Charlie and Lola may be celebrating their tenth birthday, but as Kirstie Brewer discovers, their creator Lauren Child has no intention of growing up
Lauren Child with her most popular creations, Charlie and Lola
Within minutes of talking to Lauren Child I can tell that she isn’t like most adults. Mainly because she hasn’t forgotten how it feels to be a fouryear-old child. She understands the anguish of eating vegetables and she hasn’t forgotten what fun it is to blow bubbles in your milk through a straw.
“We are all only one step away from childhood really, so there are no absolute boundaries between me as I am now and what I was like as a child – when I get told off in a shop for touching something, it still makes me feel about seven!” she giggles.
Possessing this rare instinct about the illogical logic of small children has no doubt helped her in becoming one of today’s best-loved children’s authors and illustrators. This year Child is celebrating
10 years since Charlie and Lola, her most famous creation, burst onto the scene in the award-winning picture book I Will Never Not Ever Eat a Tomato. The sibling duo were an instant hit with both children and adults, spawning a global animated TV series, spin-off books and merchandise.
Child’s runaway success has earned her a place in a new exhibition at The Lightbox in Woking, Escape to Wonderland: A History of Children’s Book Illustration. Charlie and Lola star alongside the likes of
Elmer the Elephant, Rupert Bear and Raymond Briggs’s Snowman in a display that boasts more than 100 iconic works from three centuries.
Child recently held a talk and book signing at The Lightbox as part of the gallery’s celebrity lecture series and, interestingly, her audience was made up in the main of young 30-something women.
“I suppose adults might like the aesthetics of my books,” she muses. “They have quite a retro, 70s feel to them that harks back to my own childhood.”
With their swirling typography and mishmash of collage and quirky drawing, Child’s Charlie and Lola books are certainly stylish things to behold.
“Children like to be read the same books over and over, so it helps if the adult who reads them enjoys them too. It would get terribly dull otherwise,” she says. Child is repeatedly asked why it is that she creates children’s books and yet has no children of her own. “That question always bemuses me – having children has got nothing to do it!” As she rightly points out to me, she was once a child herself and that is all the validation she needs.
“I get my inspiration from people watching and always staying curious.” Ironically, it is often her observation of adult behaviour that sparks the ideas for her children’s books. She believes there is an inner child in everyone. “When you are little, the smallest of things can be the biggest deal; everything is for the first time and you have no control or independence. But I often see those same sorts of feelings reflected in the faces of adults, especially when they are queueing or travelling.”
Child first got the idea for Charlie and Lola when sitting opposite a little girl on a train in Denmark.
“She had eyes like a pixie and looked very sweet in her little dress. I couldn’t understand what she was saying, but something about her was mesmerising,” she recalls. “I think about that little girl on the train a lot; it’s strange to think she is out there somewhere and has no idea that Charlie and Lola is all because of her.”
Lauren Child is quite childlike herself. Her voice is light and girlish with a slight lisp; her words are peppered with the same adverbs that are adored, terribly, by her creation Lola. There is an endearing lack of self-importance about her.
Yet this is a woman who has plenty to be proud of –the MBE she was awarded this year for her services to literature, for starters.
The world Charlie and Lola inhabit is distinctly, and deliberately, not the world of today. Child has instead bestowed upon the duo a childhood like her own.
“I wanted to capture how children will play together imaginatively by themselves without the help of adults – that’s why grown-ups don’t appear in my Charlie and Lola books,” she explains.
Whilst she likes the Charlie and Lola TV series, she admits to being attached to her characters and finding it “rather
strange” to see them having a “more sanitised version of childhood”.
“For example, all small children stand on chairs. That’s a fact,” she says. “But because the BBC has certain health and
safety guidelines, Lola can’t stand on chairs now, and she often has to eat banana slices rather than salt and vinegar crisps,” she sighs wistfully.
Unlike the original books, the TV series is careful to make frequent reference to the fact that Charlie and Lola are under constant adult supervision, for example if they walk to school or take a bath.
“Apparently this is to reassure children who might worry about where Charlie and Lola’s mum is,” Child explains. “But children don’t need to be patronised because they are amazingly intuitive. I don’t think adults should worry as much,” she says – in a way that makes grown-ups sound very silly indeed.
Lauren Child will be at The Lightbox on Nov 20, 2–4pm. Escape to Wonderland: A History
of Children’s Book Illustration is on until Jan 2. Visit: www.thelightbox.org.uk
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