I can’t believe those double-decker iron lungs! There are many other subtle parallels too. At one stage Mark gets an infection and ends up in hospital on an iron lung, and it’s a long road to recovery for him, in the house he doesn’t want to learn to use his legs again. We are less concerned with the stones and more concerned with the ups and downs in the children’s conditions in both real and imaginary worlds. Reading the book as an adult, a diffrerent story emerges.

From the moment the stones start watching, it becomes a race against time for Marianne and Mark to get to safety. They’re the bookish equivalent of Dr Who’s Weeping Angels – Blink and these killer statues move superfast – and have terrified my daughter ever since she first saw them. Reading this story as a child it’s this sense of danger that takes over from the fascination that you might be able to control your dreams. It was the eyes on the stones that did it for me as a kid. But when she dreams she realises she has made a prison for them both – they will need to escape, but Mark can’t walk … She imprisons him in her drawing and tries to scribble him out. Things start to take on a creepy turn when the real-life Mark outdoes Marianne with a birthday present for their teacher. He’s ill and can’t use his legs properly. Rectifying this she meets the boy in the upstairs room when she dreams. She dreams again and the house appears, but there are no stairs in the house, so she can’t get up to the boy. Marianne returns to her drawing, adds a door handle, and a boy at the upstairs window. Meanwhile Marianne is getting a little better, and starts lessons with Miss Chesterfield who is also teaching a boy called Mark who has had polio. That night, she dreams and she is at the house she drew – but she can’t get in – there’s no door handle. She draws a house with a garden and a fence around it.

She starts to draw to pass the time, using an old pencil she found in her Grannie’s workbox. Marianne is confined to bed with an illness that will take several months to recuperate from. Luckily the illustrations by Marjorie-Ann Watts are an integral part of the story and remain with it in later editions (left).

The story of a bed-bound girl whose drawings came to life in her dreams both entranced and scared me witless (more on that later). I read it in the late 1960s, not once, not twice, but countless times. In the Puffin edition (above), this book was my favourite contemporary children’s novel as I was growing up.

Marianne dreams by catherine storr