Five miss out when an adult's always there: Children had real adventures when parents were rarely seen or heard, remembers Julia Knight

STRUGGLING to write stories for children that are set firmly and realistically in the modern world, and in which children are the central characters, I have a recurring problem. How, in the Nineties, do I get the fictional children away from the grown-ups?

This was not an issue for the authors whose works I devoured in my own youth. The parents of the Swallows and Amazons were more than willing to allow their children to sail off unaccompanied to Wild Cat Island for a week or so (without the tedious restriction of life-jackets, and provided with plenty of matches for dangerous camp-fires and oil lamps). In the Famous Five books, the parents, shadowy and insignificant figures, were almost always abroad, happy to leave the holiday supervision of their offspring to a succession of dubious foreign tutors, or batty and easily outwitted servants. Mr and Mrs Brown were usually somewhere in the background, but were clearly only too delighted that their son William should spend entire days roaming lanes and exploring deserted barns; the further away from home, the better. Other books featured children whose parents had conveniently died in disasters of one sort or another, and who had moved into the care of a variety of guardians, who, very sensibly, ignored them. One way or another, the adults in those worlds had usually been happily disposed of by the end of chapter one, leaving the children gloriously free to get on with things.

None of this presented any problems of realism to the readers. In the Forties and Fifties, children enjoyed a liberty unknown by today's young, simply because we were largely ignored by the adult world. We were born before the days when parents learnt that for there to be any hope of their babies progressing to well-adjusted adulthood, mother and father would need to be hard at it from dawn to dusk. Nowadays, pre-school years must be filled with stylish early-learning equipment and toddlers' work-out clubs. If the parents' own time with the child has to be limited, then that time must at all costs be Quality Time.

As children grow older, they are awake longer and have more time that needs to be meaningfully filled. And there are myriad worthy activities: dancing classes, riding, music lessons, a vast array of sports, art groups, drama groups and gym clubs, each necessitating a different car journey (and, incidentally, a different type of footwear). Weekends and school holidays must be occupied by expeditions to theme parks, child-centred museums featuring dinosaurs, and water wonderlands followed by McDonald's. The good parent is one whose children are always busy doing worthwhile things.

Alongside parental commitment to doing the right thing runs parental concern with avoiding doing the wrong thing. The world, we now know, is thick with murderers, child molesters and lunatics at the wheels of cars. Children need protection, and, tempted as parents might occasionally be to dispatch their young to an island in the middle of Windermere for the summer holidays, they know in their hearts they would never get away with it.

Yet every child knows that the best events in childhood are those that happen when grown-ups are not present. It is not only that the most memorable moments are those spent doing ridiculous or frightful things which no parent could possibly condone, but it is also true that many of the most formative episodes in a child's life are those which involve danger, fear and loneliness.

This is the paradox. Parents go to laborious lengths to shield their children from experiences that give rise to negative emotions, but without the occasional emotional shock, what actually happens to the child's soul? To put it more simply - and to revert to the author's problem - if adults are always around, when does a child have any genuine opportunity for adventure?

I am not, of course, thinking of adventures involving catching smugglers single-handed or tracking down enemy spies. It is, however, hard to believe that any number of viewings of Home Alone can match the real feeling of being lost in a big city; nor that the thrills of a day of rides and splashes at Thorpe Park, fun as it might be, can equal the thrill of breaking into the grounds of the local big house and spying on the inhabitants from inside one of their rhododendrons. Nor can I imagine that the best burger on the block could taste quite as good as toast cooked on an illicit camp fire, preferably a fire built on waste ground where you know you should not go, using matches that you know you should not use. There is a genuine problem here, and I suspect it is one that is worse for real-life children than it is for authors of children's books.

In the Forties and Fifties, my contemporaries and I played where we pleased. Sometimes with others, sometimes alone, I wandered around, and found out about the world, people and myself. Strange men, in those days, tended to shake their fists at children, who were regarded as tiresome, and shout 'Go away'. Nowadays, they smile charmingly at children, and whisper, 'Come here'.

During these childhood prowlings, wonderful things occasionally happened and so did awful things. Once or twice it was certainly dangerous, but above all, there was always the possibility of adventure and the unexpected. When it grew dark, we went home. If our parents asked us what we had been doing, we gave them an edited account, but on the whole they tended not to inquire. I suppose they simply assumed that we were getting on with our childhood. I often think that the best thing my parents did for me when I was young was to leave me, kindly, alone.