Children's literature has lost an all time great

Telegraph

2 days ago

It's not often that you meet your heroes, but I did a decade ago at a London book launch. I noticed a pleasant older man standing alone and went over to chat to him. He knew who I was and when asked, said modestly that he was an author, too.
'What's your name?' I asked, heart beginning to sink.
'Allan Ahlberg,' he said.
I almost fell to my knees on the spot. Allan Ahlberg is someone whose work is known off by heart by millions of parents.
Together with his first wife Janet, who illustrated his books, he created stories that have coloured the imagination, vocabulary and sensibility of three generations.
The Ahlbergs were quietly revolutionary. Where today's picture books have a relentless cast of non-white, and often non gender-conforming protagonists, the Ahlbergs described life from the point of view of white working class children, with imagination, inventiveness and warmth. In an age where picture books believe all fathers are vanishingly absent and girls must be feisty. the Ahlbergs' nuclear families play together, live together and stick together. It was something that the author knew all about. Born in 1938, Ahlberg was adopted by a poor Black Country family. He grew up in a small house with a tin bath and outside privy. He was forever grateful for the love and sense of security his parents gave him. 'I am the Peepo baby,' as he put it.
Too often, recent children's authors fail to see that class and poverty, not race, is the real handicap in British society. Peepo! is radical to 21st century eyes in depicting and celebrating life in an ordinary 1930s family that has a mother, a father and siblings: it is quite clearly underprivileged, with clothes drying on an airer in front of the fire and no books, if also rich in affection.
The Ahlbergs turned the familiar game of I Spy into interactive stories – a child is encouraged to spot fairytale characters in Each Peach Pear Plum, with Cinderella dusting a cellar and the Three Bears encountering Tom Thumb – and made circular holes on every other the page that a child can see through. The idea of a text being permeable, previously confined to avant-garde literary fiction, took flight with best-selling books like The Jolly Postman in which characters send tiny letters to each other that a child (or parent) could take out of an envelope on each page.
Ahlberg's gentle wit mixed the mundane with the fantastical. His ebullient child heroes and resourceful underdogs are incarnations of a strong moral core that has become lost or confused today. For instance, one of the better picture-books this year is Bethan Woollvin's gender-switched Robin Hood, whose girl protagonist (wearing a black bob strangely similar to that of Rachel Reeves) is justified in stealing from the Sheriff because he's stealing from the poor.
The Ahlbergs had no qualms about showing children that all theft is wrong. Their Burglar Bill begins like a greedy thoughtless child. It's fun, until he nicks a lady burglar's baby by mistake, sees her in tears, and learns the error of his ways. 'I've been a bad man,' he announces remorsefully, and the lady burglar is equally regretful. Both whip off their black masks and instantly transform into honest citizens. It's hilarious – and speaks to a child's sense of justice rather than wokery.
A picture book is a unique art form, whose limited vocabulary and striking pictures must withstand a thousand re-readings. With celebrities from Madonna to David Walliams making a quick buck by writing (supposedly) children's books, fewer children today get to understand the depth and brilliance of the real thing. The Ahlbergs said that 'we decided to put as much work into a picture book as Tolstoy put into War and Peace.' They did, and generations of children will not forget them.