I Wish I’d Written: Kathy Henderson

I wish I’d written Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are and Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking and that big Golden Book edition of The Iliad and the Odyssey illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen I got for my ninth birthday, and more. But what they all have are pictures and words inseparable.

So I’ll go back to the beginning and the first book I remember really being mine. I’m in the garden and – precious things, books – this one’s got brown paper over the covers onto which I’ve copied the first picture from inside. It’s got this brown cover-over-the-cover because I won’t put it down. No, I’m walking about, dropping it sometimes, climbing trees, sitting in bushes. I’m not going to put it down because I can, just about, read some of what’s in it by myself. They’re rhymes: funny ones, clever ones, story ones, some I can’t really understand but they make the world seem more interesting somehow. And they stick in my mind, or is it my ear, until suddenly not only can I read them, I can say bits of them myself, just as if I had written them, ‘The microbe is so very small/ You cannot make him out at all’ And everyone seems to think that’s rather good.

That might have been the day I became a reader, and perhaps a writer and an illustrator too. And the book? It was Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Verses.

‘Oh! Let us never, never doubt/ What nobody is sure about!’

Cautionary Verses (978-0099295310) by Hilaire Belloc, original illustrations by B.T.B., new illustrations by Quentin Blake is published by Red Fox at £6.99 pbk.

Kathy Henderson’s latest book, The Dragon with a Big Nose (978 1 4088 1945 6) is published by Frances Lincoln at £6.99 pbk and is shortlisted for the CLPE Poetry Award.