 Pat Parker meets Pat Hutchins - children's author and illustrator |
 SMALL DOLL, GIANT PRICE: Author and illustrator Pat Hutchins with the original Titch doll used in the TV show based on her books. It looks like any small doll but this one cost £3,500 due to its jointed titanium skeleton, which allows it to be moved into any position for animation. This was the nickname given to her by the two cheeky gipsy dolls because of her penchant for long, dangly earrings. “When I first went along to meet the scriptwriter, Robin Stevens, who is also Jim’s puppeteer, he took one look at my earrings and said, ‘Aha, Loopy Lobes!’ and from then on, it stuck!” Pat and her husband Laurence, who made his name directing TV commercials, and who produced the animated TV series based on Pat’s Titch books, divide their time between their London home in Hampstead and their 300-year-old cottage in Debenham, Suffolk. The cottage, which they bought five years ago, is tiny, cosy and crammed with curios and Victoriana. “This is our bolt-hole,” says Pat. “We used to come here only at weekends, but we spend much more time here now because we have so many friends here, and we love it so much.” Spread over the table are some of the 39 picture books that have won her awards and international acclaim. All of them - from Ten Red Apples to Titch, from The Wind Blew to The Very Worst Monster – feature her bold, decorative and brightly-coloured illustrations, combined with a deceptively simple and often circular story, with lots of repetition to engage the very young.
Today the husky-voiced Pat Hutchins is instantly recognised from that Rosie and Jim series – slim, willowy, with striking eyes, high cheek bones, blonde piled-up hair and the trademark dangly earrings. She is warm, engaging, a little shy, and – although 60 this year – bursting with creative energy. Her latest children’s book; We’re Going on a Picnic, is due out in May, and she is working on her 40th – it’s typically light-hearted look at the complex relationships of a non-nuclear family. She was born in 1942, the sixth of seven children, at an Army training camp in North Yorkshire, “To us, it was one giant playground,” she remembers. “We could swing the gun turret on a tank and manage an assault course as well as any commando. One day my brother and I came across a big hut, filled with lots of lovely models. We thought it was Father Christmas’s storehouse, and were sure he wouldn’t mind if we helped ourselves.” But the models turned out to be miniature replicas of German cities, used to plan secret bombing raids, and the children ended up being questioned by Military Police. “We took them in to the woods and showed them where we’d hidden them. They didn’t see the funny side!” Then there was the time Pat and her brother strayed across a rifle range – in the middle of target practice. “We were like the two Startrite children wandering along, when all of a sudden we realised there were bullets flying towards us. These soldiers were screaming at us, ‘Lie down! Lie down!’ We could’ve been killed and my poor mother was distraught afterwards.” Pat’s father was a sergeant major during the war, but soon afterwards her parents split up, and her mother was left to raise seven children, (including a tiny baby), single-handed. The family had to leave their home in Catterick Camp and move to a Nissen hut in the remote Yorkshire village of Burton upon Swale while they awaited a council house. “The kids in the village called us ‘squatters’ when we arrived,” Pat says, “I didn’t even know what the word meant! We were very poor, and my mother had to work constantly to make ends meet. She worked night and day – in the school as a cleaner, in the fish and chip shop in the evening and in an all-night café after that. She never stopped.” Yet theirs was a happy, if chaotic, household. The children were always bringing home injured or abandoned animals, and soon they shared their small home with a kitten, five pigeons, several white mice, a hedgehog and a dog that eventually went mad. But Pat’s favourite pet was a crow named Sooty. “I found him in a little stream. He had fallen from his nest and was flapping about in the water. I picked him up, stuffed him inside my jumper, and he pecked me all the way home.” Sooty developed a passion for Spam and ice cream, and would sit for hours warming himself in front of the fire. The pair would roam the countryside together, Pat would sketch while Sooty sat on her shoulder. At 16 she won a scholarship to the local art school, and from there she went on to study illustration at Leeds Art College. To find a job, she decamped to London and trailed her illustrations around the publishing houses, but without success. “So I ended up working part-time in Marks and Spencer’s Oxford Street branch, but I didn’t last very long. I once gave away a suit which I thought someone else had taken the money for, and after that I though I’d better leave.” She finally landed a job in advertising, an assistant art editor at the prestigious J Walter Thompson agency, which was where she met Laurence. “He was a top art director, in charge of the KitKat and Guinness campaigns,” she says, “I was a lot more junior, working on things like Marigold Gloves.” The couple married in 1966, five days before Laurence was posted to the agency’s New York office. They spent two years in the city, living in a tiny apartment in Greenwich Village. Once again Pat trailed the publishing houses, armed with a portfolio of illustrations and a very long story about farmyard noises. “One publisher was interested, but when she read my story, the only line she liked was, ‘This is the fox he never makes a noise’. I was told to go away and base a story on that!” After a year’s hard work, she had reduced the six-page text to just 32 words. “I imagined it as a silent film, and let the pictures speak for themselves.” When she read the new version, her publisher declared it a classic. I was published as Rosie’s Walk in 1968, and is still a children’s favourite. Even today, Pat is perhaps most widely read in America, although she is also hugely popular in Japan and Australia, where, much to her embarrassment, she presented a TV programme which involved her talking to a giant book-worm. There is no difference, she says, between the children’s market here or abroad. “Children are children the whole world over.” Pat and Laurence returned to London in 1968, and a year later their first son, Morgan, was born, who became the inspiration for her series of Titch books. “I used to watch Morgan as a toddler trying to play football with older children, and it reminded me of how I sometimes felt and the second youngest of seven children,” she says. In 1988, Pat and Laurence filmed a pilot for a series of Titch TV animations, but the project took another nine years to get off the ground. Laurence and the now grown-up Morgan formed their own production company in 1997 to make 39 episodes of Titch. From a wooden box, Pat carefully produces the original Titch doll. It looks like any normal doll, but this one cost a cool £3,500, due to its jointed titanium skeleton, which allows it to be moved into any position for animation. Each 13 episode series cost £750,000 to make. The original narrator was the late Peter Jones of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame, and the composer none less that the distinguished Michael Nyman. The series was an enormous hit in Australia, where it was watched by 70% of under-12s. Here it reached 46% of the same age group, and Pat is hopeful they’ll be commissioned to film another series this year.
|
Originally published in East Anglian Magazine, 26 January 2002
Reproduced with kind permission of East Anglian Magazine