Many adults still think of Jacqueline Wilson as the queen of kids’ kitchen sink drama. She’s the bestselling author whose protagonists are children living in care or on tough council estates; whose heroines have to deal with absent parents, mental illness, homelessness, bereavement. She does grit-lit; it’s all about the contemporary social realism.

Yet her new novel Dancing The Charleston, out this month, is set in the 1920s and its heroine lives in a cottage on a grand country estate. Indeed, four of Wilson’s five most recent books have historical settings, including her 2017 story, Wave Me Goodbye, about World War 2 evacuees, the first stage adaptation of which opens at Theatr Clwyd this week.

There is a reason she is writing more historical fiction. "Up until secondary school age, I feel I still know more or less how children think," Wilson says, "but it gets harder the older they get because social media has changed things. This whole intensity about the way you look and what people think of you. I find it quite difficult to put myself in the mind of an average 13-year-old nowadays. But if I write about, say, Victorian 13-year-olds, I feel I’m much more aware of what life was like then.