Last week my Twitter feed was overflowing with warmth, gratitude, memory and reflection in the wake of people hearing that Shirley Hughes is no longer with us. For many, she has been an intergenerational author, delighting people when they were children, then as parents reading to their children and even once more within the same lifetime, as grandparents reading to their grandchildren. This huge span came about because Shirley’s first book solely created by her – Lucy and Tom’s Day – appeared in 1960. She has gave us 60 years worth of work and no doubt there’ll be one or two more to come out of the drawers.
Many of the people talking about the books on social media have homed in on the strongly personal effect they had. It’s not hard to see why. Shirley created art, stories and poetry that took children’s feelings as seriously as others take adults’ feelings. We live in a strange cultural world in which a fair number of people devote a lot of attention and expense exploring the importance and long-lasting effect of their childhood emotions and yet artists who dwell on such things in a way that is accessible for children are often placed low down in the league table of great art. Clear favourites among Shirley’s books on my social media seem to be Dogger, any of the Alfie books – especially Alfie Gets in First, and Out and About. So how did she do it? What are the ingredients of her work that had this great effect?
