Allan Ahlberg: making books child’s play
Allan Ahlberg, celebrated children's author (Shutterstock)
I met Allan Ahlberg, who has died aged 87, in 1995, some months after he lost his wife and working partner, Janet (née Hall) Ahlberg, to cancer at the age of 50. Even in the sunshine of the Chelsea Arts Club garden, where I interviewed him for The Times, there was a deep sadness in his eyes. He and Janet had produced some of the most enchanting books for young children of the 1980s and 90s, and as a children’s books editor and also a parent of three small children, I was their biggest fan.
Notwithstanding that he worked for decades with other children’s illustrators — Ahlberg and Raymond Briggs was surely a bromance made in heaven — Allan loved to downgrade his work in comparison with Janet’s. As he used to explain to audiences, giving the nursery-rhyme spin-off Each Peach Pear Plum as an example: “I do the words (took me about a day) and Janet does the pictures (took her about six months). Then we send the words and the pictures to the publisher and the publisher sends us some money. And I get half the money for my day’s work, and Janet gets half for her six months’ work: the basis of a happy marriage.”
As a grandmother I am now occasionally reading out loud, once again, to under-sevens, and I am deeply struck by how much skill and genius Allan hid behind that self-deprecating joke.
Anyone can write the words in a picture book, right? Money for old rope, right? Wrong.
In any household where bedtime stories are the norm, the text will have to be read out loud approximately five thousand by the same adult. So that text needs to be of outstanding quality. I could read any one of Allan Ahlberg’s books a million times without getting irritated by them. I positively look forward to picking up Cops and Robbers, while, I am sorry to say, I dread finding one of the countless sequels to Elmer the Patchwork Elephant on top of the pile. It is really saying something of a book with only 30 pages when the reader has lost the will to continue by page 15.
Many of the picture books you will find in your local library may have sumptuous pictures, but the stories are pedestrian and predictable. Characters are left undeveloped. There are few surprises. It’s as though publishers take the expression “picture book” far too literally, forgetting that they are meant to be read. We all know that little ones love verbal repetition, rhythm and ritual, but there’s repetition — and there’s taking the mick.
How different is the understated nostalgia which the Ahlbergs relished, for example, in “Peepo” — the world seen through the eyes of a baby in a working-class wartime English home reminiscent of Allan’s own Black Country childhood. It takes some courage to set a picture book for pre-nursery children firmly in 1940, without any explanation or excuse — and the result was fascinating.
When she was born, Allan described their daughter Jessica, who herself blossomed into a talented illustrator, as not so much a baby as an exercise in market research — and indeed her parents were inspired by watching what she enjoyed, whether it was looking at a Mothercare catalogue (The Baby’s Catalogue) or playing with the morning post (The Jolly Postman). But what stands out in all Allan Ahlberg’s work, both with and without Janet, is his range — from nursery board books to character series such as Happy Families, to charming, highly learnable poems.
The Ahlbergs’ first big success was Burglar Bill (1977) about a cheerful burglar who accidentally steals a baby: the baby turns out to be the property of one Burglar Betty. Bill’s refrain of “That’s a nice (whatever it is), I’ll have that” became a family catchphrase not only in our home but, as Ahlberg told me, in thousands of homes all over the country.
Allan originally wrote Burglar Bill as “less inclined to remorse”. In the version eventually published, the stolen baby incident which brings Burglar Bill and Burglar Betty together also shocks the two of them into returning everything they have stolen. In the original version, wrote Allan in his tribute to his late wife, Janet’s Last Book, “he just retired happily ever after to a farm. It took some determined editing to get him to give everything back”.
I don’t want to be too critical of today’s publishers, as it is a tough world for them these days — but it does seem to me that this transition would be unlikely today. Burglar Bill would never be written in the first place because, well, he’s a burglar. I have the impression — I may be wrong — that there are too many “issue” books around. These are books targeted, not at building the child’s imagination and curiosity, but rather at the parents’ neuroses, as they panic about starting nursery, potty training, tantrums, going to sleep, sharing and so on. These books are the natural descendants of the improving morality tales of the past — the kind of stories which Lewis Carroll frequently parodied.
Allan and Janet Ahlberg never needed to tell children how to behave. They simply showed the beauty of a safe, ordinary childhood, turning up the imaginative dial just the right number of notches to be arresting. One of my favourites, Bye Bye Baby (1989) tells the story of a baby who has no mother (Allan was himself adopted as a baby) and has to look after himself. “One night, as he was putting himself to bed, he thought, “I’m too young to be doing this. I need a mummy.” Who could not be brought up short, every time they read this, by the idea of a baby putting himself to bed?
Sarah Johnson is a former children’s books editor for The Times.
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