There are children’s books. And then there’s The Jolly Postman. Janet and Allan Ahlberg’s enchanting Eighties tale of a postman cheerily delivering letters to a village of fairytale characters – tiny letters that you, the reader, can pull from envelopes and actually read – is the Rolls-Royce of children’s books. They don’t make them like that any more. (Postmen don’t tend to pop in for a cuppa any more, either.)
“Once upon a bicycle, so they say, a Jolly Postman came one day.” So begins this children’s classic, and so begins our hero’s morning round, which sees him drinking industrially British quantities of tea, fixing a flat tyre on his bike, and then trying to ride it successfully after drinking champagne with some royals presumably quite early in the morning. And now, a new exhibition at the Postal Museum in London is marking 40 years of the best book of your childhood.
