12 March 1994 Greendale was the perfect village. It had a beaming vicar and smiling children. Then John Cunliffe created Postman Pat

When John Cunliffe sat down in the back bedroom of his home in the Lake District 15 years ago and started to write a story about a postman called Pat, something very strange began to happen. Cunliffe was not aware of it at the time. He was writing, as he always did, for the fun of it, for the change it gave him from teaching at the local primary school, and it was only years later that he could look back and begin to see the outline of what was really going on.

He was alone at the time. His only child was at boarding school down the road near Kendal, his wife was a mature student at university hundreds of miles away, and he was pretty fed up. So when he settled in behind his old black Triumph typewriter, he started to create a world that was a little bit more comforting and, in doing that, he struck on something bigger.

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