My name is Helen Oxenbury and I illustrate children’s books, and one of my best known books is We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, and I re-illustrated the Alice in Wonderland book by Lewis Carroll. I think probably I have
pretty well a hundred books that I have illustrated over the years.
I was always drawing as a child, yes. My father was an architect, and he encouraged me enormously, and I used to go in for little competitions and things like that. So yes, I was always, from a very early age, drawing.
I think probably why I spent so much time drawing was because I was very asthmatic as a child, and I was always away from school, and one of the things that
kept me amused while my mother did the housework and what not was to do drawing. And
of course I grew to love it.
I think probably the art teacher was the one who said to my parents, you know, that they ought to send me to art school, and my father was thrilled. I think my mother thought that I ought to be a secretary or something safe like that, but thank goodness my father won, and I went to art school.
I grew up in a little seaside town on the east coast of England called Felixtown. It’s a very nice little town with a long wood pier and lovely beach. It was sort of Edwardian, all the most of the buildings. And I had the most glorious, free childhood there.
We, my brother and I, I have one brother, we were let out in the morning and we’d come back maybe for lunch, go out again, come back for tea, and without any restrictions, and we had the whole of this little seaside town and the beach all to ourselves. It was just a wonderful childhood.
Books didn’t play a large part in my life. I say that, but we didn’t own books as a family because I was brought up during the War, and it — books were very thin on the ground. But my father used to go to a library and bring me home books, and it was so exciting on the days when he would bring home books.
Absolutely wonderful. And I can still remember those books. And they weren’t good books, I have to say. Probably, today they would be considered complete rubbish, but I loved them. They were the only books I had.
