Bookworm: Right on Blyton | Kerr blimey

I’ve never noticed the difference an illustrator makes to a book as clearly as in Hodder’s new editions of Enid Blyton’s Secret Seven books.

Picking Tony Ross to do the covers was a masterstroke. If you look back at the original 1950s illustrations, every one of the Seven is always pictured smiling, school uniforms are always clean and pressed – just like Perfect Peter, the impeccably behaved child who is Horrid Henry’s nemesis in Francesca Simon’s series.

Today’s kids are more like Horrid Henry – wilful, rebellious, individualistic – than the simpering Secret Seven. And who illustrates the Horrid Henry books? Tony Ross, of course. And his artwork immediately transforms Peter, Janet, Jack, Barbara, Pam, Colin, George and Scamper the golden spaniel into recognisably contemporary children rather than eccentric refugees from the Daily Mail’s vision of the halcyon Fifties. The stories haven’t changed, but you can’t have everything.

Many of us were reared on Blyton’s books – there were, after all, 700 of them to choose from – and the exhibition of her work that has just opened at Seven Stories in Newcastle (running until February next year) will doubtless be immensely popular. But here’s a quote from Blyton’s daughter Imogen that I can’t get out of my head: “The truth is Enid Blyton was arrogant, insecure, pretentious, very skilled at putting difficult or unpleasant things out of her mind, and without a trace of maternal instinct. As a child, I viewed her as a rather strict authority. As an adult I pitied her.” Ouch!

KERR BLIMEY

So instead, let’s talk about an altogether different kind of children’s writer. Judith Kerr is 90 this month and on Thursday HarperCollins celebrate her life and work by publishing Judith Kerr’s Creatures (£25). She has one of those faces that just radiate kindness and a lifetime’s accumulated wisdom.

And what a life! A journalist father who had to flee the Nazis to Switzerland with a price on his head (“I couldn’t understand that: were they coins and did he have to balance them?”). A son who won the Whitbread with his novel The English Passengers. A husband who created some of the most visionary TV dramas ever screened. And her own lasting legacy to children everywhere - The Tiger Who Came to Tea, and all the lovely Mog books. A truly wonderful woman