John Burningham: Leader of the flock

Published on Thursday 2 July 2009 15:34

MAURICE SENDAK, AUTHOR AND illustrator of the unforgettable children's story Where the Wild Things Are, has this to say about John Burningham: "Having just finished drooling over your new book, I am both wowed and very properly pissed off that I never collected all of you," he writes. "Your work, John, is stunning, luscious, sexy, hilarious and mysterious and frequently just plain nuts."

Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are won the 1963 Caldecott Medal, the top children's book award in the US. Burningham's debut, Borka: The Adventure of a Goose With No Feathers, came out the same year, winning the Kate Greenaway Medal, the UK equivalent.

Sendak and Burningham grew up at the same time. While Sendak's anarchic plots were driven by bad boys who feasted with monsters, Burningham's rang with childhood loneliness, the search for adult allies, and the hearth of home.

In a foreword to Burningham's new autobiography, Sendak describes the two of them as "lucky kids" who dumped "simpering 19th-century goody-goody books" for a wild imagination and lust for living. For me, Burningham's work has always been simply expressive and evocative, so I'm delighted to be interviewing him on Thursday, at the launch of an exhibition celebrating 50 years of his work.

John Burningham's earliest commissions were posters for London Transport. Books that followed Borka ranged from ABC, a high impact suite of comic alphabet paintings, to the fine-line colours in his classic Mr Gumpy's Outing in 1970, which won him his second Greenaway medal. His original pictures for Ian Fleming's Chitty Chitty Bang Bang were a rare case of his illustrating another writer's words.

For part of his childhood – particularly the war years, when his father was a conscientious objector – Burningham lived an itinerant life with his family in a caravan in rural Gloucestershire and Herefordshire.

"It became a way of life, being dumped at a school and having to adapt and make new friends," he says. That loneliness is reflected in the homeless dog Simp he created, and the misfit Borka.

His mother encouraged his drawing. After his alternative military service – as a conscientious objector – he got into art school, partly on the basis of sketches he had done in the Glasgow slums. He had the idea for a children's story, and Borka was published. The goose seemed to have cast off her feathers, much as people cast off many conventions in the early 1960s, and walked free. "Here I am 45 years later," he writes, "still inventing stories."

&#149 Tim Cornwell interviews John Burningham at the launch of an exhibition celebrating his 50-year career, on Thursday 9 July at the Dovecot, Infirmary Street, Edinburgh. John Burningham is published by Jonathan Cape, priced 25.