Shirley Hughes on creating Dogger and growing up during the War
During the Second World War, I was living at home in West Kirby, Liverpool, with my mum and two sisters. My middle sister went off to serve in the Wrens in Portsmouth and my eldest sister, Brenda, who’s in the picture, stayed at home as a VAD [Voluntary Aid Detachment] nurse.
I was too young to serve but, aged 14, joined the Women’s Junior Air Corps, which is why I’m wearing that uniform. We were shown slides of German bombers and were supposed to march up and down and spot enemy aircraft overhead – although what we were supposed to do if we saw one remained unclear. It was a very tough time.
Children today think the war was daring but, in fact, if you lived at home it was just deadly boring. You queued for food and couldn’t buy nylon stockings. But we grew up with very good teeth because we didn’t have any sweets, although that seemed like a poor consolation at the time. You really had to amuse yourself, so I did a lot of drawing.
Children today think the war was daring but, in fact, if you lived at home it was just deadly boring
When the war was over, I went to Liverpool School of Art. A lot of the students had come back from the war, so they weren’t 18 but 22 and were quite mature. As part of my course, I learnt to make my own clothes. Even long after the war there was still rationing, and you couldn’t buy the long skirts that you needed for the New Look.
We discovered an old Canadian Air Force depot outside Oxford and bought parachutes, which were made out of white silk, and everybody had a white silk evening dress. I even found a place that had green felt for billiard tables and made a huge flared skirt, mid-calf length, but it picked up all the pencil sharpenings in art school.
After that, I went off to London to try to make my way as an illustrator. Most of the work was very badly paid and I did some pretty awful books. My breakthrough came when the author of the My Naughty Little Sister series, Dorothy Edwards, asked me to illustrate her next book.
My favourite character that I’ve drawn is Dogger, the toy dog, but Alfie is my main character: he’s a four-year-old up against all the complexities of his life, like trying to get his shoes on the right feet and going to a party without his security blanket – it’s very serious to him.
He has a friend, Bernard, who is very cool and somebody once said to me that when they’re both 16, Bernard is going to get the girl. My job is to encourage children to slow down, really look at the pictures, follow the story, the details, facial expressions and colour combinations. It’s a pleasure long before they go to school and learn to read – to read visually, instead.
A special 40th-anniversary edition of Dogger is published by Penguin Random House (Bodley Head), £12.99
