“A good book has no ending.”
     R.D. Cumming

The palaces, lawns and gardens of Jamnagar, where I spent the first six years of my life, were just the right setting for a child whose first book was Alice in Wonderland. Princes and princesses were all over the place, and if the King and Queen of Hearts had emerged from behind the rose bushes I would not have been at all surprised. In one of  the old palaces lived a dotty old princess who was rather like the Duchess in Alice. When I grew up I put her into one of my stories, The Room of Many Colours, and several readers remarked that she had walked straight out of Wonderland. And indeed, she had. Our first books have a strong and lasting influence on our thinking and the way we look at life.