I was born in Ipswich, but grew up near Woodbridge, in Suffolk. That’s where I spent my childhood, which was lovely, completely free. We used to get on our bicycles, go down to the estuary and play around there. We used to cycle, walk and muck about, as kids do. It was a perfect childhood.

There were no adults around, and it’s amazing what one got away with. Children do learn to survive, but I used to do terribly dangerous things. We had a friend who had a little yacht, and we used to go out with him with no life belts, nothing.

In the summer holidays, all the friends who had been at boarding school came home and it was just one long, wonderful time. We used to go to the nearest town, where there was a roller-skating rink. It was glorious. I also remember the end of the summer holidays – the last day, the terrible gloom that settles on you as you have to get out your horrible school uniform and think: “That’s it, that’s my freedom gone.”

I lived with my parents, my maternal grandparents and my brother, who is three years older than I am, so our house was always full. It was built at the turn of the century, on a hill, and had no central heating – in the winter, we lit fires in the grates.

The first job in the morning was to clean out the fire from the night before. Sometimes, it was so cold, we would sit down next to the fire and get red down one side of our legs and goose pimples down the other.

What was so wonderful about the house was its position. It was high up, and you could see the sun rise on the sea and set at night. From the sitting room and bedroom windows, we could see people walking along the promenade, going to the pier pavilion for their Saturday-evening dance.

We had no television at the time, just the radio, and watching the people all dressed up was our Saturday-night entertainment. When I was small, I would lie in bed and wiggle my toes to the dance music. It always ended exactly at midnight, and all the lights in the town went off.

In those days, there was no radar – instead, they had a lightship to guide in the boats, which was located almost opposite the house. When it was foggy, the lightship used a foghorn, which sounded almost like a cow mooing. It’s a very evocative sound for me, even now: it brings back my entire childhood.

During the holidays and at weekends, we used to get on our bikes and cycle everywhere. There was a little cafe on the coast where we would go and have a cup of tea, and a plate of chips between four or five of us. There was even a Martello tower, built during the Napoleonic wars to guard the coastline.

I left Suffolk to attend art college, and had been living in London for about 10 years with my husband, [the children’s-book illustrator] John Burningham, and our three children, when my father found a house for sale near where I had grown up. By the description, we knew which one it was – originally a Nissen hut – and we dropped everything to go down there.

The first time we saw it, we thought it was lovely, and inside, it was surprisingly large. It had been lived in by an old lady, the mother of the person who was selling it. She had lived there for many years – in a wooden hut with a manservant. We actually have quite a lot of her original bits of furniture, and also a set of photographs of the house as it was in the 1930s.

We weren’t looking to buy a house: John and I had a tiny hunting lodge in Dorset at the time. It was such a long way to travel with young children, though, that we thought it would be more sensible to get somewhere on the east coast. Also, my parents had spent their formative years in that seaside town, and it was lovely to have a foothold in the area where one grew up.

You can imagine a little wooden house right next to the sea and the river, and all the little sailing boats going by. There were lots of things to watch, lots of activity – the perfect place for chilling out and reading if you were working on a book. The house I grew up in only had an open fire, but this one had big stoves for heating the rooms. It does get very, very cold on the east coast – your ears nearly drop off.

When I was a child, there was a great expanse of shingle around the house, but now the water is almost up to the house itself. My children own the house now, and my son has fixed it up. He has put a wall of railway sleepers along one side of the building, so we are now higher than the beach. However, it’s inevitable that one day, in 10 or 40 years’ time, the house will eventually be claimed by the sea. When it does finally go, some of my most precious childhood memories will go with it.

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