Hairy Maclary

In the first of a new series where we ask an artist or performer about how some of their most famous work happened, we talk to celebrated author Lynley Dodd.

"I thought, 'yes, are you going to get home without your friends actually getting hold of that meat?'." Lynley Dodd

‘Ihad been, I suppose, messing around with a little dog, a Hairy Maclary type, a sort of scruffy little terrier. For several years I’ve kept an ideas book, like most people do, and jot down things I’ve heard or read, silly happenings and so fourth.

An awful lot of my books have originated in actual happenings. [The ideas book] is an old publishers’ blank dummy so I write down anything that tends to take my fancy, even news items on the radio can give you ideas. Like the one that went round for a while saying that penguins all fall over when aeroplanes go over – [I had] visions of domino penguins all over the Antarctic. It’s that silly sort of thing that sets me off, and quite a few of my books have happened like that.

Hairy Maclary’s Bone began that way when I was buying the week’s meat for the family at the butcher... I had got back in the car and looked across at the butcher shop door, just sort of thinking of other things and suddenly I saw a dog walking away from the door with a great string of bones and meat hanging from its mouth.

Obviously the butcher had been very kind and as he carted it off up the road looking very pleased with himself, I thought, ‘yes, are you going to get home without your friends actually getting hold of that meat?’, and it was then that a little lightbulb went off in my head and I thought ‘oh, there’s the idea for Hairy No 2’. That’s what happened. This one was a big thing, sort of a labrador type. He was terribly proud.

Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy was an imaginary one.

He was the one that had been drifting about in my ideas book for quite a while.

The Hairy Maclary prototype went through quite a few variations before he sat there waiting for a book... I opened the [ideas] book and there was a little piece of paper I had done of a sketch of him on and it fell out... that made me say, ‘oh yes, I’ll do that one’.

I just tucked it in loosely. Because it was a relatively simple kind of cumulative story, I thought, ‘well that could be one I could do given the haste I’ve got to be in to get it done – this might be a good idea’. And that’s how he came about.’’

As told to Dani McDonald