Author and Illustrator Shirley Hughes Explains Why Children Need To Slow Down when Reading
Shirley Hughes wants readers young and old to take time as they turn the pages, and look beyond the words…
I have no memory of being taught to read. But I do know that from a very early age I loved comics and the strip cartoons that used to be printed in newspapers.
I suspect I learnt to figure out words from looking at the pictures and thinking about what must be in the speech bubbles; illustration has always been an integral part of the reading experience, for me.
When I was a child, the public libraries weren’t really used very much for little people, but we were lucky in that respect, as there were plenty of books in our house.
We had wonderful classics, with tipped-in colour plates that I adored by brilliant illustrators like Arthur Rackham, and Edmund Dulac – as well as the arrival of our favourite annuals each Christmas, of course, which was always a big moment in our young lives.
Mother was the provider of books, but it was Nellie Morris who actually read them to us. She was employed as a helper in the house and was, I now realise, very young indeed – perhaps only 15 or 16.
She didn’t live in, so we children would hang on the gate, waiting for her to come and bring the words alive.
I wasn’t that interested in my older sisters’ school stories – I didn’t want to join all those jolly girls in gym slips – but I loved the fairy tales and legends, the adventures, and especially, Just William. Nellie never, ever tired of reading to us; I owe her a great deal.
When I eventually had my own children, sharing books with them was something that came very naturally. I read to them every evening, and we’d talk about the pictures.
We used to go on holiday to the middle of nowhere, with no television (or anything much else, really) and we’d always have a novel on the go, which we’d take turns in reading aloud to each other.
The Wind in the Willows was a tremendous favourite, with Ernst Shepard’s beautiful drawings; later, we explored The Lord of the Rings.
I have two sons, and a daughter, who is the youngest of the three. And, perhaps unusually, all of them always knew, pretty much, what they wanted to do with their lives.
My older son, Ed Vulliamy, would be out on the pavements during an election when he was nine or 10 years old, asking people for their reactions – he became a journalist and writer.
His younger brother, Tom – now a professor in molecular biology – was a scientist from the start, cycling to school on Saturdays to check on his aphids. And with Clara, it was obvious that she was going to draw.
All children make pictures, of course, but then they go through a phase – depressing for any parent – during which they lose their self-confidence and freedom of expression, and start to believe that they ‘can’t do it’.
It’s important to get past that watershed, and Clara did. I never taught her a thing, but I did use to leave my paints out in the palette after a morning’s work, and let her muck about with them.
To have her illustrate my words, with our Dixie O’Day series, was a magical experience.
This is a golden age for publishing in many ways; there is such an array of wonderful authors and illustrators working at the moment. But it seems to me that one of the main problems today is how children are expected to react to everything so quickly.
They are always being rushed from one thing to the next – you can see it in toddlers, sitting with a tablet and swiping away, with one image replacing another at lightning speed. Then at school, teachers are supposed to push them along as fast as possible, constantly racing to the next target.
But reading isn’t a competition (although you’d think it was, the way some parents go on!). My job, as an illustrator, is to slow children down; to encourage them to linger in the story, and to look.
Because looking is a skill, and one we should nurture. And the book is a marvellous form for enabling this, for inspiring an appreciation of design, and colour – especially as reproduction is so beautiful now.
There’s a reason why proper, printed books are still popular, despite all the technology that’s available to us. They give us something we need, as humans, and it’s important, I think, to be able to enjoy them in a leisurely way.
Shirley Hughes CBE twice won the Kate Greenaway Medal, and was the recipient of the inaugural BookTrust Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015. She wrote more than 50 books, which have sold more than 3.5 million copies, and illustrated more than 200.
