When I was eight, I was sent to board at a school called Orley Farm, at Harrow-on-the-Hill in north London, which was as horrible as only a preparatory school in the 1960s could be. I wasn’t a perfect child by any means, but the school seemed determined to batter me down. Yet I began writing because of Orley Farm, and there was one kind teacher there.

Harry Thompson, my English teacher, always gave me good reports - he was the only one who did. I remember walking up to his house one afternoon and finding him asleep in a chair. He was very ill, and died soon after I left the school, at quite a young age. You had the feeling that he understood, which is often all that children are looking for.

My storytelling began in dormitories. I told escapist stories at night, about two boys who got away and travelled round the world, and the stories always ended with me being made to stand in the corridor for talking after lights out.

The villain of the piece was Orley Farm’s headmaster, who is now dead. He was well past the age he should have been teaching, and he was a flogger. I think the “flog ‘em” approach had persisted 20 years too long, and unfortunately I was in the last generation of children who had to suffer it. He beat me many times. When he beat boys they bled, and the scars were serious. I also hated him for the way he crushed me, which he did with sarcasm, and was always searching for the worst. My report when I left read: “I hope he’ll take things quietly at Rugby and not try to impress.” Thirty years later I want to shout back at him: “Why the hell not?” I’m still trying to impress in my own little way.

When he was dying in hospital, some years after I had left school, I went to visit him - to exorcise something, I think. I saw this old man in bed, shrivelled, white-haired, and I marvelled that I could have been so afraid of him and his wife. They were the power behind the school.

Orley Farm is now modern and attractive (I’ve been back as a visiting author) but they have kept one part intact. You go through some swing doors and bang, you’re in Victorian London, with the lockers, and the headmaster’s study where you queued up to get caned, and when I went back there I found myself shaking.

I was happy at Rugby and was taught by three wonderful English teachers - Geoffrey Helliwell, Robin Alden and Nigel Browne - and with them I finally learned that you can love a subject. They helped to develop my love of reading, and of literature. The first books I had a passion for were L P Hartley’s The Go-Between, and William Golding’s The Spire. Nigel Browne taught drama. He was a wonderful director - and I write for television now.

Good teachers are the ones who simply share their passion with you; bad teachers are the ones who try to turn you into what they think you ought to be.

I came out of my early years not really having had a childhood, and my books for children are a way of giving myself one now. But I haven’t had revenge through my books - though Groosham Grange, set in a school full of monsters, is Orley Farm by another name.

Writer Anthony Horowitz will be celebrating National Children’s Book Week, with a signing at The Children’s Bookshop, Muswell Hill, north London, at 11am on October 6. He will be speaking at a Books for Boys session for teachers at Kingston University on October 16. Details: Sylvia Mullett, tel: 020 8547 8073; s.mullett@kingston.ac.uk He was talking to Hilary Wilce

The story so far

1955 Born in north London

1975-78 Studies English and art history at YorkUniversity

1979 Publishes EnterFrederick K Bower (Collins), the first of 20novels for children,including Groosham Grange, Horowitz Horror and last year’s bestseller, Stormbreaker, about teenage spy Alex Rider (Walker Books)

1981 First TV scripts, for Robin of Sherwood, broadcast. Has since written widely for TV (including Murder in Mind, Midsomer Murders, and Murder Most Horrid), film and theatre

2001 Point Blanc, second Alex Rider book, published. Foyle’s War, a 1940s detective series, starts on ITV on October 14 at 8pm