Shirley Hughes on Dogger’s 40th birthday
At 90, and with one of her books reaching its 40th anniversary, Shirley Hughes tells Juliet Rix that she has no plans to retire
In Shirley Hughes’s large west London townhouse, the front hall is full of pictures, the sitting room a veritable gallery, even the loo is papered with a vast array of images. From children’s drawings to bright painted landscapes, portraits to family photos and snippets from her own sketchbooks, it all seems wonderfully appropriate for the home of one of our most prolific and best-loved illustrators. Sole creator of more than 80 children’s stories and illustrator of many more, Hughes has, for more than half a century, captured childhood and gently contained, defined and celebrated it between the covers of her books.
Hughes turns 90 this week, and Dogger – the touching story of a toy dog lost (and, of course, eventually found) – is 40. The real Dogger, whose story first made Hughes’s name, sits comfortably on a box in the sitting room. A much-loved childhood companion of Hughes’s oldest son Ed (the journalist Ed Vulliamy), Dogger has a few bald patches, but is as bright-eyed as Hughes herself. “He’s been on show in several museums,” she smiles, “but he has retired from the celebrity circuit now.”
Hughes has not retired – and has no intention of doing so. She had a new book out a few weeks ago and has just delivered another: “90 doesn’t feel any different,” she insists. The loss of her husband, architect John Vulliamy in 2007 made far more difference.
“We used to go on wonderful holidays with our sketchbooks,” she remembers, “I don’t want to go anywhere now – without him. The doors of Heathrow don’t beckon. I trundle down to Tesco, that’s about as far as I get.”
Her studio is on the first floor of this large Notting Hill house where she has lived since 1954. “Notting Hill was cheap and run-down in those days, but there was none of the awful divide there is now.” She waves her hand at the large window: “We’d be looking at the blackened Grenfell Tower if it weren’t for that big green tree.”
The tree is in the communal garden where Hughes’s children used to play and where she still observes her neighbours’ children as she always has, watching how they move, sketching them, gathering her material. Above her drawing board is a poster of Alfie, Hughes’s most famous creation. He is, she insists, a composite of all the young children she has known across the years. By rights
Youngsters ‘should not be pressured to read. It’s not a competition’
Alfie, and little sister Annie Rose, should now be in their mid-30s, but Hughes looks bemused by the very idea; Alfie can’t grow up. In fact, 36 years on, he is about to start nursery. Hughes has just delivered the final artwork for Alfie Goes to Nursery, to be published next summer.
How much has changed in Alfie’s world since he first appeared in 1981, I wonder. “Well, the clothes have changed a bit,” says Hughes, “and there are scooters – and helmets – but the basic life of small children and how they relate to each other hasn’t really changed.” And that is the wonderful thing about Hughes’s best-loved stories; the lifestyle – milk floats driven by smiley milkmen, neighbours with open doors – may seem a bit quaint, but the themes of childhood are timeless. And the way the children’s little crises are handled by their harassed parents remains a wonderful model for good parenting. Hughes’s assistant Clare chips in to say she has heard of parents using them as such. Hughes shudders: “How terrifying!”
While the essence of childhood may be unchanging, Hughes worries about today’s youngsters: “They always have something to do… it is difficult to protect them from being overstimulated. My whole idea is to slow them down and get them to make a leisurely examination of a picture at their own pace.” They shouldn’t be pressured to read, she says: “It’s not a competition, though you’d think it was the way some parents go on.”
Certainly, Hughes hasn’t had much time for leisurely examination in the last few days – she’s been too busy with her anniversaries. She’s guest-hosted Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, recorded a Radio 3 With Great Pleasure (for broadcast on her birthday next Sunday), and attended a birthday party thrown by her publishers. An exhibition of her work opens at the Illustration Gallery on July 12 and there’ll be a family celebration… “Party party!” she grins.
Once the frenzy is over, Hughes will be back to work on her next book. Ruby in the Ruins is about a little girl in the Blitz and Hughes is drawing on her own memories of childhood in the Second World War. “I think I use my own childhood quite a lot,” she says, “but [usually] unconsciously.” Hughes and her two older sisters were brought up in the “posh” suburbs of Liverpool in a mock-tudor house with a big garden. It was all very genteel and class-conscious, and in her teens, “the pressure to go down to the tennis club in nice white shorts and get an engagement ring on your finger was quite something… I had to escape”.
Her childhood was never the secure, nuclear family Alfie lives in. Hughes’s father was a workaholic who ran a chain of department stores. He was “nice when I met him” but that wasn’t often and he died when Hughes was five. And then came the war. “My mother, quite a shy person, went from sitting in her nice garden with the maid bringing her tea to being this hard-pressed figure wearing an overcoat inside because it was so cold.”
Hughes’s characters are almost never modelled directly on real incidents or people (the exception is the long-haired, flaredtrousered babysitter George in Helpers, which Hughes admits is absolutely her teenage son Ed); they are imaginative composites of years of observation. Although Dogger was a real toy, for instance, he was never lost. The loss drew more on a day when Ed mislaid his favourite Teddy and another when Hughes herself as a very young child “threw my koala out of the window of a car in a sort of ‘moment’. I was so appalled that I’d done it, I didn’t say anything. So by the time we went back, he couldn’t be found.”
For her own children there was no TV in the first few years and even when they got a set, it was carefully regulated. “The moment Valerie Singleton disappeared at the end of Blue Peter and Dixon of Dock Green came on, the TV was smartly switched off!”
It doesn’t seem to have done the children any harm. Besides journalist Ed, Tom is a professor of microbiology, and Hughes’s daughter is the popular children’s author and illustrator Clara Vulliamy. Some of her exquisite childhood artwork adorns her mother’s walls. “I never really taught her,” muses Hughes, “I would just leave the colours in my palette and when she came home from school she could use them up – like scraping out the bowl after making a cake.” Mother and daughter recently worked together on the Dixie O’day series – Hughes writes and Vulliamy illustrates: “It’s the first time I’ve had an illustrator,” says Hughes laughing.
Hughes has seven grandchildren, the oldest, a surgeon, is 32, the youngest has just left school. “I am waiting for a great-grandchild,” she says, “I think they should get on with it!” In the meantime she has to settle for Alfie and Ruby and whoever comes next to her drawing board.
A special 40th anniversary edition of
Dogger has just been published by Penguin Random House (hardback £12.99, paperback with CD £7.99). Three new Alfie stories came out earlier this year in Alfie & Dad (hardback £11.99).