I really wanted to be an actor. When I was 12, I understudied the fairies in the Old Vic production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Judi Dench, Tom Courtenay and lots of starry people, and I was completely stage-struck. I still do more performing than writing really.
I don’t want to say I’m sick of The Gruffalo, but I suppose I do feel a bit like the little mouse in the story who makes up the Gruffalo and then comes face to face with the real thing. I made him up and then, suddenly, here he is in Chessington Zoo and there’s a little boy with a Gruffalo backpack. It’s everywhere. It’s a weird feeling, but as long as I can use the Gruffalo as a trampoline to bounce my other books about on then I’m happy with that.
A lot of people are awfully silly about relationships. I’ve noticed that people who are incredibly sensible about practical things, like choosing a washing machine, will suddenly make some wild decision about relationships. I was always the other way round. I was a bit dreamy and disorganised, but when it came to relationships I was quite fastidious. I wouldn’t have rushed into anything.
I started busking when I was a student in Paris to make some money and the songwriting grew out of that. Malcolm [Donaldson, her husband] and I used to get lots of gigs. We would be asked to sing after supper at a dentist’s dinner and I’d write a song about teeth or we’d perform at the Covent Garden hat fair and I’d write a song about hats. It was tremendously good training for the rhyming stories I write now.
Ideas can come from anywhere. I was on a safari and we saw these wildebeests and the ranger said: “The wildebeest is one of the ugly five.” And I just pricked up my ears. Ugly five? Who are they? And I immediately knew what my next story was going to be.
It’s a lovely feeling when a friendship gets this frisson and you realise you’re attracted to that person. I think that’s probably a more sound way than having the frisson first and then finding out you’re not really compatible. Malcolm and I have been married for 45 years and I can honestly say we’ve never had to work at it.
It upsets me when I’m trying to read a rhyming story to my grandchildren and I can’t immediately see where the stress should fall. I’m not saying mine are perfect, but I try my very best to make it trip off the tongue. People underestimate what a lot of crafting goes into it.
Quite a few of my books are subconsciously about loss [her eldest son Hamish died in 2003]. Stick Man and Tiddler are both about characters getting lost, and The Paper Dolls is about bereavement and memory. And in my book for teenagers, Running on the Cracks, there’s a character who has mental illness, but is very likable, and I suppose that was a way of dealing with a lot of stuff.
The Ugly Five by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler is published on 7 September by Alison Green Books. The exhibition A World Inside a Book: Gruffalos, Dragons and other Creatures opens at the Discover Children’s Story Centre, London E15, on 21 October (discover.org.uk)
