There’s an illustration by Helen Oxenbury in the new exhibition of her work, Illustrating the Land of Childhood, at Burgh House, Hampstead, that I hadn’t seen before.
Titled The House, the pen and watercolour image, mostly in black-and-white, shows the exterior of a street. Two windows of a single house are lit up in colour. The upstairs window looks in on a bedroom where a child is sleeping, and the window below shows the child’s mother preparing breakfast in the kitchen downstairs.
Who would’ve known that these characters had recently planted a plum tree in the bedroom that had burst through the floors and ceilings, almost destroying the home? Such is the story of Meal One (1971), by Oxenbury and Ivor Cutler, from which The House is taken.
