The Troll

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I ask Scheffler if his and his German-French family’s lives have changed much in Britain since Brexit. “Not so much on a day-to-day basis, but I look at the quality of politicians in this country and it’s incredible. In Germany, it would be unthinkable to have such incompetent, cynical and corrupt people in government. Sorry, I’m getting political,” he says. It goes deeper than that. The stories should be universal, so if there is a message, it should be for anyone at any time,” she says. Before Malcolm and I had our three sons we used to go busking together and I would write special songs for each country; the best one was in Italian about pasta. We have sailed past our allotted time by now but I have one last question from my three-year-old: why, at the end of A Squash and a Squeeze, does the pig look angry but the other animals don’t?

Does she see books as a way for children to learn about the world around them, or an oasis in which they can escape from it? Here, I’ll show you,” she says standing up, and Malcolm – keen as ever – runs over to perform alongside her. In Germany, it would be unthinkable to have such incompetent, cynical and corrupt people in government Axel Scheffler No, no!” cries Donaldson, while Scheffler says simultaneously “Oh that’s a good idea!” He then ponders how he might have pulled that off, Donaldson’s objections notwithstanding: “I should have drawn one of the baddies with that [Boris Johnson] hair.” urn:lcp:troll0000dona:epub:bb9b986e-99b4-450d-a092-6f66e28cd09b Foldoutcount 0 Identifier troll0000dona Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s2zwmxkcd5n Invoice 1652 Isbn 9780230017931 My real breakthrough was THE GRUFFALO, again illustrated by Axel. We work separately - he’s in London and I’m in Glasgow - but he sends me letters with lovely funny pictures on the envelopes.

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Well, we don’t usually have people in our books at all,” says Donaldson, meaning that their collaborations are usually animal- (and Gruffalo) based. I also continued to write “grown-up” songs and perform them in folk clubs and on the radio, and have recently released two CDs of these songs. Did they instantly know, when Scheffler made the drawings for A Squash and a Squeeze almost 30 years ago, about an old woman who thinks her house is too small, that they’d found each other’s work soulmate? The Smeds and the Smoos wasn’t about Brexit, it was just Romeo and Juliet with a happy ending,” Donaldson insists. “I never start a book thinking, ‘I want to teach the world to stop being at war.’”

Funnily enough, I find it harder to write not in verse, though I feel I am now getting the hang of it! My novel THE GIANTS AND THE JONESES is going to be made into a film by the same team who made the Harry Potter movies, and I have written three books of stories about the anarchic PRINCESS MIRROR-BELLE who appears from the mirror and disrupts the life of an otherwise ordinary eight-year-old. I have just finished writing a novel for teenagers. In The Baddies, the witch, the troll and the ghost come a cropper when a little girl refuses to be scared by them. Although it’s never mentioned in the story, she is of south Asian heritage. Is this the first time they’ve featured a non-caucasian main character?Scheffler found his way into art by being political. “When I was growing up in Hamburg, there was the Vietnam war going on, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and there are teenage drawings of mine in which I reflected on that, so that was my formation,” he says. “Oh! I didn’t know that,” says Donaldson, turning to him in surprise. “Now I draw rabbits and mice,” he says and they look at each other and laugh.

When Julia’s writing, I’m like a father who is at the birth of a child. I can’t have the baby, so I’m on hand to make the tea,” Malcolm says. I studied Drama and French at Bristol University, where I met Malcolm, a guitar-playing medic to whom I’m now married. After studying drama and French at university, she busked around Europe, joined by a fellow performing enthusiast, who was, of course, Malcolm. I ask if their busking days inspired Donaldson and Scheffler’s book, Tabby McTat, about a busking cat and his shabby human, Fred. “Julia’s sister says Fred is who I’d be if I hadn’t met Julia, which I deeply resent,” Malcolm chortles. He is certainly as devoted as Fred: when Donaldson can’t remember quite when she finished writing The Baddies, Malcolm consults his diary and gives her precise start and finishing dates. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2022-07-04 11:10:43 Associated-names Roberts, David, 1970- Autocrop_version 0.0.14_books-20220331-0.2 Bookplateleaf 0002 Boxid IA40592908 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier I really enjoy writing verse, even though it can be fiendishly difficult. I used to memorise poems as a child and it means a lot to me when parents tell me their child can recite one of my books.

Summary

I grew up in a tall Victorian London house with my parents, grandmother, aunt, uncle, younger sister Mary and cat Geoffrey (who was really a prince in disguise. Mary and I would argue about which of us would marry him). It’s not difficult to see elements of Donaldson’s own story in her work. Born into a bohemian family in Hampstead, north London, she grew up in a home that she, her parents and sister shared with her grandmother, uncle and aunt. Her parents encouraged her and her sister “to absolutely be ourselves”, and Donaldson wrote musical versions of fairytales, which the four of them would perform for the extended family. To this day, she thinks of herself as a “performer-author”, and she and Malcolm frequently put on shows of her books; at the time of our interview, they are preparing for a performance at the Edinburgh festival.

Find as many different types of punctuation as you can in the story. Can you explain why the author has chosen to use them in those places?Donaldson has in the past talked about her concerns for today’s children, from them having to wear masks in school to the effects of social media. So I persist with my theory that perhaps The Baddies is a parable about how much resilience modern kids need to deal with the world – and she persists in batting it away: “No, no, no,” she says firmly.