My father worked in the printing ink industry and had a great love of beautifully-illustrated children’s books. Some of my happiest childhood memories are of him reading books to me such as Kathleen Hale’s Orlando the Marmalade Cat, the stories by CAM (Barbara Mary Campbell), and later the books of B.B. (Denys Watkins-Pitchford), especially The Little Grey Men and Down the Bright Stream.

He would firmly refuse to read me any book that lacked both a good story and beautiful illustrations. He had little time for Enid Blyton or for books such as Rupert Bear, however popular they may have been. The detailed illustrations and gentle storytelling of the books that he brought home each week from Foyles bookshop made a lasting impression on me.

About 20 years ago, I tried to persuade the modern successor to the original publisher of Barbara Mary Campbell’s wonderful children’s books, the books that I had read as a child, to republish the series. In the end, however, it became clear that some attitudes and expressions which had passed without comment in the middle of the 20th century no longer belonged comfortably in the modern world.

My idea of republishing them would never work. Apart from some periods of teaching, my major career was in the Hong Kong civil service.

Civil servants spend about 60% of their time writing boring things. But we gained a pretty good training in writing boring things concisely and clearly, particularly keeping in mind that many of the readers of our English output might not be native speakers.

In the 1980s, I started a website on archery and in subsequent years, I wrote several academic books and articles related to archery and Chinese history.

However, I’m not a good academic writer. I feel that academic writers perform as if under attack. You have to be right at the very top of the academic tree to be allowed to let your imagination fly away.

My own academic position remains somewhere down near the lowest branches of the tree. The immediate origin of my first children’s book, Mishka. A Bear and a Girl Save the Circus. was much closer to home.

When my children were young, I wanted to repeat for them the experiences that I had enjoyed with my own father. We often read together in the evenings.

Whenever we ran out of books or when I was driving the car with the children in the back, I and my wife, Anne, would invent stories of our own. One of those improvised stories concerned a little bear and the circus girl who rescued her. My story of the bear remained in my memory. Eventually I decided to write it down properly. My aim was not to reproduce the books of my childhood exactly, because society changes and each generation tells stories in different ways. Instead, I hoped to recreate something of the warmth, kindness and eye-popping illustration that I remembered from those books, while leaving behind assumptions and attitudes that belonged to an earlier age.