Serious concerns

It’s funny, isn’t it, how a dust jacket on a book can draw you to it from the other end of a room — always supposing the illustration is by Edward Ardizzone. In fact, is there anything more suggestive of delight than a book illustrated by him? It’s the Midas touch even for unprepossessing authors. The exhibition of his work at the House of Illustration finishes off with a wall lined with them: The Little Grey Men, Jim at the Corner, Italian Peepshow, Johnny’s Bad Day, Eleanor Farjeon’s Book… you’ll recognise lots.

And there’s something utterly distinctive about every one: the boy’s upturned nose, the rounded line of a motherly woman’s bottom — he’s good at soft women’s lines; the tapering narrow shins of two children in Edwardian dress; the curve of a dragonfly’s body over a pool where a dwarf with a wooden leg sits fishing. Just a line, usually a curved line, but evocative of a delicacy and humanity that characterised everything — well, nearly everything — he ever drew. Actually, there’s a dragon in this exhibition that he did when he was a boy, and it’s reminiscent of the feisty, fierce one in what is, I stoutly maintain, his masterwork: The Land of Green Ginger, Noel Langley’s wonderful tale of dragons and djinns and an enchanted island that was never in the same place twice.

And of course there are illustrations from the books for which he’s probably best known, the Tim and Ginger series, which he wrote as well as illustrated — he did 17 books as author and illustrator — but the exhibition isn’t just about the children’s books.

That’s the point.

Actually, I feel rather embarrassed now that I only ever associated Edward Ardizzone with children’s stories — which Puffin, to their infinite credit, are still producing (check out The Little Girl and the Tiny Doll).