A Friendly Looking Lot

When I was 6 I broke my arm and had to go to hospital to have it set in plaster of Paris. All this, both the breaking and the setting, made for an eventful day. When I got home there on the table was a book, a present to cheer me up (this was 1954 when presents for a not-birthday were perhaps rarer than they are now). The book was The Bell Family by Noel Streatfeild and I have it still. It’s the story of an impoverished vicar’s family who triumph over adversity by being, basically, nicer than their odious rich relations; there’s also a cleaning lady called Mrs Gage who has a heart of gold and drops her aitches. It seems very anachronistic now, but at 6 I was a sucker for heart-warming stories about gallant, united families. And I loved the illustrations, which were by Shirley Hughes.

Her line drawings perfectly capture the stoicism, pain or embarrassment of the put-upon Bells, as well as their good-humoured decency; she conveys just as convincingly the pomposity and snootiness of the cousins. She captures Mrs Gage’s affection for the family along with her double chin; she draws truculent children, twinkling adults, stern policemen, indulgent grandmothers. These are thoroughly executed line drawings featuring shabby wallpaper and kitchen sinks and a dog under the table – I attempted to paint some of them, I’m sorry to say, because they were calling out for colour. For me, the characters in the book could not possibly have looked any other way. Shirley Hughes’s drawings were the truth, and the reason I treasured the book. And then, twenty years later, starting to collect books for my own children, I recognized on some of the covers – all in colour now of course – the same look on the faces of both adults and children. It was a good-tempered, equable, making-the-best-of-it look, a look of reality, a look you believed in. Grown up now, with my world fundamentally changed, I was delighted that these people were still around. It was like finding old friends. Gone now were the cleaning ladies, the post-war frocks (and the vicars). Instead, mums and dads were wearing jeans and harassed expressions, living in not very tidy houses, looking as if they were a bit hard up but – like the Bell family – managing to get by and be cheerful. They were a friendly looking lot, affectionate parents, good neighbours, decent people. No one was glamorous and everyone was drawn truthfully: clothes were rumpled, shoes scuffed, bedrooms muddled; a contented toddler might be gurgling in his buggy, but the mother pushing him would be laden with shopping and looking as if she needed a cup of tea. An adorable chubby baby might be sitting in her high-chair – but would be dropping lumps of food all over the floor, having first put some in her hair. These were people and households one could identify with. Although her skill enabled her to draw anything – in The Faber Book of Nursery Stories (1966) she drew beautiful tigers, bears, apes and mice – Shirley Hughes clearly preferred drawing children, in all their moods. Collaborating with Dorothy Edwards on the My Naughty Little Sister series gave her ample rein to show the good, the bad and the grumpy. And having begun by illustrating books for other writers, Hughes soon found that she could write excellent books for children herself; being a mother of three clearly gave her plenty of material. Over the years she tried various formats – graphic books without any text, like the delightful Up and Up (1979) about a little girl flying over the rooftops to evade capture; or Chips and Jessie (1985), a mixture of text and comic strip, which gives the impression that she couldn’t help launching into a drawing at every opportunity. Towards the end of her long, productive life (she died earlier this year), she even wrote a novel for young adults. But it’s her books for young children for which she is best known and probably most loved. The Alfie series features a little boy – too small for school, on one fateful day too small to reach the door-knob – and his younger sister, Annie Rose. Each book describes an event in Alfie’s life which any child would recognize as huge. The crises are always resolved (and Alfie is always a little wiser as a result) but what is as satisfying as the resolution is the detail in the illustrations. The pictures are as generous with information as the text: in Alfie’s Feet (1982), as he stamps about the house with his new wellies on the wrong feet, we see baby Annie Rose thoughtfully unpacking the shopping basket and arranging vegetables across the floor, unnoticed by Mum (who has slipped off her too-tight shoes under the table) because she is chatting to Dad, while he carefully pours boiling water into the coffee pot. We learn something about each member of the family, and we know this is their reality. In Alfie Gets in First (1981), where Alfie finds himself locked inside the house and Mum locked out – a frightening situation for them both – Hughes cleverly shows us events inside and out on the same double spread. The scene starts quietly with Alfie unsure what to do while Mum calls instructions