The work of dealing with unpaid bills and unanswered letters was enlivened at times by what she called ‘lots of silly fun’. ‘I felt a frisson whenever he came into the building,’ she wrote. While working on a life of the artist Augustus John, I discovered that Kathleen Hale, the creator of Orlando the Marmalade Cat, had worked as his secretary in the early 1920s. Much later, after I began writing biographies, I came across several children’s writers I now admire.
It was not until my mid-teens that I entered the exciting and adventurous worlds of Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle (not Sherlock Holmes but Brigadier Gerard was my comic hero). After this there is a gap in my memory, though I suspect that Enid Blyton’s prolific volumes filled much of that period. But it was the illustrations rather than the words in Beatrix Potter’s and Alison Uttley’s books that I remember most vividly. The first stories I can remember reading in my early childhood were, it seems, mainly about rabbits.
0 kommentar(er)
