Helen Oxenbury: 'I used to hide books from my children – I couldn't bear to read them again'

Ten Little Fingers, Clap Hands, Farmer Duck ... the pioneering illustrator talks to Lisa Allardice about her 50 year career and the real story behind We’re Going on a Bear Hunt

The house opposite Hampstead Heath where Helen Oxenbury has lived with her husband, fellow children’s writer and illustrator John Burningham, in north London for more than 40 years, is a home you might find in an old-fashioned children’s book: turreted, with steps up to a porch, a sun-lit kitchen – all paintings, pots and pans and piles of books. It is easy to imagine it as a family haven for their three children; the youngest, Emily, an artist, now lives next door with her baby and toddler. And Oxenbury, a sprightly, upright 80, with angular features and hair in the messy bun she has worn all her life, is the sort of no-nonsense grandmother you might find in such a book.

Her life and 50-year career as one of the UK’s best-loved illustrators – with classics such as Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes, Farmer Duck and, most famously, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt (written by Mem Fox, Martin Waddell and Michael Rosen respectively) – is celebrated in a handsome coffee-table book by the critic and children’s book specialist Leonard S Marcus. “Helen has mapped out the territory of childhood in drawings that combine the intimacy of a family snapshot with the formal mastery of a searching and rigorous art,” Marcus writes, placing her in the English tradition of Randolph Caldecott, Beatrix Potter and Edward Ardizzone.

How does it feel to see her achievements between hard covers? “A bit embarrassing,” she grimaces. “I don’t find it easy to look at it.” She feels the same about being interviewed. “I just get so bored of myself. If I were to talk about John, I could do it for hours.” “John! Are you listening John?” she calls periodically to check a date or anecdote. “No!” he shouts back, before retreating to his studio on the ground floor, from which, for decades, he produced one or more books a year, including such nursery favourites as Husherbye and Avocado Baby.

Just last year, Oxenbury illustrated Julia Donaldson’s The Giant Jumperee, praised by one critic for the “supremely skilled, line-and-watercolour loveliness of the images”. And she has nearly finished a version of Little Red Riding Hood translated from French by Beatrix Potter: “My goodness, she could draw. A great draughtsman!” She’s had particular fun with the wolf. “He’s such an awful villain, he’s great to draw. I decided to make it quite dark. And I’m so thrilled I did.” Her Alice in Wonderland – a sweet-faced Alice in a pinafore and plimsolls – won the Kate Greenaway medal for children’s book illustration in 1999.

Her mother read Alice to her as a child, one of the few books she can remember growing up in Ipswich during the war. She has “always drawn as far as I can remember, way back”. Having asthma, and with her parents working and her brothers at school, she “had nothing to do. So they just sort of piled paper and crayons in front of me – there was no television, not many books.”

She met Burningham at London’s Central School of Art and Design, where she went to study theatre design in 1957, having worked in the props department of Ipswich Repertory theatre during the summer holidays. They married and their first daughter, Lucy, was born in 1965. It was only then, inspired by Burningham’s success (his first book, Borka, won the Kate Greenaway medal in 1963) and unable to continue working on sets, that Oxenbury thought: “Well, perhaps I’ll have a go at that.” At first she just wanted to make enough money to afford some help around the house. “Then I loved it so much I wouldn’t have stopped anyway.” Motherhood “spurs you on”, she says. “You think: ‘I’m bloody well not going to sit back and do nothing,’ and she would start work each evening once the children were in bed. “I do feel for mums,” she says, and they are always sympathetically portrayed in her books (Spare Rib approved of the resourceful, fun-loving single mum in Meal One).

Oxenbury’s initial playful counting book, Numbers of Things, was published in 1967. Just two years later she became the first artist to take the Kate Greenaway medal for two books, The Quangle Wangle’s Hat by Edward Lear and the gloriously trippy The Dragon of an Ordinary Family by Margaret Mahy.

“We were in at the beginning of a great boom of children’s illustrated books,” she says of the way in which her and Burningham’s careers took off as part of a group of British artists who are now household names, including Janet Ahlberg (Each Peach Pear Plum), Quentin Blake (The Enormous Crocodile and many more Roald Dahl stories), Raymond Briggs (The Snowman), Shirley Hughes (Alfie) and Jan Pieńkowski (Meg and Mog), and who transformed the drab postwar children’s publishing scene. “It was just wonderful, the energy and the excitement. Printing improved. Also publishers got the idea that you could make money out of children’s books – that helps. We were very very lucky.”

One of her contributions to this new wave was her writing and creation, in the 1980s, of board books, featuring babies doing baby things, like eating and looking, which hardly sounds like a radical idea today. There had been Dick Bruna’s Miffy and Rosemary Wells’s Max and Ruby – both rabbits and both “wonderfully good”, she says. “But not a baby.”

