A childhood for young people

Autobiography:Girls who have grown up with sweetie-coloured Jacqueline Wilson books on their bedside tables will tell you there's a lot of unhappy marriages between the covers.

No surprise, so, to find that Wilson's own parents didn't get on very well and that Jacqueline had a rather lonely childhood, much of it spent in her bedroom with books and paper dolls as her best friends. Her latest book, Jacky Daydream, is the story of her early years, and it cleverly uses extracts from her bestsellers to show how her favourite characters and events emerged from her own life.

With its vivid blue and yellow cover, and illustrations by Nick Sharratt, who has worked on all her books, Jacky Daydream is pitched firmly at her young fans, though it's an amusing and touching read for adults too. The short extracts from her books and various snapshots of Wilson as a smiling little girl break up a story that's rich in detail about life in suburban London in the 1940s and 1950s, when everything was rationed and yet everyone managed to look smart.

Wilson's parents, Harry and Biddy Aitken, were painfully respectable people who didn't drop their aitches, who dressed up to go for a stroll and who were once photographed for the local paper as the archetypal happy young couple with baby. Naturally it wasn't as simple as that. Harry, a minor civil servant, was tall and handsome but bad-tempered and sometimes viciously cutting to his wife and child. Biddy was a proud and pushy mother, constantly urging her daughter on, sometimes with disastrous consequences, such as at a talent show in the hotel in Clacton where they spent summer holidays, when Jackie was so nervous about performing her poem that she she peed "into her snowy white socks". "We went to Clacton year after year. We had a lovely time. Or did we?" she wonders.

Biddy had a keen dress sense and Jacky was never less than immaculate. Her baby clothes were elaborate and pristine white, her hair always curled and pinned. Later she had pretty cotton summer dresses and a rainbow party dress that she particularly loved. Even Jacky's dolls were beautifully dressed, thanks to her grandmother, Biddy's mother, Hilda, who herself adored dolls and made complete wardrobes for them out of scraps. Dolls are a constant theme and a lifelong passion. Jacky got one for every birthday and says she still collects them.

The Aitkens first moved in with Biddy's parents, but eventually got a council flat of their own in Kingston with unheard-of luxuries such as central heating and constant hot water. Here Jacky had her own bedroom, a kingdom full of imaginary friends, as Biddy did not encourage the real thing and since Biddy now went out to work, in the accounts office of a factory, Jacky let herself in to the flat in the afternoons. (Her mother insisted that she was not a "latchkey kid" since those that were kept their keys on pieces of string around their necks, while Jacky had a little leather purse to keep hers in.) She devoured books, and her list of favourites is an excellent one for young readers, if they could be persuaded away from Wilson's own work: the Faraway Tree books by Enid Blyton; Eve Garnett's The Family from One End Street; Noel Streatfield's Ballet Shoes, White Boots and Tennis Shoes; E Nesbit's The Story of the Treasure Seekers and The Railway Children; Louisa May Alcott's Little Women; The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett; and Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.

Her school days slip by, not unhappily. She was bright and a favourite with the mostly male teachers, who praised her vivid imagination and her gift for storytelling. Exams weren't her thing, however, and she failed her eleven-plus the first time around due to a combination of a bad cold and jangling nerves. The book ends with yet another bucket-and-spade holiday, this time in Bournemouth, where she wishes that one day she might write a book. (So far she has published 90). We leave Jacky on the verge of being a teenager, staring out to sea, wondering if wishes ever come true. We're sure to find out in the next episode.

Orna Mulcahy is an Irish Times journalist

Jacky Daydream By Jacqueline Wilson Doubleday, 344pp. £12.99