In the beginning what made me a storyteller was not so much a place as the lack of a place.

My father was a Methodist minister. Methodists had a custom where every four or five years each congregation dismissed their current minister and got a new one – the idea being that they didn’t get stuck with one they didn’t like. What it meant for my brother, my sister and me was that every few years we had to leave home and start again.

In the early 1970s we moved to Wibsey, a village on the outskirts of Bradford. Yorkshirefolk, I found, had a strong sense of identity and were intensely proud of their birthplace. The organist at the church explained to me that since I wasn’t actually from Yorkshire I would have to prove myself good enough to live there. I was 13. He was an elderly man and this was his dry northern humour.

My brother and I went to school in a bleak council estate, Buttershaw. Ten years later it would achieve fame as the place that produced the playwright Andrea Dunbar who wrote Rita, Sue and Bob Too. At school I brushed up against the life that Dunbar described – no money, little future, casual sex. A sweet, pretty girl lent me her diary to read. She wrote about getting fresh with one of her mother’s boyfriends. She was, I suppose, 14.

As a dull, unadventurous daughter of the manse it seemed unlikely that I was ever going to fit in at Buttershaw comprehensive. So I set about systematically disappearing. I made a sort of ghost of myself to walk the corridors and sit in the classrooms. Meanwhile I stayed in my head and told myself stories about the characters I saw on television. My arrival in Bradford had coincided, fortuitously, with the start of Arthur of the Britons, an ITV TV series in which King Arthur was reimagined as a Celtic warlord fighting guerrilla battles against the Saxon invasion. It had two heroes who looked like rock stars, except with swords. If you were 13 it was the most perfect television programme ever made. So, while I appeared to the casual onlooker to be in 70s Bradford, I had actually gone weeks ago to live in fifth-century Wales.

Then an odd thing happened; Bradford and Arthur of the Britons began to merge into each other. On every wooded hill that surrounded the city – there are many – I visualised Celtic warriors on horseback picking their way through the trees. The West Yorkshire landscape became the landscape of lost ancient Britain.

This was the paradox of Bradford (or perhaps the paradox of me): that while it made me feel more of an outsider than ever, I also loved it. It was – and is – full of drama.

Buttershaw was filled with dogs that either had no owners or else declined to acknowledge the owners they had. From time to time they formed into a pack and raced from place to place. They were led by an enormous white alsatian. We watched them surge past from the school windows while instructions came over the tannoy not to venture out until they had gone.

Wibsey teetered on a hillside, high above the city centre. The earth felt insubstantial, the sky immense. Perspectives of blackened terraces came to abrupt endings; streets seemed to fall into the sky. We told each other that our weather came straight from Siberia. Once it snowed on the first of June.

The most magnificent buildings in Bradford were Victorian, black with age and in various states of decay. Derelict mills were everywhere, with empty windows full of nothing but sky. We lived in the ruins of a lost civilisation. Glory and romance were in the past, almost out of reach, but there were still warriors in the woods if you believed hard enough.

• The Ladies of Grace Adieu by Susanna Clarke is published by Bloomsbury.