If you’d have asked the 16 year old me what my least favourite subject at school was, I wouldn’t have hesitated before answering HISTORY. To be frank, (and I’m sorry Mr Birkitt, I know you did your best) it bored the pants off me. All those lists of dead kings and queens, the endless dates to memorise, the wars, the alliances, the Entente Cordial….UGH. I spent most history lessons doodling in my jotter such meaningful phrases as, I luv Paul 4eva. (BTW, Reader, I married him some 30 years later. Paul that is. Not my history teacher.) Unsurprisingly, I barely scraped a D in my O level. But I left school quite happy with the thought that I was consigning the subject of history to…well, history.

What my teenage self was totally oblivious to though, was the fact that history had, in its own sneaky way, already worked its magic on me outside of the classroom. The 1920s black velvet shoes that my Nan had worn to dances as a young woman, now fitted my feet perfectly, and every time I slipped them on I was transported in my imagination back to a time when Nan flirted with young men instead of knitting needles. What were the dance halls like? What music did they play? What did everyone talk about? Did the halls smell of stale perfume and sweaty armpits? Had deodorant even been invented?

I was enchanted by antique shops. Everyday objects from times gone by fascinated me. I wanted to know who sat around that old oak table. Who once carried that now battered suitcase? What did they pack in that suitcase and where did they travel to? How many eyes had stared into that 1950s mirror? What stories had it witnessed as it hung for years above some fireplace?

And old buildings. I just loved them. From ancient castles to Anne Frank’s house, from a derelict workhouse to a crumbling cottage by the sea. I would touch the walls of these buildings, wondering about all the other hands that had touched the walls before me. I would marvel at stone steps worn down by hundreds of thousands of footsteps, and all the while I would wish that the TARDIS was real so I could travel back in time and breath the same air, smell the same smells, taste the same tastes and hear the same sounds as all those people who had lived before. Social history captivated me. The real nitty gritty of the past. The real lives behind all the boring dates and wars.

In time, I filled my house (a medieval hovel, obviously) with pre-loved items. A 1950s kitchen cabinet, an old washboard, Victorian lace antimacassars, chipped enamel jugs and plates, old and scratched pine furniture, antique bedframes, meticulously embroidered tablecloths, Babycham glasses, a 1960s pineapple ice bucket. Anything in fact, with its own story embedded in its fabric.

I was well and truly bitten by the history bug (you’ll be relieved to hear that Mr Birkitt) and I hadn’t even realised it. History in all its dirty, colourful, wonderful, quirky, shocking glory. No wonder then that my first three YA novels (The Quietness, The Madness and The Beloved) were set in the Victorian era and dealt with the subjects of baby farming, Victorian sea-bathing and dippers and an obscure cult of Victorian women and girls known as the Agapemonites. I love nothing better than immersing myself in the period I am writing about. Reading old newspapers, recipe books and diaries, looking at old photographs, studying the costumes of the day and visiting museums. I try to recreate a vivid picture of the times by concentrating on the small details. The food that was eaten, the words that were spoken, the smells on the street, how people washed and went to the toilet. The everyday ordinariness of life that my history classes at school failed to touch upon.

For my fourth novel, V for Violet, I jumped forward in history to the 1960s. As a child of the 60s myself (born 1964 if you must know) it felt a little strange at first to be writing about things I still had a vague memory of; Blue Riband chocolate biscuits, Fine Fare supermarkets, Green Shield stamps, sixpences and watching Dixon of Dock Green on a black and white telly. But it also made me feel incredibly lucky to actually have those memories.

Violet is a teenager by the early 60s (having been born onto a pile of newspapers in her family’s fish and chip shop at the exact moment Winston Churchill announced Victory in Europe on the wireless). She is like any teenager, desperately trying to deal with the confusions of friendships, first love, family expectations and finding her place in the world. A world that reflects her own confusion. A world that straddles the old and the new, where the devastating after effects of the war are still evident in the bomb sites on street corners and within families that have lost fathers, sons and brothers and where a more tolerant attitude towards sex, new fashions and music are shocking the pre-war generation and are being embraced by the post-war generation. Violet deals with all this and more (a spate of local murders, a lost friendship, a deserter brother and the thrill of falling in love with a leather clad Rocker) in her own inimitable way.

The 60s was a vibrant, intense and challenging period of history and if anything, was more challenging to research than the Victorian era. Even though it is recent history, I was surprised by how much I learned along the way. Not least the fact that fish and chips were one of the few foods that were not rationed during the war.

History is all around us. We’re making it fresh every day. I wish I’d known that when I was younger. That history isn’t just about the Russian Revolution or the Italian Unification or having to learn all the prime ministers of Britain by heart. Learning what Winston Churchill had for his breakfast (whisky and cigar), how carpets were cleaned with tea leaves and how a woman called Phyllis Diller walked and measured every street in London herself before producing the first A-Z map is just as important (and much more interesting). Who knows? If social history had been on the curriculum when I was at school, I may have walked away with an A. If I looked up from scribbling in my jotter for long enough, that is.

Buy V is for Violet at the Guardian bookshop