Grandpa’s Slippers trod winning path
Joy Watson children’s author b February 21, 1938 d October 4, 2021
Great stories come from humble beginnings. In children’s author Joy Watson’s case, it was a pair of tatty old slippers. Who’d have thought the sight of her husband’s slippers with ‘‘holes in their soles’’, propped up on the hearth, would inspire a yarn that would sell hundreds of thousands of books all over the world.
Not bad when you consider a first print run for a New Zealand picture book these days is probably about 2500.
The simple but cleverly told tale of Grandpa and his slippers ‘‘ratty and tatty, a little bit mouldy and a little bit smelly’’ was so successful it spawned four more books, about Grandpa’s cardigan, shed, shorts and cat.
The books, all illustrated by Wendy Hodder and published by Scholastic, have been translated into te reo Mā ori, French and Spanish, and are still in print 30 years after their first publication.
That’s a lot of mileage out of a pair of old slippers.
But Watson had mastered the art of being able to see the funny side of something quite ordinary and spin a tale out of it. That was her superpower.
Born Valerie Joy Evans in Gisborne in 1938, she was always known as Joy. Her father was a farm manager who travelled around for work. She and her three brothers lived in many parts of the country before settling in central Hawke’s Bay.
Her mother, who also worked on the farm while raising the children, was one of the Golden Queens – a women’s collective who used to bottle fruit for young mothers in need. A work ethic was instilled into Joy at a young age.
The whole family were writers – of diaries and letters – young Joy in particular. She was sent to St Mary’s College in Wellington for her secondary school years and later went on to become a dental nurse, working in and around the Dannevirke area.
It was at a New Year’s Eve dance in Mā hia that she met her husband, Kevin Hayes Watson, a young pharmacy student who would later become her muse.
They married and moved to Hastings, where they bought a pharmacy and proceeded to build a family of nine children.
Family life was an organised affair. Watson ran a tight ship. The children were up before 6am completing their chores, doing their music practice.
She was an avid reader. Her children remember her reluctantly closing her book when they got home from school.
Reading was a family pastime. As the children washed and dried the mountain of dishes that such a large family of 11 naturally generated every night, one would be assigned reading-aloud duty.
At first they didn’t want to listen, but the story would work its magic and the gaggle of children would hang around the kitchen long after the dishes were washed
‘‘She was able to enter the mind of a child. She really understood them.’’
and dried to hear more, daughter Maryanne Scott recalls.
The Railway Children, Little House on the Prairie, all the classics. No-one wanted to be on dishes. Reading was the better job.
The house was full of books, but Watson was a great library user too. She would take the children to the Hastings Public Library every Saturday, returning cartons and cartons of books and leaving with another haul.
While her professional writing career began later on, she was always writing. Her children were her audience.
During school holidays Watson, usually with a babe in arms, would write the children a rhyming play which they would learn off by heart, make sets and costumes for and perform before school started again.
She wrote cryptic clues for treasure hunts held at each birthday, which was pretty much a monthly gig for the large family. She wrote rhyming poems for each of their parties. Nonsense poems inspired by the world around her. There were twists on the carpool; finger food took a sinister turn.
When one day her husband put his feet up on the hearth, Watson said: ‘‘Kevin! You need new slippers.’’
And right there the Grandpa’s Slippers series was hatched. Grandpa’s Slippers, which won the Gaelyn Gordon Award for a Much-Loved Book in 2000, was followed by Grandpa’s Cardigan, Grandpa’s Shorts (winner of the 2002 Children’s Choice Award), Grandpa’s Shed and finally Grandpa’s Cat.
The original story was by far the most popular, and has more than 220,000 copies in print. It has been sold in hardback, paperback, as an enlarged edition for classroom use, and in foreign language editions.
The paperback edition has been reprinted 29 times since its publication in 1989. The four other titles between them make up a further 220,000 books.
The series has certainly shown longevity – not many New Zealand children’s books remain in print for 30 years, according to Scholastic, which has a bumper hardback treasury of all five titles scheduled for publication in 2022.
Scholastic, her longtime publisher, said the secret to her success was that she’d tapped into something that was very real. It was a quiet look into someone else’s life. People could recognise themselves in the story.
Publisher Lynette Evans said the company had been ‘‘very touched by the outpouring of love from Joy’s many fans to our Facebook post, which reached over 250,000 people. The hundreds of comments left by readers reinforce how beloved her books are’’.
Watson was most chuffed with her Children’s Choice Award. If children voted for it, then that was all right by her. It was always about the children, eldest daughter Liz O’Connor says. ‘‘She was able to enter the mind of a child. She really understood them.’’
Having Grandpa as the main protagonist was a way to include her husband, who was often away at work, says O’Connor. Watson wanted him to share in her success in a very visible way.
Occasionally, he would come up with ideas for Grandpa’s next adventure, once suggesting there was potential for a story about him searching for some old shorts.
By the time the Grandpa books came out, her own children were mostly grown up. She took great pleasure in being invited to read in schools, sometimes accompanied by Kevin wearing those tatty slippers for maximum effect.
She would often get a list of the children’s names before the class visit so she could write a rhyme using each child’s name.
Watson wrote 15 books in total. She and Kevin wrote a musical together, which was performed in local schools.
Her nine children, 28 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren have boxes of unpublished short stories and journals she wrote over the years. A treasure trove of joy.
The Alzheimer’s that began a decade back started to rob Watson of her beloved words a year ago.
O’Connor would often recite rhymes to her mother, telling her afterwards, ‘‘You wrote that, Mum,’’ to which Watson would say ‘‘Did I? They’re really good!’’
As her Alzheimer’s took a tighter grip, she was unable to read her stories in the classroom as she’d loved to do over the years.
She did go along to her greatgrandson’s class, though, and listened as the teacher read Grandpa’s Slippers.
Those familiar words, those ‘‘old slippers, with the stitching undone’’. When the teacher had finished reading, Watson remarked: ‘‘Do you know, that’s the best book I’ve ever heard.’’ – By Bess Manson