The gingerbread in question is a recipe I’ve grown up with. It came from my mother’s huge Good Housekeeping book, which dated from at least the 1940s, and with its gold embossed letters and hard black binding, had the look of book of spells.

My mother always baked it as it was, faithfully wrapping it in greaseproof paper and foil and storing it for 3-4 days so it developed its flavours. I have tried to do this, but I have no chance. It is so fragrant that my scheme to keep it secret for a few days is always rumbled, and by the time 3-4 days have passed, the gingerbread, too, is no more.

So here it is in all its old fashioned glory, with the addition of some mixed spice, raisins and crystallised ginger being the only changes to the original.

Ilb plain flour

3 heaped tsp baking powder

1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

1 tsp salt

3 heaped tsp ground ginger

1 heaped tsp mixed spice

4oz raisins or sultanas

2oz crystallised ginger, in small pieces

6oz butter

8oz Demerara sugar

6oz black treacle

6oz golden syrup

1/2pt full fat milk

I large egg

Line a deep 8” square tin with baking parchment. Pre-heat the oven to 160C.

Into a large mixing bowl, sieve all the dry ingredients, mix well together and stir in the raisins and crystallised ginger. In a jug, beat the egg into the milk and put to one side.

Put the butter and sugar in a small saucepan. Weighing syrup and treacle is a messy business, but I’ve found the simplest and cleanest way is to weigh the tin, subtract the required weight in your head, then spoon it out until the scales balance to the reduced weight.

Add the golden syrup and black treacle to the butter and Demerara sugar in the pan and melt together over a low heat, stirring gently until the butter has just melted. Don’t rush this part – if you let it boil, the sugars will begin to caramelise, and if it burns, you’ll have to sling it and start again.

Make a well in the dry ingredients and pour in the melted butter and sugars. Add the egg and milk and beat thoroughly together.

Pour into the prepared tin and bake for about an hour, until a skewer pushed into the middle comes out clean, and the top is springy. Lift onto a wire rack, still in the baking parchment, and cool. Wrap in foil and keep for 3-4 days – well, it’s always worth a try – before cutting into generous squares.

In the course of shifting around our beleaguered family library the other day, I came across a much battered Puffin edition of Rosemary Manning’s The Dragon’s Quest.

I discovered the R. Dragon books when I was about 10, and had two, the other being the first book in the series, Green Smoke. Both were given to me by my best friend for my 15^th birthday in 1971. Over 40 years on, The Dragon’s Quest has pages missing from it now, and yellowed sellotape patches on the spine from previous attempts to hold it together, and I haven’t yet found the copy of Green Smoke to determine its condition.

These books are now considered collectors’ items, and appear on the internet for fairly large sums of money. Good job I held onto mine, as Green Smoke is now well out of my price range. The books are set on the Cornish coast and provide beautifully told stories about the court of King Arthur and the dragon’s other adventures, recounted to Sue, a little girl on holiday who is lucky enough to find him in a beach cave. The simple line drawings by Constance Marshall do much to bring the characters to life, especially the dragon who swore to King Arthur he would never eat meat, and has a fondness for Sue’s mother’s sugar buns.

I have often wondered why Puffin has not reissued them, especially with the current interest from collectors, and in view of the fact that as the recent BBC series Merlin proved, even with its wildly misjudged ending, interest in the subject never goes away. Young readers of Green Smoke meet Arthur and Guinevere, Morgan le Fay, Lancelot and the knights of Camelot, including the dragon’s special friend Sir Gryfflet, who is not as brave as other knights, but has a good heart. The gentle humour, good characters, unpretentious writing, pleasing illustrations and sound storytelling make for a winning combination. I was delighted when my kids took to them as fondly as I had.

It set me thinking about other books I read aloud while my children were growing up, and what they were attracted to. When they were very young, a big book of Postman Pat stories proved compelling – they were well-told, humorous, and featured a good range of adult characters doing all sorts of different things, and together, we read the eight stories in the book until it fell apart.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar did good service, and we had hours of fun with the Mr Men and Little Miss series; I’d often finish the session with a sore throat, especially if we were doing Mr Noisy!

A year or two later, my eldest daughter came home and asked me to name somebody strong. I said Hercules, and we went off to find Geraldine McCaughrean’s excellent collection of Greek Myths, a large-format book with a literate but accessible style. Granny and Grandad obliged with a copy so we didn’t have to keep borrowing it, and that was another huge favourite, especially the tale of Odysseus. We also tracked down McCaughrean’s other story collections, including The Thousand and One Nights, and Myths and Legends from around the world. Anthony Minghella’s The Storyteller was also well-loved.

A surprising hit was The Nation’s Favourite Poems, which contained quite a lot of children’s verses, including Michael Rosen’s Chocolate Cake, which we used to read making all the yummy noises, plus grown-up offerings like Roger McGough’s Let me Die a Young Man’s Death, and the rhythmic story poem by Alfred Noyes, The Highwayman’s Daughter; my eldest daughter Harriet, then about 11, was particularly taken with Thomas Hardy’s blackly comic The Ruin’d Maid, which created interesting talking points about the social order – and a very surprised English teacher, who found it was the subject of a critical essay in early secondary school.

I decided to take a flyer and read them Jane Eyre. By this time, Harriet was collecting children’s classics and we had done A Christmas Carol, The Secret Garden, Gulliver’s Travels and Heidi. I was surprised when all three of them – the youngest, Al, was only about six – were riveted by the first part of the book, with its Red Room child abuse, the weird brand of child-directed terrorism that constituted Victorian religion, and the punitive starvation regime of a ‘charity’ school. There were long conversations about the Victorian way of doing things and how times and attitudes change, especially towards children.

There were, of course, lots of other things – a collection of traditional princess stories from around the world, the picture book about a little fish who wouldn’t share his brightly coloured scales – and let us not forget He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Al’s all-time favourite excursion into super-heroes and intergalactic derring-do.

When I was growing up, television and film were not the threats to literacy they are now; I know an English teacher who was asked by the parent of a student studying Standard Grade if it would be OK for her daughter to watch the film of A Midsummer Night's Dream instead of going to the bother of reading it.  If children are raised in a house with no books and only access to television and film, they associate being entertained with at best constant sound, at worst, manic noise, and eye-blinding colour. The inevitable consequence is a dulling of the senses through over-exposure. The daylong access to television with its dumbed down children's channels filled with dayglo American series full of shrieking teenagers and trite sentimental messages does nothing to encourage language, develop a child's imagination or help them understand and take an interest in the world around them. Give me an OFF switch and a Mr Men book any day over almost all programmes dished up for children, with a few notable exceptions.

And finally - one book I would love to re-discover for the next generation was one we borrowed from the library just the once, and never found again. Title and author are forgotten, but it concerned a group of enterprising cats lead by the intrepid Ginger Brown Sauce, who decide to do a few odd jobs around the house of their owner while she’s away on holiday. Things escalate from straightforward DIY until the cats have decided to resurface the road leading up to the house, before their efforts peak in a truly monumental feat of civil engineering. I have a memory of the cover, of a group of cats brandishing road drills and sporting safety goggles – It combined the best elements of an entertaining children’s picture book – it was a good idea, funny, well-told and brilliantly illustrated. If anyone reading this knows what I’m talking about it, I’d love to know!