The inspiration came from the arrival of her youngest daughter, “Little Em”, born 11 years after Lucy. Emily had eczema. Oxenbury recalls “traipsing around all night long, showing her things to stop her scratching, magazines or anything we could put our hands on. She loved looking at catalogues from Mothercare, and things like that. That’s really what gave me the idea.” Don’t be fooled by the simplicity of her brightly rompered, moon-faced babies: like Bruna, who could spend days redoing Miffy’s dot eyes, Oxenbury was similarly exacting about two tiny dots: “You’ve got to get it just right to get the expression that you need. Also eyebrows are so important.”

The baby board books were followed by Oxenbury’s First Experiences series, which grew alongside Emily as she went to playschool, birthday parties or the doctors, and are always seen from the child’s perspective. Although the witty details are clearly drawn from life (was there always an ancient pianist with a bandage on her leg in dance classes?), Oxenbury would never pull out her sketchpad in public. “I’d be too self-conscious. I’d die!” One of the highlights of her week now is taking her three-year-old granddaughter to ballet. “Exactly the same place. They don’t wear blue any more: they wear pink. That’s the only difference.”

The diversity of the children she drew at ballet classes or playgroups was surely pioneering at the time? “You just illustrate what you see,” she replies matter-of-factly. “What is around you – and they are not all white faces.” She nevertheless became something of a champion of racial diversity in children’s publishing, with a new series of large-format baby board books such as Clap Hands and All Fall Down – “I wanted every book to be a combination of as many different babies as possible,” she says – and the award-winning So Much by Trish Cooke (of BBC’s Playdays), a joyful gouache-painted celebration of an African-Caribbean birthday party, in 1994.

Most successful of all, of course, was We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, published in 1989: it has sold more than 9m copies worldwide, was made into a film in 2016 and a stage show that has just finished a West End run. Rare is the nursery bookshelf that doesn’t include at least one copy. “It is extraordinary,” she says. “I feel so sorry for the parents. When I was reading books to my children, I used to hide some of them. I couldn’t bear to read them yet again.”

Rosen – later to be children’s laureate – and Oxenbury were approached independently to work on Bear Hunt. Based on an American folk song, it was “an illustrator’s gift”, according to Oxenbury, “because it has no description of who these people are; who the ‘we’ is; no indication of where anything is.” The lovely watery beach scenes are drawn from those around Felixstowe and the River Deben of her childhood, where the family have owned a boathouse for many years. “The mud reflects the sky and the light. It’s magical. I love that space,” she says. She tried out several ideas, almost abandoning the project at one point, and eventually settled on a family outing. Interestingly, the largest character was not intended to be the father but the big brother. “No No, No!” she says. “I wanted it to be an adventure without adults. But I can’t carp really, because everybody thinks he is the dad.”

Unusually, Oxenbury worked on it for 18 months without showing anything to the author. When Rosen saw the finished art work, she recalls: “He said: ‘Good God! What’s going on? This isn’t my story.’ He couldn’t understand it really. He had a sort of procession of kings and queens and jesters in mind, I think.” Now, Rosen admits, he “gets what others got right from the start”. Oxenbury’s drawings tell a tale of perseverance and triumph over adversity. “The depth and emotional body of the book comes from Helen’s paintings,” the author writes.

In half a century, Oxenbury and Burningham have only collaborated on one book, There’s Going to Be a Baby, in 2010. “We work very differently,” she says, by way of explanation. “John writes his own stories and he brings up the illustration and the text at the same time. I like to know the text and then I can plan the illustrations.” Has the fact that both of them are illustrators ever caused tension? “People think it must have done. But honestly, no! I can’t imagine that it would.” For years, Oxenbury has had a studio in Primrose Hill, bought not so much to avoid distractions from Burningham, but from her mother, who moved into the flat next door to their house after her parents retired. “I got on terribly well with my mum and it was always: ‘Helen come and have a coffee.’ And I thought: ‘If I don’t get away, I’m not going to be able to work.’”

She has always had a dog, and the last, Milo, died two weeks ago. “My little dog was such an important part of my life,” she says sadly. Her day would begin with taking him for a walk: he didn’t like the heath, so they would head into town and go to a cafe to “watch people” before heading to the studio. There would be another walk on Primrose Hill in the afternoon, a nap, Radio 4 in the background. “When I’m not actually drawing, I am thinking. It comes out eventually,” she adds. “That one is appreciated is very nice. Because you do work totally on your own.”

Helen Oxenbury: A Life in Illustration is published by Walker. To order a copy for £26.40 (RRP £30) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

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