Walker Books , 1993

illustrated by Martin Brown

     "It had been a bad day at school for Titch. nothing had actually gone wrong - that wasn't the problem. The problem was that it had gone so well for everytone else..."

     I wrote Gilbert and Toni almost by accident. They seemed to work, but I had no idea why. After Toni, however, my lucky streak ran out and it took me a long time and many false starts before I wrote Titch Johnson. I had forgotten quite how many false starts until I was digging out some old roughs from a bottom drawer to show to students on an Arvon course. I found 50 sketched-out ideas for books. Picture books, mostly. And none of them quite right. Producing the text for Titch was therefore a huge relief. I still didn't understand why some books worked and some didn't, but I'd hit on the ploy of remembering things that made me unhappy as a child, putting a fictional character into a similar situation and letting them work the problem out. Obviously I didn't set a world record for balancing a fork on the end of my nose...
     The book is dedicated to my nephew, Max. Max was born very prematurely and he is the reason a premature baby plays such a central role in the book. At the time we weren't entirely sure that he was going to survive. So the dedication was an act of faith.
      Happily, Max is now fourteen. And he's probably going to be very pissed off that I've mentioned any of this...