IT is said your schooldays are the happiest of your life, but I have to say the reverse is true in my case.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved being young – it was just the going to school bit that got in the way of my favourite pastime of reading.

In those pre round the clock television days, I read voraciously, consuming everything from newspapers and magazines to sauce bottle labels and my mother’s Bero recipe book.

I simply loved the written word, and I would spend literally hours working my way steadily through Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia – known in our house simply as the Volumes.

If we had the temerity to ask my father for information, he would snap: “Look it up in the Volumes!”

I detested school with a vengeance, all the way from starting primary school at five to leaving at 16 to enter the world of journalism I had set my heart on from the age of around nine.

I can’t quite put my finger on what caused me so much distress between nine in the morning and three in the afternoon. It wasn’t the lessons, because I was quite a bright child, who could already read before starting school.

Perhaps it was school dinners, which I generally enjoyed, but one day my sister and I were appalled to find our rice pudding had been decorated with three large prunes each.

I plucked up courage to tackle one of the dinner ladies to declare: “ Please Missus, me and ‘er don’t like them black things.”

She swelled up like a turkey cock, and screeched: “ Don’t like ‘em – people in Africa would be glad of ‘em! Now gerrem et!”

We forced them down – and were then sick in unison on the dinner lady’s brogues.

I found it hugely frustrating to sit in a class of some 40 children struggling their halting way through the Adventures of Old Lob the Farmer, when I could read all about Mr Grumps the Goat, Master Willy the Pig and Percy the Bad Chick backwards and upside down.

My salvation came in the form of the comics my uncle would lavish on the family every couple of months or so. Many were several years old, but in pristine condition, and would be eagerly devoured by me and my siblings.

Beano, Dandy, Beezer and Topper were the favourites of course, with splendid tales of heroism running alongside the likes of Desperate Dan, Minnie the Minx, Beryl the Peril and Pansy Potter the Strongman’s Daughter.

Then there were the Lion and Tiger, Victor and Hotspur and many others, all heavily laden with stories about the war which had finished only a decade or so earlier.

Grinning Tommies would launch hand grenades at hulking Huns with coal scuttle helmets, with a cheery “Take that, Sausage Noshers” or “Share this among you, Cabbage Crunchers!”, while teams of schoolboys would not only enter the FA Cup, but win the trophy, despite having their star centre forward kidnapped by shady types on the morning of the game and having their half-time oranges injected with a powerful sleeping draught.

And it wasn’t just boys’ comics I loved reading – I was swift to embrace my feminine side by enjoying Bunty, a publication aimed at girls. I was really into The Four Marys, who got up to all kinds of high jinks at St Elmo’s School.

Although we lived in a cramped council flat, my brother and I were astoundingly well informed about life at public school, thanks to a lifelong affection for Billy Bunter, the Fat Owl of the Remove, forever on the scrounge, and being given merciless beatings by the famous five – not the Enid Blyton goody-goodies, but the doyens of Greyfriars society Harry Wharton, Bob Cherry, Johnny Bull, Frank Nugent and the Nabob of Bhanipur himself, Hurree Jamset Ram Singh.

The custard yellow books by Frank Richards were as thick as modern Harry Potter volumes, but we eagerly snatched them off the shelves of Macclesfield public library.

I once borrowed a Bunter book from the library one morning, and attempted to return it in exchange for another the same afternoon, but the heavily moustachioed and blue rinsed librarian refused to believe I had read such a weighty tome in just a few hours, and sent me packing.