She kept forever her own favourite doll, Ruthy, who inspired her first book, Ingeborg and Ruthy (1940). (Her father was a barrister and she was brought up in Kensington, with two brothers, one of whom was Hugo Cole, former music critic of the Guardian.) In particular, throughout her life Storr was captivated by the special, private make-believe world of dolls and their owners, knowing how 'real' they could be.

She never forgot what it felt like to be a child, retaining the details of her own childhood absolutely. While she was careful to keep up to date with contemporary externals, checking facts about schools, clothes, hobbies and, above all, speech, with her grandchildren and their friends, the impetus for what she wrote came from within herself. But, like many other writers for children, Storr always claimed that she wrote for herself more than for children in general or even for any particular child. Storr was married first to writer and psychiatrist Anthony Storr, with whom she had three daughters. More interestingly, as in one of Storr's earliest titles, Polly and the Giant's Bride, it allows for a story in which there is no way of telling exactly what happens, allowing readers to interpret for themselves - a remarkable feat to bring off in a story for the very young. Sometimes this takes the traditional form of a ghost story as in The Mirror Ghost or of a mysterious puzzle as in The Chinese Egg.

It also encouraged her analytic approach to writing and her concern to show the possibilities of explaining events in more than one way, both scientific or 'real', and magical. Her clinical training enabled her to capture so surely the child's-eye view of the world.

Educated at St Paul's Girls' School, she went on to read English at Newnham College, Cambridge, and then qualified as a doctor and trained as a psychiatrist, working in London hospitals through the 50s and early 60s, before combining the two educational backgrounds by becoming an editor for Penguin Books. This particular characteristic may come directly from Storr's professional background. Though externally so different, they show Storr's skill and enthusiasm as a story teller as well as reflecting her ability to create characters of remarkable insight, whose stories she tells in parallels of fantasy and reality. Both are timeless and, though published in 19 respectively, are in print as 'classics', with Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf remaining a staple of the curriculum in primary schools. The second, for older readers, is an extended fantasy, as Marianne, convalescing and so with time on her hands, creates and enters a dream house where she meets Mark and faces the threat of destruction.

The Catchpole Story by Catherine Storr