'Children aren't talking about the pandemic - it doesn't mean it's not affecting them'
When Lauren Child was little, she and her family would often have picnics in graveyards and cemeteries. ‘Occasionally we would spread our cloth over a tombstone,’ she says. ‘Some might not find that very respectful, but I would be quite happy if people wanted to picnic on my tombstone.’ We are in Abney Park cemetery, in north London, and Child is dressed as if for a picnic, in a vintage dress and white clogs. ‘Cemeteries have never been creepy to me, and this one is particularly welcoming – it’s a perfect example of nature taking over the man-made, isn’t it? It doesn’t feel as if it’s about death, somehow.
'It’s more like going to an art gallery, and it obviously attracts all sorts,’ she says charitably, glancing at a group of drunken Irish men who are yelling amiably at each other. ‘I feel like we’ve seen every type of customer today.’
Child, 54, has created more than 40 children’s books, as writer or illustrator or, most often, both, which have sold 15 million copies worldwide. She was Children’s Laureate from 2017 to 2019, and was made an MBE for services to literature. Her most famous characters, Charlie and Lola, who first appeared in 2000, were turned into a television series, but she is also responsible for Clarice Bean (a quirky little girl who finds her way round the issues of everyday life with unusual flair), and seven books in the spin-off Ruby Redfort detective series. And she has illustrated classics including The Princess and the Pea and Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking. Next month, Pippi Longstocking Goes Aboard is published to celebrate Pippi’s 75th anniversary.
We met soon after lockdown, hence the cemetery. The pandemic has affected her concentration, ‘because it’s always there, hunched up at the back of my mind,’ she says. ‘It obviously affects children, too, though they’re better than we are at living in the moment. But just because they’re not talking about it doesn’t mean it’s not affecting them – we tend to forget that. For instance, even though she doesn’t appear anxious, my daughter’s eczema came back, having been gone for a year.’
Child’s books reflect the world we live in. Her stories are not moralistic or cloying; they don’t urge children to eat broccoli or say please or tell them not to pinch the baby. ‘Sometimes an idea will come out of a conversation with friends, or people I meet – it’s often just a fragment of a thought or something I’ve seen – a child walking an invisible dog, or an interestingly dressed octogenarian – or something I’ve overheard. “He’s in the dark tunnel of adolescence,” was something my friend’s mother used to say about her son, which went into my first Clarice Bean picture book. Often they come from memories of childhood: an unjust telling-off, an escaped guinea pig, or a troubling mushroom I was once made to eat.’
Child’s very distinctive characters career through the books, photo-bombing the page and interrupting the story. Her new book, The Goody, has asides in a different colour text, a wry nod to the reader as if to say, ‘We’re on the same side here.’ Her children have scribbly hair and expressive faces and are sometimes named after villages – like Stanton Harcourt or Minal Cricket (Clarice Bean’s little brother, named after Mildenhall Cricket Club, pronounced Minal); Chirton is a character in The Goody and a village in Wiltshire.
The Goody is based on an idea Child has been thinking about for 20 years: our subconscious labelling of children. She grew up in Wiltshire, and both her parents were teachers. Like many children, she and her sisters acquired roles: her older sister was ‘the clever one’, her younger sister was ‘the helpful one’, and Lauren was the selfish television-watching one in the middle. ‘My little sister, Jenny, was definitely the goody. She was Mummy’s little helper – she would do the shopping with her at weekends and carry the bags, and for her troubles she’d get a Dougal (the dog in The Magic Roundabout) made of meringue from the local bakery.
‘That was a struggle because I wanted to be known for being helpful, but I also wanted to stay at home and watch Saturday morning television – I was obsessed with television. If Mum had said, “Actually, Lauren, would you like to come today, just us?” I might have done, but it was my sister’s role and there was no changing that. The danger is that these shorthand labels handed out in childhood can stick, and you can grow up with this slight uneasiness that for good or for bad this is who you really are.’
