The Royal Literary Fund asked me to be interviewed by Jonathan Tulloch, another RLF Fellow, for one of their podcasts in the Collected series. The idea was I would chat about my work process, as well as listening to and commenting on two other short podcasts by different writers, and also talk about the 100th anniversary of the appearance of A. A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, and what Pooh meant to me. Meanwhile, to celebrate the anniversary, Queen Camilla played Poohsticks in Ashdown Forest, and in Kings Cross Railway Station concourse, a giant Fortnum & Mason beehive is currently advertising jars of ‘Hundred Aker Wood Hunny’.
The Pooh connection to the RLF is this: A. A. Milne kindly left a quarter of his copyright to the RLF; they then later sold the Pooh merchandising rights to Disney. When encouraging good writing practices in a University, and more recently in Sixth Forms in various state schools, and telling students briefly about the writers helped by the RLF (Dylan Thomas, D.H. Lawrence, Bram Stoker, Ali Smith and many others), students often look blank until I mention Winnie the Pooh, and yes, they recognise him. They were occasionally mildly amused when I explained that indirectly, he pays me to come into their schools. But sadly, I now had to admit to an awful truth. I never read Winnie the Pooh as a child, and never was it read to me. During the week before the podcast recording, I read the book, and was delighted by its characters and the general feeling of optimism, although wondering how Milne and Shepard could have come up with this despite both, in different circumstances, having witnessed the horrors of the First World War. Perhaps that’s the point. Visiting Hundred Aker Wood is an escape into a gentler, happier world.
My childhood was fractured by uncertainties. Some of it was spent unwillingly with my even more unwilling grandmother in her large Nottingham house. At the age of about three, I badly missed my mother, who was elsewhere. I often refused to eat, wash or have my hair brushed. The latter grew so tangled my grandmother showed me a copy of Struwwelpeter, a book of dire warnings to children. ‘If you don’t let me brush your hair,’ warned my grandmother sternly, ‘you will end up looking like this!’ She showed me Struwwelpeter’s cover portrait and I was filled with admiration. ‘I do hope so!’ I said. Many years later, I wrote and illustrated a book about hair, published by Walker Books.
