Picture book heaven: family favourites
Plus: Women and money
The family descended last weekend. The living room became a buggy park. Outdoors, the grandchildren’s favourite activity was lifting stones to find woodlice. “Look, Wendy! They are running for their lives!” said granddaughter #1, delightedly.
Then the gang of four took things too far, scraping at the patio grouting with sticks until it lifted up and throwing chunks of cement at the window.
Time to come indoors and settle down for stories. Time to rediscover our favourite picture books of yesteryear, that somehow escaped being torn to shreds and have survived to be enjoyed by a new generation.
Here are the most thumbed:
The Tiger Who Came to Tea by Judith Kerr (1968)
You can tell from the photo that this is the copy I read to my daughters 30+ years ago. Have you ever seen a more crinkled book? Every page is taped back in. Amazingly, no-one has yet drawn on it.
What is it about a tiger coming to tea that is so very special?
It’s delightfully surreal, the way the tiger asks politely if it can have tea with Sophie and her mum, because it is hungry and is invited in, no questions asked. Ultimate hospitality.
It sits at the table, then eats all the food and drinks all the water from the tap. Doesn’t attack anyone.
The image near the end of Sophie and her mum and dad walking down the lamp-lit street to have sausage and chips and ice cream because the tiger’s eaten everything at home, is so cosy and comforting.
Judith Kerr made it up as a bedtime story for her own daughter after visiting a zoo. Some people read deeper meaning into the book: Kerr fled Germany with her family in the 1930s as the Nazis came to power, to avoid persecution, and settled in England. But Kerr herself (who died in 2019) didn’t draw those parallels.
More than one million copies of The Tiger Who Came To Tea have been sold worldwide.
The Lorax by Dr Seuss (1971)
Dr Seuss’s most famous book remains The Cat In The Hat, which he published in 1957, as a way to get young children reading. It works! And I love the challenge of reading Fox in Socks out loud, with its tongue-twisters:
AND when tweetle beetles
battle with paddles in a puddle,
they call it a tweetle
beetle puddle paddle battle.
But I have a soft spot for The Lorax, because it so brilliantly and engagingly explains what happens if you exploit the Truffula Trees for all the Thneeds that we don’t really need.
When the axe falls on the last Truffula Tree, my heart breaks. When the Once-ler reveals the last saved Truffula Seed – a hope of renewal – I cheer. Gets me every time.
Estimated sales of all Dr Seuss’s books? 600 million copies worldwide.
Wilson’s World by Edith Thacher Hurd and Clement Hurd (1971)
This was a book we repeatedly borrowed from my daughter’s nursery school in about 1990 (the UK edition was called Wilkie’s World), but I only recently tracked down my own second-hand copy.1
It’s the story of a boy called Wilson painting a world and wondering what to put in it. He keeps adding more – animals, then people, buildings, vehicles – until in the end he realises his world is too full and he has to start over.
Like The Lorax, it introduces the idea of stewardship of the planet in a way that anyone of any age can understand. Very beautifully done.
Edith Thacher Hurd (words) and Clement Hurd (pictures) were a married couple from California who produced fifty books together, as well as working independently. Clement Hurd illustrated Margaret Wise Brown’s famous children’s story, Goodnight Moon.
Mr Men by Roger Hargreaves (1971 onwards)
Granddaughter #2 has been obsessed with the Mr Men, ever since she could crawl to the bookcase. So colourful. The perfect size for little hands. 250 million Mr Men books have been sold worldwide over the past fifty years, so she’s not the first to get hooked. We’ve tried placing them higher up, to encourage her to try other books, but she just scales the shelves. She reminds me of Maggie Simpson.
“Oh wow, he’s a bit creepy,” I muttered under my breath when I read Mr Tickle afresh. Bit of a pest. A bit handsy. He was the very first Mr Men character that Roger Hargreaves created, in response to his son, Adam, asking, “What does a tickle look like?”
There’s physical aggression in some of the stories that I’d forgotten all about. Pinching and pushing and teaching people a lesson.
“Patriarchy, much?” I muttered, when reading Little Miss Trouble.
My daughter Becky pointed me to comedian Troy Hawke’s skit on the Mr Men – “Vile, sexist propaganda. The author Roger Hargreaves, a men’s rights activist decades ahead of his time” – and I collapsed laughing. YES! Where IS Mr Passive Aggressive?!
The first person I knew who had the full Mr Men collection was my sixth form boyfriend. In 1978, it was kind of ironic to be a fan of the Mr Men as a teenage boy.
Coincidentally, I noticed that
, who publishes his 1984 diaries on Substack, mentions in his 25 September 1984 entry that he put up Mr Men curtains in his sixth form prefects’ room.Legend.
Hairy Maclary by Lynley Dodd (1983)
Lynley Dodd’s jaunty illustrated rhyming stories about dogs and cats are utterly infectious. Hairy Maclary was the first book my son memorised. Same with my grandchildren. Give them the opening lines and they’re away.
