I was born near Hampstead Heath on October 24th 1932. My mother was Kathleen Fabian, a Froebel-trained nursery school teacher and my father was Jock Mitchell, a research chemist from Cupar, Fife. They were always kind and loving parents. I was educated at a nameless school in Hell and then at Greenways, a school in Heaven, where my first play, The Animals' Brains Trust, was staged when I was nine to my great satisfaction. I was a teenager at Dauntsey's School in Wiltshire, where my friend Gordon Snell and I staged and co-starred in many plays. I was conscripted against my will into the RAF, which taught me to touch-type and confirmed my natural pacifism. I spent three happy years at Christ Church, Oxford. Deciding not to be a primary school teacher because the classes were far too large - as they still are - I became a reporter on the Oxford Mail, then the Evening Standard in London. Inheriting enough money to live on for a year, I wrote my first novel and my first TV play. Soon afterwards I became a freelance journalist, writing about pop music for the Daily Mail and TV for the pre-tabloid Sun and the Sunday Times. I quit journalism in the mid-Sixties and since then have been a free-falling poet, playwright and writer of stories. The rest of my life can be traced through the lists of my work in theatre and my books. I am married to Celia Hewitt the actress and bookdealer and we have two grown-up daughters. I also have two sons and a daughter by my first marriage. More and more of my time is spent writing for children. This is partly because I have six grandchildren.