winter Gardens. The Winter Gardens had seasonal flowers all year long. As if by magic the beds would be replaced overnight. One day the flowers would be red, the next day purple. Snowdrops, daffodils, pansies, tulips – flowers never grew, they just appeared in beds the shape of stars. I can see the colours now but I can't smell the flowers because I never could smell the flowers, I could only smell the sea.

Sometimes we would go inland. In reality, inland was maybe only half a mile, sometimes less. We would play – in derelict bomb sites that we would refer to as "the wrecks" – the hiding game of Ting Tang Tommy where you would run and hide and when caught, your finder would shout out the three given words, until you had eventually joined up into the Ting Tang Tommy pact, chasing after the last surviving hidden soul.

Margate was badly bombed during the war. The church of Holy Trinity towered high, close to the cliff's edge, a good spot for the Germans to release their remaining bombs. And these were the places where we would play, scampering down basements through a warren of potholes. I remember once hurling myself into the abandoned wreck of an old car. As I pulled myself through the back window, I landed on the springs of the back seat. A calamitous squeal rang in my ears as at least a hundred rats jumped out of the car through the windscreen.

The Lido with its Elvis Presley diving boards; Miss Cliftonville beauty parades; old people waltzing and singing to Tony Savage on the organ; Jamaica Inn Bar with its plastic palms – the general hangover from the GI days – all places that seemed magical, whole worlds that linked up. And then there were the really secret places, my favourite being the cave at Fort Hill. Every time I go back to Margate I think I should climb the hill and look inside the cave. It's not a real cave, it's just where the road never touched the soil and there's a gap. But it's at the top of the hill and the hill goes down to the promenade. The hill is steep, covered in tufty grass, a bit too steep to walk up, but not too steep to roll down. I remember when me and my friend found a porno magazine. We must have been about 11 and we spent hours in the cave analysing every single picture. We would hide the porno magazine underneath a pile of rocks and at regular intervals go back to visit it. And almost in some scientific way, we examined the photos to see if we could find out anything new. I can even remember one of the pictures was the saucy nurse: the colours were powder-blue and white and hospital-green. The magazine wasn't glossy – the paper was soft like newsprint. Eventually we could stand it no more and ripped it up into tiny pieces and let it blow away down the hill like confetti.

And then, a year or so later, we found ourselves being rolled down the hill by young men asking us if we had any older sisters. I remember laughing and screaming, "Watch out for the dog shit!", as we tumbled and rolled down the hill, pressed tightly together. And then Fort Hill became a haven on the first days when I decided not to go school. It became one of my secret perching places. I would crouch like a member of the mujahedin, chain-smoking in my blazer, grey skirt and school tie. I remember putting my cigarette out into the dust, sometimes with my back to the sea, and I would know that I was actually contemplating the whole world. Even at that age I was a little bit too big for the cave. But I was never too big for Fort Hill.

And now, just to make things go full circle, the Turner Centre in Margate is going to be built on my green bits of turf, on my rolling hill, where the saucy nurse got blown away, where I sat and contemplated the world at 13.

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