Out of the gate
and off for a walk
went Hairy Maclary
from Donaldson’s Dairy
And they all know the yowl of Scarface Claw the fierce tom cat, when faced with his own reflection in a mirror. “EEEEOWWWFFTZZ!”
(I’ve been trying to find a clip of scary Mandy from the BBC TV comedy drama, This Country, reciting the book, but drawn a blank.)
Other favourites: Hairy Maclary and Zachary Quack, about a duck that rescues Hairy Maclary from a pond. And Slinky Malinki, the cat that thieves people’s belongings in the night.
But they’re all superb. Lynley Dodd (now 83) is a genius. Her books have deservedly sold more than five million copies worldwide.
Old Bear by Jane Hissey (1986)
Old Bear was Jane Hissey’s first book, based on her childhood teddy bear. In the story he is left in the attic for years until the other toys remember him and hatch a plan to rescue him.
Hissey’s meticulously realistic pencil illustrations are exquisite and her stories charming.
There’s a recurring theme of lost things. In Little Bear Lost, Little Bear goes missing during a game of hide and seek. I’ve been looking everywhere for my copy of Little Bear’s Trousers to include in the photos. It will turn up eventually, just like his trousers did, I’m sure.
Five Favourite Tales by Tony Ross (1990)
I used to volunteer to hear readers once a week at my children’s primary schools. Sometimes they’d have their own books assigned by the teacher, but sometimes not, so I always had this book in my bag for back-up.
This collection is great fun and was always a hit.
I Want My Potty is about the little princess who has to shout to the line of courtiers any time she wants to go, so they can fetch her potty, hopefully in the nick of time. Oscar Got The Blame is about a boy with a mischievous imaginary friend. I’m Coming To Get You tells of a fierce monster from outer space that’s either very big or very small, depending on which planet you’re on. In I Want A Cat, Jessy refuses to take off her cat suit until her mum and dad agree to get her a real cat; and Super Dooper Jezebel is about the most perfect girl in the world, who doesn’t see danger coming.
All of the stories have surprises and keep young children guessing.
Tony Ross has illustrated other famous authors’ books, but this collection of some of his own work is a gem.
Cockatoos by Quentin Blake (1992)
Quentin Blake illustrated many of Roald Dahl’s children’s books and they were a team made in heaven. But his own picture books are a delight.
Cockatoos is a counting book, in which Professor Dupont’s mischievous birds escape one morning, because they’re fed up of him always greeting them in the same way: “Good morning, my fine feathered friends!”
He looks for them all around the house, but where can they be? Children love getting one up on him by spotting them in the wine rack, or on the toilet cistern, out of his range of vision.
Other favourites are Mrs Armitage on Wheels and Mrs Armitage and the Big Wave. She always needs one more thing to add to her cluttered bicycle or surf board.
I’m also fond of Zagazoo, about a very strange creature that morphs over time, which is really about children – and parents – growing older. Hard relate.
The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler (1999)
Every book created by Julia Donaldson (words) and Axel Scheffler (pictures) is a joy. Like so many good picture books, they have clever rhymes that help children recall them and eventually read them unaided.
My grandson adores Room on the Broom and flies around the house on whatever broom or twig he can lay his hands on. Plus, some of their stories have been made into charming animations for TV, so you can safely put on Zog (young dragon learns how to dragon), or Snail and the Whale (snail voyages around the world attached to a whale) and leave the room for a few minutes.
But I think The Gruffalo is my own favourite. “He has terrible tusks, and terrible claws, and terrible teeth in terrible jaws.” It’s about what scares us and working out what’s real and what’s not. Existential questions in picture form!
What were your own favourite picture books as a child? Which ones have stood the test of time? Please do comment below.
Women and Money
, who writes about money in her Substack, The Ladybird Purse, kindly invited me to answer questions as a 60+ woman for her “decades” series on money. What has it meant to me at different stages of my life and what advice would I pass on?I hope I’ve shared some useful tips here. Please do have a read.
© Wendy Varley 2024
Thanks to everyone who responded to my piece last week, Modern Woman, 1950s Style. The feedback was fascinating.
Ninety-year old Betty wrote in reply: “I went to college headed for a career in theatre and broadcasting while avoiding marriage. And then I did get married and despite my independence fell into a poor example of the life I'd avoided. I had no idea what I could demand from my husband or how the chores of marriage and family could be shared. There were publications to support my plight, I think, but I was still reading the ones like the ones your mother read. I did manage to sell designs to Women's Day and articles to Parents Magazine, but it took a long time to gain my lost freedom.”
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One book of many that stuck in my mind was Judith Kerr’s ‘When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit’. Just went to look it up and see it was made into a film in 2019. Must check it out. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_the_Hitler_Time#When_Hitler_Stole_Pink_Rabbit
Gorgeous. I'd completely forgotten Old Bear! We're currently making our way through everything Shirley Hughes ever wrote, and there's nothing like seeing my daughter as enchanted by them as I was thirty-cough years ago.