Below is a transcript of the speech given by Dame Jacqueline Wilson at the In The Picture "Picture this!" event held in London on 15 April 2008.

Hello everybody it's lovely to be here tonight however I feel slightly embarrassed and I really feel I should hide my head in shame when I came in here to the lovely reception I was meeting lots of different people, and I met Becky, who has written to me before taking me to task about the way I don't have enough children and young people with disabilities in my books, and when I do try, I don't actually get it spot on.

Normally if people criticise me, I'm quite fierce back but actually Becky has certainly got a point and so I have Becky's address and we are going to get in touch and work together and maybe next year or the year after back I will come and proudly we will have our book together! And that will be absolutely great. You would think I would have slightly more insight as to what it's like to have a disability because when I was five or six, I had very bad measles - everybody thinks measles is perfectly ordinary illness and you get better quickly maybe I was always a drama queen because I didn't get better. I was ill in bed for weeks, and then when eventually I got a little bit better I actually couldn't walk and I just wasted away in bed. So for about two or three weeks my mum borrowed a wheelchair, I don't know from the hospital or somewhere, and pushed me around. I do remember how strange it was to be at a slightly different height, but also... I do remember a lot of adults treating me as if I was a toddler, and I did feel very odd about this, you would have thought that I would have wanted to remember this, and to actually have it inside my head so that much later on when I became a writer I could use this experience however there we go again, I probably will do so in the future. Cherie mentioned Enid Blyton. When I was in bed with my measles, I don't think I had learnt to read then, and then people were odd with measles and felt you should look after your eyes, and so my long suffering father had to read to me and he read the Magic Far Away Tree, and the two sequels and then after going through the books he searched the book shelves and eventually came upon David Copperfield which was certainly a change from Enid Blyton! But he read to me through those long horrible weeks of measles and turned me into a book worm, as soon as I could actually use my eyes officially, I started reading. I was the sort of child that read all the children's classic. And wonderful books though they are, if you look back at them, and reread them, it again makes you realise that people weren't always absolutely thinking what they were doing when they dealt with children with disabilities. Because for instance one of my most favourite books is The Secret Garden about bad tempered Mary who goes to the huge house in Yorkshire with 100 rooms and she discovers down the corridor Colin who has tantrums and something unspecified wrong with his back, and he has to use a wheelchair. Yet, lo and behold the moment Mary has got him out into the secret garden and he has breathed in the fresh air he gets out of his wheelchair and walks. Then I read Heidi about the little girl who goes up the Swiss mountain to live with her grandfather and then she goes to stay with Clara, a rich little girl who uses a wheelchair. And immediately Heidi sees if only she could get up the Swiss mountains and see grandfather she would be up out of the wheelchair indeed that happens. And my other favourite book as a child was What Katie Did about a huge naughty family of children and Katie is the oldest and naughtiest and told never to go on the swing because it's broken. She does and falls off, breaks her back, and she has two years of lying in bed and pushed around in her wheelchair until her cousin Helen taught her how to be saintly enough and then she rises up out of the wheelchair. And I do see that we have nowadays to redress this a little and be much more realistic, sensible, and sensitive about children's needs. Of course when you read a children's book you want to see your own life reflected and you want it done properly, so... I am determined now in the future to do this. I do various work with children, with various disabilities, and I do a lot with the RN IB and as a patron of Living Paintings but obviously it's not enough.

I was going through all my books trying to think of which ones had children with disabilities. There's one that sadly isn't as well-known called Take a Good Look about a little girl who really can't see very much, she can only see as far as that, which is very much based on a friend of my daughter, then when she gets kidnapped she is brilliant at focusing in on the really pertinent details rather than being able to see where she is going, and how to get out of this situation. That's a little melodramatic, and there's a boy with Down’s syndrome in a book called Deep Blue which I thought was a good book but unfortunately it disappeared without trace. However of my more recent books, Lily in Sleepovers has profound learning disabilities, so we don't really know exactly what is going on inside her head. But she does, wonderfully, become part of the little sleepover gang and actually defeats offensive Chloe and makes all the other little girls understand she is on their side.

Then, the only one that got the tick of approval from Becky was Natasha in Worry Website who uses an electric wheelchair and uses an electronic device to be able to speak, and she's part of the class and so much wants to be part of the school concert. She and her friend devise way of doing this. But in the future watch this space! I promise there will be a book that everybody will recommend, and I have already met Zara, my second time because she went to my old school Coombe, and I have met John a cool customer with trendy hair! Hopefully, I will meet some of the other children, and if any of you have got any ideas to help me, please let me know. I have been inspired by this project, and I think it reminds us all that disabled children are everywhere, they are in the classroom, they are in our road, at the park, and they are at the seaside, parties, let's keep them all In The Picture. Thank you.

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