through the door, but as fear sets in Alfie dissolves into tears while Annie Rose on the outside has a proper meltdown. Gradually the outdoor scene becomes more and more crowded with helpers as Annie Rose’s wails get louder – and more and more heads are poked out of windows along the street – while indoors we see Alfie concentrating on carrying his little chair, which is going to enable him to reach the latch. He eventually opens the door and everybody breathes a sigh of relief. The final scene shows all those who’d tried to help crowded into the kitchen having a cup of tea together, Alfie receiving praise as the hero of the hour, Mum looking weary but relieved, Annie Rose cosily tucked up on a neighbour’s lap sucking a biscuit. In that drawing of seven individuals you see good humour, kindness to children and a sense of community. Community is a favourite theme for Hughes. The Trotter Street series is all about neighbourliness (reflecting now, in the 1980s, Britain’s changing communities) and perhaps this is why most of her stories take place in urban settings. Not for Hughes the idealized farm with spotless animals as background, or the fairytale castle in some distant land – she prefers terraced streets, crowded pavements and small gardens. She shows us parents walking their children to school – never driving – and we feel that the neighbours are all at least on nodding terms. We are not in a fantasy setting where people, according to their deserts, might shrink, turn green or explode. Other writers have made a good living exploring those possibilities, but Shirley Hughes never saw the need to go beyond the world that most children recognize: the neighbourhood and the home, where people are decent, predictable and kind. This is reassuring territory for the small child. She reflects social change – hardly surprising as she was born in 1927 and in the course of her ninety-four years saw plenty of it. Gradually more and more fathers are seen taking a share in parenting; in Dogger (1977) there is even a father waiting at the school gate (with, admittedly, seven mothers). In Alfie’s Feet we see a dad carrying a newborn on his chest in a sling (something the Reverend Bell would never have done in 1954). We get the impression that the harassed mothers would like to be more than just mothers. But the kindness is a constant and the people are essentially the same; the stories all conclude, satisfyingly, with a secure and contented child. There is plenty of sly humour too – but in the illustrations, not the text. In Helpers (1975) teenage George, who comes to look after three children for a day, means well but is shown to be useless when it comes to anything practical, unaware of anyone’s needs but his own. And in Dogger, the illustrations of the egg-and-spoon race and the wheelbarrow race are amusing, but the illustration of the grimly competitive fathers’ race is hilarious. Hughes is equally good at illustrating grief: when there’s a crisis children howl inconsolably, fists clench, tears spurt. Nowhere does she show this better than at the climax of Dogger when an unknown little girl carries off Dave’s beloved toy dog and Dave’s world threatens to collapse around him: we see a little boy quite desperate with grief. At this point his big sister Bella comes to the rescue, generously saving the day so that poor Dave need howl no more. This is another of Hughes’s themes: the bond of the family. Siblings (like the nameless naughty little sister) can often be maddening but they are siblings nonetheless and in extremis they look out for each other. Bella doesn’t hesitate to make a sacrifice because she under-stands the importance of Dogger to her brother – and Nancy in The Trouble with Jack (1970) says at the end, ‘The trouble with Jack . . . is that as he’s my brother I’ve got to put up with him whatever he’s like.’ But always it’s the illustrations capturing the mood perfectly; the facial expressions, the stances, the postures tell us everything we need to know. Hughes’s small children in all their moods and crises are drawn with such truthfulness – she does a great deal with the positioning of feet, the splaying of fingers, the angle of eyebrows. And she is wonderful at babies – babies surveying the world placidly from their buggies or cots, or sitting on the floor with both legs straight out in front, not quite crawling, all their attention focused on whatever it is they’re clutching in their small hands. Even Dogger himself, a little worn and battered, one ear up, one down, is like that because he has always been cuddled on the same side. Her work is clearly the result of years of tireless observation – and a real affection for children. Her children are secure, with the security that comes from being loved. The drawing on the cover of Alfie and Mum (2016) says it all: three heads, close together, sharing a story. It’s a good world, Shirley Hughes’s world: decent, kind people keeping children safe. There’s nothing revolutionary about it, but it’s precious. Long may her work be celebrated.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 76 © Posy Fallowfield 2022