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  • What a Performance: The Lively Work of Julia Donaldson
  • Mandy Wheatley (bio)

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Audience participation is central to Julia Donaldson’s approach to writing for children. So I make no apologies for opening this letter on her work with the viewpoint of a child in that audience. Take, for instance, Hannah Yeadon, who lives in the north of England and is very nearly three years old. Her latest library book is Julia Donaldson’s picturebook The Highway Rat. This tale of a wicked robber rat is inspired by the classic Alfred Noyes poem The Highwayman. Hannah doesn’t know that. But she does know the type of book that she likes. The Highway Rat, with its enticing cover, fits the bill. Listening to the book being read aloud is a noisy business involving dramatic gestures, expressions of disbelief and quite a few giggles. As the story unfolds, Hannah rocks to its rhyming beat. By the third reading, she is joining in with the Highway Rat’s refrain:

Give me your buns and your biscuits! Give me your chocolate éclairs! For I am the Rat of the Highway The Highway—The Highway— Yes, I am the Rat of the Highway, And the Rat Thief never shares. [End Page 72]

The experience of reading The Highway Rat draws the reader into a lively world, where a large helping of the wonderfully ridiculous is tempered by an underlying message about sharing. All delivered in memorable rhyme with closely matched illustration. When Hannah grows older, if she reads Noyes’s The Highwayman, it is tempting to wonder whether the rhyme in her head will be that of Donaldson’s Rat Thief.

Donaldson’s picturebooks invite participation and her personal history has always involved performance. As a child in London she recalls her father’s fifth birthday gift of The Book of a Thousand Poems as the stimulus for a lifelong love of poetry. While growing up, she regularly wrote shows for herself and her younger sister to act out. Her enjoyment of acting led to a degree in Drama and French at Bristol University, where she met her husband. Donaldson wrote songs for them to play and they went busking together. She used this experience to start a career in song writing for children’s television and became expert in writing on request, on subjects ranging from pet animals to awful smells through “throwing crumpled up wrapping paper into the bin” (Donaldson).

The move to writing books came when one of her television songs, A Squash and a Squeeze, was published in picturebook form with illustrations by Axel Scheffler. A Squash and a Squeeze is a variant of a Jewish folktale, in which an old lady (who complains that her house is too small) takes the advice of a wise old man. His suggestion causes increasing chaos, squashing and squeezing, before a happy solution is found. This book was the start of a partnership between Donaldson and Scheffler that has produced a series of distinctive rhyming stories, combining her words with his illustrations. Donaldson has also written picturebooks with a range of other prominent illustrators, including Nick Sharratt, Emily Gravett and Lydia Monks.

Traditional tales regularly provide the inspiration for Donaldson and in 1999, she reworked an idea about a tiger, inspired by Chinese folklore. The tiger evolved into another, purely imaginary, creature when Donaldson had difficulty finding effective rhymes for “tiger.” This was the rather down-to-earth starting point for one of her most well-loved creations: the Gruffalo, star of The Gruffalo and The Gruffalo’s Child. In The Gruffalo, a tiny mouse uses the excitingly scary Gruffalo to outwit its predators during a journey through the quintessential fairy tale territory of a deep dark wood. Donaldson’s illustrator, Axel Scheffler, had the good sense to realize that the Gruffalo should look “frightening, but not too frightening” (37). So while Donaldson’s description of the creature (including terrible claws, prickly back and poisonous wart) are present in his drawings, there is also a clumsy tenderness to the character to help defuse potential fears among preschool audiences.

The Gruffalo showcases Donaldson’s skill in writing picturebooks...

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