You went to Oxford. Did you start writing there?

I never really had the least intention of being a writer. It's true I came from an 'arts' family. My father was controller of opera for the BBC, my sister danced for a while in the Ballet Rimbaud school and my mother was a very well-known potter and then founded an arts gallery, so there were plenty of arts around. But I was really an outdoors boy; I was a cricketer, a tennis player. I thought I might be a priest, in my teens, but if anything archaeology was what was leading the way. When I got to Oxford I was confronted by the beast, the monster of Anglo-Saxon poetry and promptly failed my Anglo-Saxon exams. You're allowed a second shot before you get slung out, or as they say so decorously 'sent down'. Something happened. Something got into the nervous system, into the bloodstream. I began to love Anglo-Saxon poetry and the sound of Anglo-Saxon and of course the great Everest of Anglo-Saxon verse is the story of Beowulf. I found myself beginning to translate bits and pieces, beginning with the riddles. So that was my way in. A fascination with the Middle Ages. But I didn't write anything other than a few poems. I won a poetry competition at Oxford when I was 18, so I suppose there was something stirring, but really I had very little intention of entering seriously into the whole discipline and skills of being a writer until I was 21/22. Just graduated, I went into a publishing house. Macmillan. Loved it. Was immediately exposed to all manner of glamorous writers. The first writer I ever had a letter from was Sean O'Casey, written on a wonky old typewriter. It was thrilling to be meeting and corresponding, albeit as a lowly number 3 in the publicity department with renowned writers. This was mainly adult books, although I was the editor of the children's list for a while. For instance, I think I was the first, and I think he would credit me with being the first, to persuade Charles Causley to write poems for children. I brought him and R. S. Thomas to our poetry list and, during the 1960s, built a poetry list of more than twenty-four poets. Then I was invited by the University of Leeds to become their Gregory Fellow in Poetry in 1969 when I was 28 and I hadn't published a first volume then, so it was a bit of luck really. At that time I formed a more 50-50 relationship with Macmillan - spent some of the week there, and some of the week up in Leeds.

My first children's book was called Havelock The Dane. It was the retelling of a medieval romance. That was in 1964. I was 23. I remember writing it in lunch hours, lying in Lincolns Inn Fields. You were not meant to have gone in there unless you were a young lawyer in the making. Then when I got really excited I used to retreat to the loo, to the men's lavatory in Macmillan, in the old oak-panelled building and lock myself in for 20 or 30 minutes - as long as I dared be absent from the desk!

From the first, I was interested in traditional tale. My father used to tell stories, sometimes accompanying himself on a little Welsh harp, sitting by my sisters' and my bed and sing and say stories to us. So they'd always been part of the scheme of things. Hearing legends and folk tales, especially those of East Anglia, which was where my grandparents lived. So in a way it was natural to gravitate to the legendary, to the world of traditional tale and to the historical.

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