Retire at 91? NEVER!
Says beloved children’s author Shirley Hughes who, 58 years and more than 50 books later, is still writing
Shirley hughes is still getting to grips with Twitter. she doesn’t type her missives on the social media site. instead, her assistant photographs shirley’s handwritten notes and exquisite illustrations and posts those.
This low-fi approach has clearly struck a chord — at 91, shirley has amassed 12,000 Twitter followers.
But then, shirley, who was awarded the first ever lifetime Achievement Award by the BookTrust in 2015 for writing more than 50 children’s books, refuses to regress into old age.
she has twice won the Kate greenaway Medal (the Oscar for children’s illustrators) and last year was appointed CBe. she has also guestedited radio 4’s Woman’s hour (her passion topics were the importance of public libraries and making hats) — and has two new books in the pipeline.
retirement isn’t on the agenda. ‘i’ve been a widow for 11 years now and work is my routine — it’s really held me together,’ she says, with a smile.
A mother of three and grandmother of seven, shirley is at her workroom every morning by 10am, having done her stretching exercises. she clocks off at 2pm, then takes a walk to Tesco or to have tea with friends.
her guilty pleasure is BBC’s Flog it!, though she’s been gripped by Channel 4’s fly-on-the wall show The secret life Of 5 year Olds — ‘the power struggles’ between the children providing research material for her writing.
generations of children adore shirley’s books. she has sold more than 12million copies worldwide, including the exploits of Alfie (her most famous creation) and Dogger, the story of a lost toy dog. illustrating in pen, paint and chalk, she evokes the everyday concerns of small children — a landscape of scraped knees and school fetes.
Although her line drawings are quintessentially english, she takes inspiration from old black-and-white cinema, especially Buster Keaton and Forties American film noir.
NOW, 58 years after the publication of her first book, there are subtle modern touches — parents wear jeans and there are mobile phones.
But the landscape of childhood looks pretty much the same and she never dumbs down. her task today is to get children away from their screens.
‘My role in life is to slow them down, make them pore over the drawings and really look.’
Modestly, she regards herself as a late starter. While she was bringing up three children in the Forties and Fifties, illustrators such as Quentin Blake were ‘like a Mercedes’ overtaking in the fast lane, she recalls wryly.
And she didn’t write her first novel, hero On A Bicycle, a thriller for teenagers, until the age of 84, four years after the death of her beloved husband of 50 years, architect John Vulliamy, in 2007. ‘i was OK during the week. i’d go in the workroom. But the weekends hung really heavy, so i started writing a novel at the kitchen table to make them bearable.’
We meet at shirley’s townhouse in West london, where she has lived for the past 64 years. you can tell that this is the house of an illustrator. There’s a hand-printed message taped to the door — ‘Welcome, Please Knock loudly’ with a drawing of a natty dog and a bear in matching suits.
When she and John first moved to Notting hill, friends tried to warn them off. ‘everyone said: “it’s too rough. you can’t live north of the park, no i’m sorry”,’ she recalls, laughing. Now, her neighbours are hedge fund managers and millionaires.
she lives alone, but her son, journalist ed Vulliamy, has an office in the basement.
her other children are Tom, a professor of microbiology, and Clara, an author-illustrator.
Although shirley insists she is slowing down, she’s sharp as a tack as she darts swiftly around the house. she shows me her firstfloor studio with a balcony overlooking a large communal garden, where she used to watch her three children playing while she worked at her desk.
she has always drawn from life and spent a lot of time with a sketchbook sitting by sandpits or ‘larking about’ in the park.
‘i’d watch how children move, he way they crouch down, peer at something on the ground, then all jump up like a flock of birds.’
Today, she laments that there are far fewer children running about outside: they’re off learning Mandarin, being pushed towards their next academic achievement. shirley is refreshingly suspicious of perfect parents.
What’s noticeable is how multicultural her early books were. ‘i got an award for being the first person to put black children in a playground in my book, lucy And Tom. They were there, playing, so of course, i drew them in.’ hughes was born in 1927 into a middleclass family on Merseyside. her father founded the TJ hughes department store, but died aged 45, when shirley was five.
she suspects she’d never have become an artist if she hadn’t grown up during the war, making her own fun. ‘As a child, i would create my own magazines and there were, of course, the movies — the only glamorous thing in an otherwise dreary life.’
she left school at 16 — ‘i’m terribly badly educated’ — and studied dressmaking with a view to designing theatre costumes. Back then, college was a way for nice girls to fill some time before they got married.
‘The idea was that you went down to the tennis club in a pair of rather lovely shorts and got an engagement ring on your finger.’ One of her old tutors even said of a fellow student: ‘she hasn’t got a very good diploma, but at least she has got her Mrs.’ That is, her title of ‘Mrs’ — she’d got engaged!
When shirley’s engagement ring didn’t materialise, she escaped to ruskin school of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford.
Around this time, she met her husband, John. in fact, a blocked drain brought them together. she was visiting a friend and her baby and found them surrounded by foul, rising water.
A charming young man from the flat upstairs came to the rescue, rolling up his ‘beautiful clean shirtsleeves’ to unblock the drain. ‘The dirty water glugged away. The sun came out and the baby stopped crying. i thought: “This man knows what he’s doing.” ’
They married and shirley worked as a struggling freelance illustrator. she was lucky to snatch three hours a day doing illustrations in between school-runs and meals.
‘i was determined never to be late on a deadline. Nobody was going to accuse me of being slowed down by having three children to look after.’
in 1960, at age 33, she plucked up the courage to approach a publisher with her own picture book, lucy And Tom’s Day.
Publishers warned that her drawings ‘were much too english to be accepted abroad’, but she proved them wrong.
it was Dogger in 1977, the story of a little boy who loses his stuffed dog, that became an international success story.
AND then, in 1981, Alfie, her most famous creation, arrived on the scene, a small, determined four-year-old, the hero of a thousand scrapes.
Today Alfie is ‘the big moneyspinner’, with Alfie books respresenting a quarter of total sales. Which may well be why her next book, Alfie At Nursery school, is the 12th instalment.
Once, children’s publishing was a niche area. Now, it’s a major industry. she loves Philip Pullman and Jacqueline Wilson, but winces at ‘David Walliams, who makes a million a book. he’s so prolific. if only i could,’ she sighs, ‘but it takes me too long.’ As she does all her own illustrations by hand, her books are a labour of love. That’s why they appeal to so many.
Modern, curious and engaged, shirley strikes me as the very best kind of role model.
she’s seen life change so much for women — and watches in awe as her daughter and daughters-inlaw juggle work and family.
As for the Twitter generation, she tells me her granddaughters are very independent. ‘But they’ve got a whole new set of pressures. i was trying to get my engagement ring at the tennis club. Now, they’re expected to do everything.’
shirley herself will always work — ‘it’s a thing i was put on this earth to do’. But she adds: ‘it’s such a luxury to be able to stroll into my workroom, with the lovely light flooding in, and not have to think: “Oh god, who’s going to collect so-and-so from school?”’
Alfie At Nursery School by Shirley Hughes is out August 23 (Penguin Random House).