Was Little Grey Rabbit genned up on swine flu?

What were your favourite children’s books? That’s the question five of the UK’s finest writers of children’s books have answered today.

Quentin Blake, Michael Morpurgo, Jacqueline Wilson, Michael Rosen and Anne Fine are announcing their lists at a lunch today for 100 10-year-olds.

Mine? The Children of the New Forest, by Captain Marryat. An optimistic book about self-sufficiency under fire. An unapologetically royalist book, it depicts the family of a cavalry officer in the English civil war, whose country house is burned to the ground by the Roundheads.

The children flee to a gamekeeper’s cottage in the New Forest. What appealed to me was not the politics but the day-to-day struggle for rural survival: hunting, gathering, making things and protecting each other from the “enemy”.

I was injudicious enough to browse my old copy of the book the other day. I had obviously read far more into it than it warranted. How on earth could I have sat so comfortably on the side of class and privilege?

So I decided it might be easier to think about the book that scared me most as a child. Absolutely no contest – it was Allison Uttley’s Hare Joins The Home Guard. A terrifying tale of how Hare’s army strode in long columns to a very lifelike first world war kind of a battle.

He and his fellow rabbits and hares were adorned with saucepans on their heads to repel the sticks and stones hurled by the loathsome stoats and weasels. I have hated weasels ever since.

And as for sexual stereotypes? You have it – Squirrel stayed home knitting long, woolly socks for her men at war, and Little Grey Rabbit donned her Red Cross apron and scuttled about with her basket of ointments and lollies.

I hope she was genned up on swine flu.