My family values

Julia Donaldson, children's writer

Interview by Juliet Rix

The Guardian, Saturday 20 December 2008

I grew up not just with my parents, but with my lovely grandmother and my very nice aunt and uncle. None of them could afford a house in Hampstead on their own so they all clubbed together. My grandmother (my father's mother) lived on the top floor, my father's sister and her husband in the middle and my nuclear family on the ground floor, which was just as well because when I was six my father got polio and from then on he was in a wheelchair.

My parents were quite leftwing. Not radical or militant but liberal left. My father hated Monopoly. My uncle and aunt taught it to me and my sister, and we were capitalist as anything. When we tried to get my father to play he said he wouldn't play "that horrible game where you ruin people". I later discovered that my grandmother voted Conservative. I was amazed. I'd never heard of anyone I knew voting Conservative.

My parents gave us a lot of freedom. We roamed the heath and got the tube into central London from the age of about nine. I've passed so many bushes on Hampstead Heath where a man pops up and waggles his willy – but that isn't the end of the world. So I learned from my parents to take reasonable risks and I think travelling on your own is terribly important for children's development. I used to let my middle son, Alastair, go into Glasgow on the train once a week to an after-school activity. He was nine or 10 and I know other parents thought it was shocking that I let him go on his own.

Jerry, my youngest son, is laid - back but he has my father's sense of social justice. Alastair, the middle one, is a very thorough person and he thinks he gets that from me. I get it from my mother who was quite pernickety and terribly keen on words being used properly.

My oldest son, Hamish, had an imaginary friend, Sammy, who was his reflection in a wardrobe mirror (which is where my character Princess Mirror-Belle came from). I helped Hamish make lift buttons to go inside the wardrobe. He would then go up to another floor and come out as Sammy or Lola the Cat and I'd have a day with Sammy or Lola, who was usually better behaved than Hamish. Then I'd say, "I'd like Hamish back now", and he would come back and tell me all about his adventures. I sometimes wonder if I entered into it too much with Hamish. He didn't seem to know it wasn't real. But I think Hamish was wired differently from the start, so things probably would not have turned out differently. Hamish died five years ago, but I don't want to talk about that.

I always try out my books on my boys. When I was writing The Gruffalo I got completely stuck at the point where the mouse has met the Gruffalo. I knew the storyline but couldn't get it into verse. I thought, I've had enough of this stupid story, but Alastair said, "Finish it, Mum, I like it." So I am very grateful to the boys.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/dec/20/family

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