The most important picture book of the last few years is, for me, Malala’s Magic Pencil (2017) by Malala Yousafzai, illustrated by Kerascoët. In it Malala, an activist who was shot by a masked Taliban gunman on a bus, aged fifteen, tells of how when she was younger she wanted a magic pencil – one that could erase the stink of refuse or conjure up a football for her to play with. The book contains truths we have always instinctively kept from Western children: boys so poor they fish for scraps of metal on flyblown rubbish dumps; men who stalk the streets carrying weapons. Malala has said in an interview that it was important for her that the art: ‘felt accurate, down to the cracks in the wall of our home (I had to ask them to add more cracks)’. Yet it is also hopeful, telling us that words are magical and can change the world. The very act of her recounting her own story, as both a young Pakistani woman and a Nobel Prize winner, through the medium of a picture book, is significant. ‘My voice became so powerful that dangerous men tried to silence me,’ she tells us. ‘But they failed.’
We diminish the preschool years. For parents, they’re framed as a period of teething, sleeplessness and career stagnation that will ‘get easier’ once the children start school; portrayed as both tedious and fleeting – somehow, days are both endless yet gone ‘before you know it’. Toddlers, people say, don’t recall anything before they’re four anyway. Small children’s culture is seen as meaningless, trivial, saccharine, something to shut them up or keep them busy. But this is because our society does not place enough value on children, women, home, care, patience or poetry. It is also because our society refuses to accept responsibility for the adults it makes. We are lucky that some of the geniuses in this history knew that picture books are not a minor form, but one of the most important of all. A picture book can, like a fierce bad rabbit, look innocent but conceal darker forces. It can also teach us empathy, heroism and love.
By the time I started school, I was myself. I look at photos of that girl, her wilful fringe and dreamy, serious expression, and know that I have changed very little, and that who I am was shaped by my mother and father; by the books that they read to me.
Before I finish, I’m aware there is an author I haven’t mentioned yet, one who was younger even than Malala Yousafzai. Jayne Fisher, creator of the Garden Gang books, published by Ladybird from 1979–83, with the first written when she was nine years old. How I loved those felt-tipped drawings of Penelope Strawberry, with her fine golden hairs; her garden party with Blancmange and hundreds of sausage rolls. Roger Radish saving the two little chives from drowning. That cross-eyed pea; the elegance of Grace Grape; little blackberries waiting for their socks to dry.
I have tried to track her down to no avail. There are few clues on the Internet to what became of her. All I know of Jayne Fisher is the profile at the beginning of each book – her centre-parted hair, polo neck and cord dungarees. Her hobbies (classical guitar, the recorder, sewing, baking and chess). She kept two gerbils and bred stick insects. She based the stories ‘on her own little garden at home’.
Oh dear, sweet, ambitious Jayne! How ardently I wanted to be like her, to compete with her: a prodigy, a real writer. Of all the picture books that inspired me, it is perhaps to these I owe the biggest debt, because I looked at her photo and things became possible. After ‘writing’ (mainly in my head) my first play at four, The Little Goose Girl, in infants I also wrote two long tales down in notepads: The Scruffs, about messy kids who get into scrapes, and the melodramatic epic Gipsy Horse. Then came the ‘Lisa Spector’ series, where the daughter of an oil magnate has adventures in exotic locations – Transylvania, the Bermuda Triangle, Egypt, New York – and which my Granny Cranshaw would type up on her typewriter for my birthday. In Hard Cheddar mice plotted the murder of all the world’s cats. Sand Up My Nostrils tackled evil genies. Somewhere along the line, I got the idea that for it to be a novel you had to reach 100 pages, and near the end my handwriting would get VERY BIG. I could magic up adventures; entire worlds. I had found my vocation.
My dad always predicted I would be a writer. I have said I don’t know what my father really believed in, but that isn’t quite true. I know he believed in me.
Listen, they say that time isn’t really linear: it’s just a human invention; another story we teach our children to help them make sense of this world. Norman Warne is giving Beatrix Potter doll’s house furniture, Christopher Robin sleeps hugging his bear, a one-year-old sees a rabbit hop through the dunes, a ladybird takes wing, Janet Ahlberg paints a gingerbread bungalow, a coachman’s wife recounts witchcraft, a mother talks tiger.
The milk is poured; we snuggle on the bed. I am forty and I am four. As I read the story to my children, my father reads the story to me again, and yes, we are lucky.