Where the Gruffalo roam

All these years I’d been writing songs, and they were like fireworks, they’d play once and they’d usually vanish. But books! A book you can hold in your hand. - Julia Donalson

Julia Donaldson’s most famous book, The Gruffalo, has won the hearts of children around the world. During a fleeting visit to Auckland and Wellington, Britain’s best-selling author talks to David Larsen.

It began with an ailing fairy. Julia Donaldson was 12 years old and, in the shape and character of her life you can glimpse her future as a beloved children's picture book author. But without the fairy it probably wouldn't have happened.

Twelve-year-old Julia certainly didn't see it coming. For one thing, "children's picture book author" wasn't a career category back then. "There weren't really that many picture books when I was little. I'm quite old." She laughs as she says this; she's only in her 60s.

Her childhood home was near Hampstead Heath, in London. "We mostly had bedtime stories and chapter books. I do remember very vividly such picture books as I did have. There was one about a little duck whose pond had dried up and he wanted to find water. What I really remember about that book actually is the end papers. There were these diamond lozenge shapes with the rain in every other one and the sun in every other one, and they were somehow very riveting."

The memory is important to Donaldson, who has spent the last 20 years writing stories for other people to illustrate. "When the parent's reading to the child, they're naturally focusing on the words, but the child is so focused on the pictures," says the author, who was in New Zealand earlier this month to perform concerts in Auckland and Wellington.

The power of the pictures in Donaldson's books is certainly hard to overstate. Particularly in her collaborations with Axel Scheffler, the German illustrator whose vivid, cartoony drawings have brought to life some of her most popular creations: Zog, the accident-prone dragon, the helpful witch in Room On The Broom, and, of course, the fearsome Gruffalo. But Donaldson's stories contain and define these creatures, and her flexible rhyming verse is the common thread that ties all her books together and tells children they're on familiar ground.

"I still have the book of 1000 poems which my father gave me when I was 5. I used to learn all these poems off by heart. And there were poems and nursery rhymes on the radio ... Everyone was very exposed to rhyme and rhythm and songs in those days, it all just seeped in."

Her mother sang in a choir, and they were a musical family generally. Towards the end of her primary school years a woman came to her school recruiting for the Children's Opera Company, a Saturday morning music school that staged operas once a term and supplied child singers for professional productions. "I was already in the Guides and the ballet, I was one of these children who quite liked joining things. We did singing and acting and really, now that I think of it, it was very formative." It also afforded her an experience which was more formative still, when, midway through an Old Vic production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, one of the fairies fell sick. There was only one understudy fairy.

"She moved up to be Cobweb or Moth or Mustard Seed, whichever one it was, and they quickly auditioned some of us from the Children's Opera for a replacement understudy, and I got the job." Donaldson became wildly stagestruck. "They had a wonderful cast. Judi Dench was Hermia, Tom Courtenay was Puck - they weren't particularly well-known then, they were just beginning. I did get to go on stage quite a few times, and I would sit there in the wings, watching every performance. I knew the play completely by heart - if my mother said, 'Oh, I'm going to do the ironing', I would immediately proclaim, 'The iron tongue of midnight doth toll 12 ...'"

Julia Donaldson in Auckland last week with her 2011 book, Jack and the Flumflum Tree. Photo / Jason Oxenham

Hence, an iron determination to become an actress. At which point Donaldson's life becomes a sort of parable of following your passion, letting it take you unexpected places and trusting that you will end up where you want to be, because today she does quite a lot of acting. Mostly in adaptations of The Gruffalo and her other books. The Gruffalo and Room On The Broom have also been made into Oscar-nominated animated shorts. "We had loads of offers to film The Gruffalo - Axel and I were offered a 90-minute Hollywood film, but you know how these things go. It would have ended up with the Gruffalo going to the moon and it wouldn't have been in rhyme. In the end I said, no, I just want a 30-minute adaptation, and you're only allowed to use my words ... and I got my wish.

"They're lovely, the people in the production company. I've had them out on the road, touring with us, wearing toad costumes on stage, joining in the shows. They've become really good friends."

So, films and plays out of books, which came out of a song, which came out of children's TV, which came out of busking, which came out of the university drama course which Donaldson enrolled in as a pathway to her dreamed-of acting career.

At the University of Bristol, where she studied in the late 60s, you couldn't take drama as your principle major. She combined it with French. The French major included six months of study at the Sorbonne, in Paris.

"It was very expensive living in Paris, so a friend and I would go busking along the Champs Elysees to get some extra spending money. I had a guitar, and we could each play five chords, but then our friend Malcolm came out to join us, and he knew 105 chords. Suddenly we were singing all these Beatles songs, we were doing songs from Hair, the musical, and next thing you know we're back home regularly doing singing gigs, and I began writing songs for us to perform, and Malcolm and I - well ... I actually had a boyfriend at this point, but it didn't work out, and Malcolm was the shoulder to cry on, which isn't really supposed to be a good recipe for a relationship, but we've been married now for 42 years."

Early in the 70s, Donaldson sent a tape of songs written for children to the BBC. "I kind of struck lucky, because they happened to be looking for songs then. So that led to me being commissioned on and off to write songs for children's television."

Some of these songs ended up being released on a BBC cassette tape, and in the early 90s, a children's publisher looking for picture book ideas happened to listen to it.

"She tracked me down via the BBC, and asked me if I could make it into a book. And really that was the biggest turning point, because I suddenly thought, 'hang on, books!' All these years I'd been writing songs, and they were like fireworks, they'd play once and they'd usually vanish. But books! A book you can hold in your hand."

For that first song-based book, The Squash And The Squeeze, the publisher paired her with Axel Scheffler. "It was like a storybook plot in a way, because they approached one illustrator who said it was too long, and a second who said - I don't actually know what she said, but she couldn't do it, and then the third illustrator they approached was Axel."

A gap of some years followed, after Donaldson's editor died and was replaced by someone who disliked rhyming verse and fairy tales.

"She said, 'Couldn't you write something not in rhyme, about modern children?' So I had lots of goes at that, but I kept getting rejection letters. And then she left, and another editor came on and said, 'Look, Julia, why do you keep sending in these things about modern children that aren't in rhyme? How about writing something in rhyme, based on a traditional tale?' So that's why I wrote The Gruffalo, really."

Even before it was published, there were hints The Gruffalo might be a breakthrough book. There were 12 foreign language editions in the works before the English version appeared. "Quite a lot more than usual, though it's in 58 languages now, including Maori."

The week it came out, Donaldson was flying to Venice for a holiday. "And at the airport I just thought 'I'll get the Sunday paper and see what's in the books supplement, just in case', and there was a whole picture of the Gruffalo, and they called it a modern classic. I was just walking on air the whole time I was in Venice."

In the decade and a half since then, Donaldson has written about 60 books, most of them picture books, with many different illustrators, though she has also written chapter books for older children. Nearly all of these are one-off stories, though she did write a sequel to The Gruffalo, The Gruffalo's Child. "I don't particularly like writing sequels. A lot of it's to do with the meter, and the rhyme. You'd want a sequel to be in the same meter; but maybe you've only chosen that meter because of that particular storyline. So to use it again for something new, you're setting yourself a much tougher challenge."