Lauren was later landed with the label of ‘having great determination’ which was problematic – ‘for example with cross-country running, which I was good at but loathed – yet I had to keep on with it because I was reluctant to let go of having ‘great determination’.’ She managed to shake this off as a teenager – and after she left school she went to art college in Manchester but left after a year, in an undetermined sort of way, then had a series of evanescent jobs: window dresser, muralist – before setting up a lampshade company called Chandeliers for the People. ‘I wanted to make that work but it was impossibly difficult, so when I was offered a job spot painting for Damien Hirst, via a friend, I sensibly took it.’
Writing a children’s book, she says, ‘wasn’t a deliberate decision’, but the turning point was when she saw the 1990 film Edward Scissorhands. ‘I liked how Tim Burton had created a whole world with his imprint on it – he’d done the drawing, then got someone to write a story around it; he curated the whole thing – costumes, music, design. I found it inspiring and just started writing, and I showed it to someone who said, “Oh, this could be a children’s book.”’
Clarice Bean, That’s Me was published in 1999, by an enlightened editor who is now the managing director of Puffin. Child’s books are about the big effects of small things. ‘I am more interested in the commonplace than the fantastical or epic, partly because it is the ordinary that connects us, and small things can have the greatest impact on daily life.’ Her work has a very particular look: she often uses scans of odd bits of material in the illustrations; for The Goody it was J Cloths and the insides of envelopes.
‘My father taught art and was passionate about taking us to art galleries – so I saw a lot of art, and became aware of the many different ways you can create an image, the importance of structure, the endless variety of materials that can be used. Most of all it made me understand the importance of pushing oneself to experiment and not just do the same thing over and over.
‘I was interested in the post-impressionist painter Vuillard and his use of pattern, and how he made figures disappear, their clothing merging with the interiors so they became no more important than the curtains; I also loved Bonnard and Matisse – there is an illustrative quality to their work.’
When she was little, Child had a doll’s house made out of an old cupboard, and her mother arranged for her to have woodwork lessons so she could make the furniture for it. 'I would come home with very sturdily-made furniture, usually much too big for the rooms. What I appreciated was that I was trusted with the bandsaw and power tools though I was only eight.'
She loved books by John Burningham and Judith Kerr (she would become great friends with Kerr); also Betsy Byars, and Florence Parry Heide. And she loved Pippi Longstocking, so it was a welcome challenge when she was asked to illustrate a new edition, in 2007. ‘Pippi represents an escape from conventional thinking; she lives in the moment and is funny and generous and wild. She pays no mind to what people might say, but she cares very much for people’s feelings and is never anything other than herself.’
This, Child believes, is the trick to life. She herself is a worrier and an empathiser. ‘It’s almost like being a sponge; I feel everything a bit too much, but I think I couldn’t do my job if I didn’t. It’s essential to be able to remember what it was like to be a child, but it can become exhausting.’ The character she is closest to, she says, is Clarice Bean. ‘She is the voice inside my head, the girl who says the things I wish I could have said. She’s braver than me, but we think the same way and worry about the same things.’
Lauren lives in north London with her partner, Adrian Darbishire, a QC, and their daughter, Tuesday. Lauren had always known she wanted to adopt, and after doing some work in Mongolia with Unesco (she is one of their Artists for Peace), she decided that that was where she would apply. It took five years, but that meant proper time spent in Mongolia, getting to know the country and making friends there.
Tuesday is now a flourishing 10-year-old who looks just like one of Lauren’s drawings in The Goody. ‘I know! I didn’t set out to draw her but I can see my daughter in both of the characters: Chirton the Goody and Myrtle the Not Goody, and of course she behaves like both of them, too, which is really the truth of things. I try hard not to give her any sort of label, and sometimes I succeed and sometimes I slip up, but as Chirton would say, “Trying is much better than not trying, don’t you agree?”’
The Goody by Lauren Child (Hachette, ￡12.99) is out now; Pippi Longstocking Goes Aboard by Astrid Lindgren, illustrated by Lauren Child (OUP, ￡20), is published on 1 October
