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Going mad takes time. Getting sane takes time.

There was a person in me – a piece of me – however you want to describe it – so damaged that she was prepared to see me dead to find peace.

That part of me, living alone, hidden, in a filthy abandoned lair, had always been able to stage a raid on the rest of the territory. My violent rages, my destructive behaviour, my own need to destroy love and trust, just as love and trust had been destroyed for me. My sexual recklessness – not liberation. The fact that I did not value myself. I was always ready to jump off the roof of my own life. Didn’t that have a romance to it? Wasn’t that the creative spirit unbounded?

No.

Creativity is on the side of health – it isn’t the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness.

The lost furious vicious child living alone in the bottom bog wasn’t the creative Jeanette – she was the war casualty. She was the sacrifice. She hated me. She hated life.

There are so many fairy stories – you know them – where the hero in a hopeless situation makes a deal with a sinister creature and obtains what is needed – and it is needed – to go on with the journey. Later, when the princess is won, the dragon defeated, the treasure stored, the castle decorated, out comes the sinister creature and makes off with the new baby, or turns it into a cat, or – like the thirteenth fairy nobody invited to the party – offers a poisonous gift that kills happiness.

This misshapen murderous creature with its supernatural strength needs to be invited home – but on the right terms.

Remember the princess who kisses the frog – and yippee, there’s a prince? Well, it is necessary to embrace the slimy loathsome thing usually found in the well or in the pond, eating slugs. But making the ugly hurt part human again is not an exercise for the well-meaning social worker in us.

This is the most dangerous work you can do. It is like bomb disposal but you are the bomb. That’s the problem – the awful thing is you. It may be split off and living malevolently at the bottom of the garden, but it is sharing your blood and eating your food. Mess this up, and you will go down with the creature.

And – just to say – the creature loves a suicide. Death is part of the remit.

I am talking like this because what became clear to me in my madness was that I had to start talking – to the creature.

I was lying in bed reading Dog Years, and a voice outside of my head – not in it – said, ‘Get up and start work.’

I got dressed immediately. I went over to my studio. I lit the wood-burning stove, sat down with my coat on because the place was freezing, and wrote – It began as all important things begin – by chance.

From then on, every day, I wrote a book for children called The Battle of the Sun.

Every day I went to work, without a plan, without a plot, to see what I had to say.

And that is why I am sure that creativity is on the side of health. I was going to get better, and getting better began with the chance of the book.

It is not a surprise that it was a children’s book. The demented creature in me was a lost child. She was willing to be told a story. The grown-up me had to tell it to her.

And one of the first things that invented itself in the new book was something called the Creature Sawn in Two.

The Creature who came into the room was cleaved in half straight down the middle, so that one half of him had one eye and one eyebrow, one nostril, one ear, one arm, one leg, one foot, and the other half had just the same.

Well, nearly just the same, because as if the Creature did not astonish enough, one half of him was male and the other half of him was female. The female half had a bosom, or certainly half a bosom.

The Creature appeared to be made of flesh, like a human being, but what human being born is cleaved in half?

The Creature’s clothes were as odd as the Creature itself. The male half wore a shirt with one sleeve, and a pair of breeches with one leg, and where the other sleeve and other leg should have been was a cut-off and