
Happy Birthday, Winnie and Wilbur
As she approaches her 35th birthday, Clive Barnes celebrates the lasting appeal of Winnie the Witch.
It’s Winnie the Witch’s 35th birthday, or at least it’s thirty-five years since Winnie and Wilbur, her long-suffering black cat, first appeared in a picture book. Should there be a birthday party for Winnie and Wilbur, and surely there should be, then the proud parents ought certainly to be there: Valerie Thomas, the author, and Korky Paul, the illustrator. There should also be someone from the publisher, Oxford University Press. They all have their proper credits on the pages of that first brilliant book, but there is someone who is not acknowledged there, who had perhaps the greatest responsibility for that auspicious birth. This was Ron Heapy, who died in 2017, the late lamented and far-sighted editor at OUP who gave the original text to Korky Paul to illustrate.
Valerie was a teacher and Winnie the Witch first came to Ron for possible inclusion in the inaugural Oxford Reading Tree, a graded reading scheme which will now be familiar to teachers across the country. The first books in the scheme were published in 1986, just the year before Winnie and Wilbur’s debut, and, if you look closely at the text of that first book, with its carefully controlled vocabulary and repeated words and phrases, you can see how it might have become just one more rung on Oxford’s reading ladder. However, Ron’s choice of Korky Paul as possible illustrator changed the story’s fate. Korky was yet to make his name and Winnie gave him his first major opportunity to introduce a style that was bold, inventive, busy, characterful, funny and anarchic, and perfectly suited to filling a double page spread. Whether Korky’s ideas were what Ron had expected, we don’t know, but presented with them, Ron saw that he had a proper picture book in the making.
What was it that made that first book so exciting and beguiling? Well, some of it came from the original text and some from what Korky madeof it. Winnie is more a female wizard than the kind of witch we might recognise from the tales of the Brothers Grimm. She has a magic wand and is an inveterate spell caster, ABRACADABRA in bold is splashed across the pages of every book. And, inevitably the spells go wrong or turn out unexpectedly. She is engagingly well-meaning but often does not think things through, to put it politely. This is established from the beginning of that first story, when the solution to the problem of a black cat in a black house, when you are in possession of a magic wand, should be obvious to most child readers. Yet it takes Winnie the entire book to get to the answer. The enjoyment for the reader, but certainly not Wilbur, is what happens in between.
So Korky had something to work with and what he made of it is remarkable. Against type, Winnie is a young, tall, slim witch. She may have a stereotypical long nose but it’s very red at the end as if she has a permanent cold. She has a relaxed and eccentric fashion taste, and definitely nothing in black. You might wonder, does her dress have a white lacy frill or has she not pulled up her petticoat? And what about those shocking orange and yellow striped tights? Korky gives her a wizard’s cone to wear, decorated with stars and a sliver of a moon but it’s bent at the tip, and stays like that at various angles and twists through every adventure for the next thirty-five years. And her house is no ordinary house. Apart from being black, it’s a baroque stately pile that Citizen Kane might envy and which seems to change shape from book to book and, wouldn’t you know it, returns to monochrome for every book after the first. If the first book had a very small cast of characters, then Korky made up for that by filling the house with odd utensils and curious creatures, including some very odd-looking birds. When later books took Winnie and Wilbur away from the domestic scene, Korky peopled them with a cast of other eccentrics, some of whom had wandered in from the other picture books that he was by then busy creating.
The greatest gift that Valerie gave to Korky is probably Winnie’s relationship with the long-suffering Wilbur. Wilbur doesn’t speak in the first story and he hasn’t spoken since, except a strangled ‘Meeooow’ and, occasionally, a more comfortable ‘Purr, purr, purr’, but Korky has provided him with a range of expressions from exasperation, through forbearance to fur-electrocuted shock and fear. But he’s not always on the worst end of Winnie’s spells; sometimes he’s more than a little amused by the scrapes that Winnie gets herself into, sometimes a fully signed up partner in crime, and sometimes a bit of a mischief himself. Creating an invisible trip hazard by lying across the black hall in the first book, he is surely hoping to get his revenge for Winnie sitting on him the page before.
There were nine years between that first book and the appearance of the second Winnie book, but that long a gap was never to be repeated, as adventure has followed adventure. More than twenty years after Winnie and Wilbur first appeared, and almost as many picture books, as testimony to their enduring popularity, Oxford released a series of novels for younger readers featuring the pair, written by Laura Owen, with Korky’s illustrations.
Although the first book was simply Winnie the Witch, and Winnie continued to have star billing in their many adventures, Wilbur has always been by her side, whether she was at the seaside or in space. Belatedly, in 2016, the series was rebranded as Winnie and Wilbur and only last year, the story of their first meeting, Winnie’s Best Friend, was published. In this Wilbur gets to ‘Purr, purr, purr’ more often than he has ever done before (or after), marking the beginning of a friendship whose mad escapades have delighted parents and children ever since.
Clive Barnes has retired from Southampton City where he was Principal Children’s Librarian and is now a freelance researcher and writer.