Alice’s favourite books are Alice In Wonderland and Through The Looking-Glass, and she is writing her own version – Malice in Blunderland – which she allows Duffy to read. It’s soon clear that in her sinister stories Alice is revealing the terrible secret that her adopted father – Big Norm – is abusing her. Duffy believes her, of course. But with Big Norm such a well-respected member of the community, surely the adults won’t?

The classic first question: where did your idea for this book come from?

It came from my husband, whose story it was. He was Alice, he was adopted, he had an adopted brother (who became Sarah in the book), both he and his brother were abused by his Christian father, Big Norm, while his mother turned a blind eye. Duffy (who stood in for me) was the person who finally listened to him and believed.

What was the appeal of working with Alice? Is it a book you’re particularly fond of?

Alice is not so much a book I am particularly fond of as a book with which I have been familiar all my life. I had been waiting for years to write Bad Alice, and when I was finally able to I cast around for the best way to tell – for young readers – what was a basically very harrowing tale. Had I written it earlier in my career it would probably have been a straight, realistic telling, but experience told me that was best avoided. While I was still cudgelling my brains, I took the dogs out for a walk and one of them attempted to dive down a fox hole. It was the fox hole which set me thinking. Fox hole, rabbit hole, Alice In Wonderland ... all the rest followed.

Bad Alice is full of echoes of Alice In Wonderland, and not only in Alice’s writing; how deliberately did you plant these things? How much do you assume that your readers will know the original story, or doesn’t that matter?

The poems were the only deliberate plants. For the rest, the story came 100% from life. I suspect that very few children today would read the Alice books, but they are so embedded in the national consciousness that there must also be very few children who are not familiar with at least some of the characters – the White Rabbit, the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

Could you say something about the process of writing Alice’s version of the Alice In Wonderland story – the bits of story within the story – for example, how you chose pieces, and how you actually went about writing them. It must have been really fun but also very difficult.

Yes, it was enormous fun and perhaps not as difficult as it would appear, given that there were only a set number of scenes and poems available to me. Not being spoilt for choice did tend to concentrate the mind! I knew that I had to make every poem and/or scene play its part and have a relevance to what was going on in Alice’s life, so sometimes I took an incident from her life and fitted it to a poem or scene, while sometimes I did it the other way round. For instance, in Chapter VIII of Malice, where the Red Queen screams “Off with her tongue” rather than “Off with her head.” I hadn’t previously envisaged Alice clamming up and refusing to talk, but once the words “Off with her tongue” had occurred to me I knew that this was exactly what she would do.

I found Bad Alice a very powerful and quite distressing book – there’s darkness in Lewis Carroll’s book but nothing as upsetting. What sort of reactions have you had from the publishers and readers?

Reactions from readers have generally been very positive, even though occasionally the younger ones don’t realise Alice is being sexually abused by her stepdad and think he is limiting his abuse to slaps and punches – which is fine, and a perfectly valid interpretation if a child is not ready to understand what is actually going in. My publishers, I think, were somewhat nervous about how the book would be received and as a result arranged no bookshop promotions for it, which I found rather sad. To this day I have never spoken about the book to an audience of children.

And finally… If you had to choose an icon of England, what would you choose and why?

I would choose a piece of music by Elgar, that most British of composers. Preferably not Land Of Hope And Glory! The Enigma Variations, maybe?