Authorgraph No.26: Shirley Hughes
Perhaps the best-known story about Shirley Hughes is also the least typical – how she came to write and illustrate ‘Dogger’ which won her the Kate Greenaway Medal in 1978. ‘It was one of those ideas which fell out of a clear sky. In fact, he fell out of a cupboard which I happened to be tidying at the time. He is a very elderly stuffed toy (he’d been living in quiet retirement for about fifteen years) and he immediately reminded me of a drama which once happened in our family. It seems to have happened in a good many other families all over the world, too: a much-loved toy lost at bed-time, to the desolation of its small owner.’ Thanks to ‘Dogger’ the world’s small owners of stuffed toys now have a great comfort in time of need. Inspiration seldom drops in her lap that easily, however. ‘Your best ideas come at your drawing-board,’ she says, ‘when you’re actually working.’
Her own drawing-board is set up on an oblong kitchen table in a back bedroom of the house in Holland Park where she’s lived for almost thirty years. In other hands it would be rather a grand house. As part of a handsome, mid-Victorian terrace enclosing at the rear quite an acreage of communal lawns and trees, it’s the sort of residence much favoured by rising merchant bankers. As Shirley’s house, though, it very much reflects her personality: warm, welcoming, and full of surprises and humour. On its walls, for example, a sketch by William Nicholson or Edward Ardizzone is likely to be hung up alongside a dazzling collage made in plasticine by one of her own children when young. Dogger himself keeps watch over Shirley’s workplace. This has one crucial feature. ‘The light – it catches the most marvellous London light.’
She puts it to good use. In addition to the Kate Greenaway, she won the Children’s Rights Workshop ‘Other Award’ in 1976 and the Dutch Silver Slate Pencil Award in 1980. Yet, according to Margaret Meek. ‘her talent is underestimated because of its very distinctiveness. A retrospective exhibition of her many modes would show her to be indeed a versatile and distinctive artist in the great tradition of English illustration.’ It’s easy, in fact, to overlook her originality. Who else could have handled so well the open-ended, strip-cartoon format of Up and Up, a text completely without words? Or worked the wiles of picture-book design on older children with Here Comes Charlie Moon? Or used the actual form of the book, the gutter down the middle where the pages are sewn, as part of the story in Alfie Gets in First? More than most illustrators with a secure reputation, Shirley Hughes believes in taking risks.
She was born in Liverpool and grew up in the coastal town of Hoylake. Her father, a prosperous businessman, died when she was four. Despite having no background in the arts her mother seems to have had an instinct for promoting creativity in her children – Shirley and two older sisters. ‘We played, we mucked about, we dressed up, we made up stories and acted them to anyone we could make watch. We did a lot of writing, we did a lot of drawing… nobody ever interfered. We were just expected to get on with it. It was an ideal background for encouraging imagination.’ Another advantage was her mother’s good taste in books which brought an early acquaintance with illustrators like Rackham, Dulac and Heath Robinson. Comics and annuals were also permitted. Nor were these restricted to Tiger Tim and Pip, Squeak and Wilfred. ‘I remember being in bed with measles when I was about nine. A lady friend gave me a whole pile of old American comics which were very different from the sort of things we’d been brought up with. Little Abner, Blondie and Dagwood, all that stuff, I lapped it up – we used to scour Birkenhead market looking for more.’ Plans to send her to boarding school like her sisters were interrupted by the war. This remains a vivid memory. ‘Liverpool was bombed every night at nine o’clock. You could actually see the docks burning from where we were. You couldn’t go anywhere. Yet we did get to the point where we could go to the movies… to the cinema. That was a tremendous influence on me. It was the most thrilling thing in the world. We used to fight our way down miles and miles of windy prom to the Winter Gardens. My mother didn’t realise that the cinema was about the most unsafe place to be in an air-raid. As we sat there, enthralled, plaster would be falling like snow. We saw just about every movie going… Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Buster Keaton. Buster Keaton was especially impressive. The silent movies of the great clowns are stuffed with picture-book ideas because it’s all visual. I look at them even now and idea after idea comes to me.’
