For my second choice I’m going back to a story that was one of my stand-out reading experiences as a young boy. Aidan Chambers’ ghost story anthology for children, Ghost After Ghost, contains various tales that gave me an enjoyable shudder. But this one got right under my skin. Perhaps the East Anglian setting made it feel close to home – it is set in the Fens and I lived in north Norfolk at the time – but mostly it’s to do with John Gordon’s ability to convey the unforgiving bleakness of a fenland winter, the way we begin to sense the fear beneath the joshing schoolkids’ bravado as they dare each other to step out on to the frozen drainage dyke, and the skill with which he reveals a chilling realisation about the narrator. Maybe that twist would be more quickly apparent to an adult reader, but to the eight-year-old me it prompted a shiver down my spine as cold as the black water beneath the ice on a fenland canal.

First published in Ghost After Ghost, ed. Aidan Chambers, Kestrel, 1982, and collected in Catch Your Death and Other Stories, by John Gordon, Patrick Hardy, 1983; regularly anthologised thereafter