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The pair say they don't work on their books at the same time. "I kind of beaver away all by myself," Donaldson says. If she thinks she's written a story that Scheffler would like to draw, she'll send him the finished manuscript.
No, no!” cries Donaldson, while Scheffler says simultaneously “Oh that’s a good idea!” He then ponders how he might have pulled that off, Donaldson’s objections notwithstanding: “I should have drawn one of the baddies with that [Boris Johnson] hair.” Before Malcolm and I had our three sons we used to go busking together and I would write special songs for each country; the best one was in Italian about pasta. Though, she admits, she's running out of creatures for Scheffler to draw. "I do think sometimes about gargoyles or a sphinx or something," she says. "It's getting harder and harder, actually." My real breakthrough was THE GRUFFALO, again illustrated by Axel. We work separately - he’s in London and I’m in Glasgow - but he sends me letters with lovely funny pictures on the envelopes.When I first arrive at the Donaldsons’ house, Malcolm gives me a tour, which largely consists of him naming everyone in the family photos on the walls. “This is Jerry and Alastair, our two sons,” he says, pointing at pictures of two men. “Our oldest son Hamish died, which is terribly sad,” he says, voice catching a little.
Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler started working together more than 30 years ago, on A Squash and a Squeeze. Donaldson had written the story as a song when she was in her 20s — years later she got a call from a publisher who wanted to turn the song into a children's book. She was paired up with Scheffler for the illustrations. Their second book together was The Gruffalo. Funnily enough, I find it harder to write not in verse, though I feel I am now getting the hang of it! My novel THE GIANTS AND THE JONESES is going to be made into a film by the same team who made the Harry Potter movies, and I have written three books of stories about the anarchic PRINCESS MIRROR-BELLE who appears from the mirror and disrupts the life of an otherwise ordinary eight-year-old. I have just finished writing a novel for teenagers. It’s not difficult to see elements of Donaldson’s own story in her work. Born into a bohemian family in Hampstead, north London, she grew up in a home that she, her parents and sister shared with her grandmother, uncle and aunt. Her parents encouraged her and her sister “to absolutely be ourselves”, and Donaldson wrote musical versions of fairytales, which the four of them would perform for the extended family. To this day, she thinks of herself as a “performer-author”, and she and Malcolm frequently put on shows of her books; at the time of our interview, they are preparing for a performance at the Edinburgh festival.
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She wasn’t unhappy, she adds, just sensitive. “I just couldn’t understand other people, and even when I was about 10 I would always have one little cry every day.” One year her father gave her a poetry compilation, A Book of 1,000 Poems, and she decided to become a poet (she cites Shakesapeare as an influence and has recently written a story in iambic pentameter for the first time).
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