By the age of sixteen, with her talent for drawing already obvious Shirley left her local grammar school for Liverpool Art School. Then, after a brief period designing costumes at Liverpool Rep, she enrolled at the Ruskin School, Oxford. It was a very academic course with no formal training in illustration at all. Nevertheless, her ambition to become an illustrator grew – undeterred by a remark of one of her tutors who predicted ‘You’ll either make it to the top or you won’t make it at all’. He also wrote to three art-editors on her behalf, though, launching her into the tough world of the freelance. Years of hard slog followed illustrating education books, readers, stories with titles like ‘A Madcap Brownie’. All of it was good training and none of it was well-paid. ‘I still remember the wonderful moment when full-colour jacket art-work went up to ten quid! It was the equivalent of being in rep – there was no spotlight on me, I could concentrate on just trying to get better. It was a wonderful learning experience.’ Also invaluable was the experience of raising three children – now grown up into a film-maker, a micro-biologist and a painter – whom she observed so closely she feels she’s able to draw youngsters from the inside out. ‘We all live off the childhood of our children, don’t we, and our own childhood. Somehow I managed to keep up my freelance work and still meet deadlines, urged on by my architect husband John who supported me like mad and never doubted what I wanted to do for a single moment.’ And steadily the success came – being chosen by Noel Streatfeild to illustrate her books about the Bell family, the Naughty Little Sister books with Dorothy Edwards, the story-anthologies edited by the Corrins, and of course her own Lucy and Tom books now enjoying something of a renaissance.
She loves her work. It combines all her enthusiasms – for storytelling, for visual narrative, for comics, movies and the theatre. Yet the basic difficulty always remains the same: how to retain in the finished work the sheer vitality of her first roughing-out which she does ‘at a rate of knots in a few days’. Her method is to ‘put down a monotone drawing in a sort of Vandyke brown and then I work up wash after wash after wash to get tonality, a recession of going back into the pictures. It’s difficult because you’re concentrating terribly hard on the drawing and all the details which takes much, much longer. Yet in the end you’ve got to bring it back to the flow you’ve got in the first rough. Every artist has this problem, I suppose, but I always tend to think it’s just me.’ What she hopes to communicate even to the youngest reader is sheer excitement – the ‘feel and smell of the page, the shapes and patterns of the words and pictures as well as their content’.
Not that she thinks illustration is solely, or even mainly, for the youngest readers. ‘I want to do books which are not picture-books but are very close to the picture-book experience for older children. I had a bit of a go with Charlie Moon but what I’m after now is a mixture of speech-balloons, stories, theatre, strip-cartoons and film; breaking the page up in all sorts of ways as a kind of four-decker narrative happening at once. It’s been very exciting and has taken a long time to do because I’ve written it so many times and spent ages working on the design.’ For this latest project she’s come up with two new characters called Chips and Jessie who seem already to have taken on a life of their own. We’ll see the final product early next year. Judging by the roughs, another Hughes tour-de-force is in the offing, but success even for so established a figure can never be guaranteed. ‘The public quite rightly wants to know what it’s getting so it’s always difficult to break new ground. It takes time and effort and patience… I’m keen to expand the form even into the secondary age-range. Many children, I know, find it very hard to sort things out when they’ve only got a text to go on. I think there’s a great deal of mileage in the old annuals format, where you knew the characters in advance from a strip-cartoon and so were much more willing to pluck up courage and read the text.’
Through her own books, through talks and lectures, through her work on panels like the Mother Goose Award, Shirley strives to communicate her own enthusiasm and optimism about the future of illustration. ‘I’d love to see more and more young artists prepare to take up black-and-white drawing, for example. They’d have it made if they developed this skill – though it does take about twenty years. Yet the real heights of happiness are when you’ve got a good job to do and a good pen and you don’t have to think about technique because by now your hand is just an extension of your brain so everything works like a treat… that’s wonderful. That’s bliss. That’s why it’s always worth hanging in there.’
Already she’s illustrated more than two hundred books. Yet for her ‘there’s still no excitement to compare with sitting down in front of a blank piece of paper on the drawing board. You always hope that this next one is going to be the best ever.’