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I wonder if everyone has Lost Books? I suspect most writers, at least, do; and I suspect they're not the only ones.

By Lost Books, I mean books which are out-of-print; books on which you can no longer lay your hands, but for which you retain a remembered fondness, and which perhaps at some level have had an effect on you or your writing. I'd like to share a couple of mine with you:

Borrobil, by William Croft Dickinson. Anyone remember this one? It's a magical fantasy about two children who find themselves transported to a Britain of the mythical past, where the narrative takes in dragons, faery creatures, viking raiders, mermen... I loved it, and the last sentence has just popped unbidden into my head after all these years: Borrobil! They knew - and they would never forget!

I don't think I'll ever forget, either; yet the book is now unavailable. It had a Wikipedia entry for a couple of days but that was deleted, apparently on the grounds of the book's lack of significance. For me, though, it was hugely significant - and probably a major influence on my latest book, Bansi O'Hara and the Bloodline Prophecy. Like Borrobil's Donald and Jean, my heroine finds herself in another world; like them, she gets there via a ring of standing stones; like them, she meets creatures from faery legend. My story is very different from Dickinson's, I hasten to add, but the influences are clearly there.

My second Lost Book is The Gadfly, by... er... I can't remember. I'd love to know, if anyone can tell me. I'm pretty sure it was published by Puffin, if that helps. It's the story of a young Greek boy who enters the circle of influence of the philosopher Socrates and witnesses the events leading up to his trial and execution (or, at least, State-commanded suicide). I can't recall so much about this book, but one thing that stuck with me was the reason that Socrates was condemned to death: his 'blasphemous' assertion that if there were gods, they would be better than those of Greek legend, who behaved like overgrown children with wonderful powers.

When the idea for my first book, Zeus on the Loose, was slowly awakening in my head, it was the memory of this assertion that suddenly brought it all together. Greek gods are like big kids! That became the conceit on which the book hinged. Without The Gadfly there would be no Zeus on the Loose.

I find this somehow comforting. Maybe in twenty years' time my books will all be out of print. Maybe in forty years no-one will even remember them. But perhaps some child who is now reading one of my books will grow up to write books of their own; and perhaps one day they'll write a book that in some way owes part of its existence to one of mine. And maybe that book will become the ancestor of another; and that one of another. Perhaps some day there will be a great and enduring classic of literature that would never have been written if not for one of my books - and that will perhaps therefore owe its life not just to my book, but to Borrobil or The Gadfly, too.

The press coverage of the poll that last week named Enid Blyton as Britain’s favourite author couldn’t avoid mentioning the many criticisms of her work as “sexist, racist and simplistic”. But I’m surprised that so far no-one has (to my knowledge) seen fit to point out that the Famous Five, those four determinedly upper-middle-class kids with their equally upper-middle-class dog, are members of what is probably the most dysfunctional family in children’s literature.

‘Nonsense!’ I hear you scoff. [Oh, wasn’t it you? I’m sure somebody just scoffed ‘Nonsense!’ Well, whoever it was, let’s hear how the rest of the scoff goes:] ‘The most dysfunctional family in children’s literature surely has to be one created by, oooh, Dame Jacqueline Wilson, at a guess. Or perhaps Melvin Burgess. But surely not the Kirrin clan? Okay, George has gender-identity issues and Julian’s a bit bossy and superior, but as a family there’s nothing really wrong with them.’

I beg to differ. Take a look at the opening chapters of Five on a Treasure Island and you’ll see what I mean.

The story begins with Anne, Dick and Julian being told by their parents, ‘You’re not coming on holiday with us. We’re off to Scotland and you’re going to stay with your Uncle Quentin (Daddy’s brother) and his family.’

To me, even this seems a little strange. It’s not as if Scotland won’t let children in, after all. But it gets much weirder. You see, although the eldest of these three kids is eleven, they have never met Uncle Quentin before.

Let me just repeat that with a bit of unnecessary capitalisation: They Have Never Met Their Father’s Brother Before. Over a period of eleven years, and despite the fact that they live within driving distance of one another, these two brothers have never made the effort to get their families together. But more than that, until the holiday plans are made, the children don’t even know they’ve got a ten-year-old cousin. The family with whom the children are to spend their summer are clearly Never Spoken About.

It gets worse. A mere few days after the children are told the news that they’re being abandoned for the summer and sent to stay with people who, though blood-relatives, are complete strangers, it all happens. Off they go to Kirrin Bay, where Mummy and Daddy drop them off, scarper without so much as stopping for a cup of tea, and are Never Seen Again.

Actually, I can’t be certain that it’s absolutely never. They may, over the course of the next 21 books, pop up for half a page at some point. But effectively they are from this moment forward written out of their children’s lives. At the end of the summer Julian, Dick and Anne return to boarding school; every holiday from then on is spent either at Kirrin Cottage, or fending for themselves and dependent for survival on the kindness of rosy-cheeked farmers’ wives. They are effectively cast adrift from their nuclear family, cut off apart from the odd letter telling them they still can’t come home.

But what’s really strange is that, as a child who lapped up the Five’s adventures, I never noticed how bizarre this family set-up was. In fact, I think it was one of the things I loved about them - they got to do things without Mummy and Daddy telling them they couldn’t.

Thinking about it, much of my favourite reading as a child took place in a parent-free world. The Pevenseys disappeared off to Narnia without their Responsible Adults, for instance. James Henry Trotter lost his parents to a ravenous rhinoceros, while Mr and Mrs Bucket couldn’t take Charlie to the Chocolate Factory themselves and sent him with his Grandpa instead. And now that I’m a writer of children’s books myself, I seem to have a need to get rid of the parents as quickly as possible. In none of my own books do the parents figure hugely. Even when - as in my latest book, Bansi O’Hara and the Bloodline Prophecy - they are crucial to the plot, they’re offstage for most of the action.

The thing is, parents get in the way. They stop children having adventures. And what would be horribly damaging for a child in real life can be wonderfully liberating in the world of the imagination.