A strange link between Art and Life

 

When I was very young, I loved learning. In fact I was a bit of a swot at school ("what's changed?", I hear people cry). And I did love reading, and especially reading through all the 'Ladybird' books that I could find on our bookshelves in St Joseph's, Pudsey. 

To those of a non-British persuasion, the Ladybird series of books were absolute mainstays of children's reading through the 50s, 60s, and 70s. They were still very much present in later years and there were hundreds of titles, some stories, some factual, some 'easy reading' to help young children learning to read. 

The title above 'The Gingerbread Boy' is one I must have read several times, and it is in a series of 'Well-loved tales' such as 'The Little Red Hen' and 'Puss in Boots'. I like the clear, simple illustration here that is quite realistic but colourful and effective. Here is another one of the illustrations:

And then, about 35 years ago we moved with our young son to rent a house in a village out in Essex. It was called Hatfield Broad Oak, and even though it was only just over 30 miles from Central London, where I worked, it was like going to a different, earlier world. There was no gas in the village, so we heated our houses with wood stoves and fireplaces. The place was so quiet that you could hear people talking at conversational volume when they were 200 yards away. It was indeed lovely and rural, and was full of very nice people that we got to know. It was also full of old houses, especially on the street that we lived on, which was called Cage End.

One of our neighbours was Sally, who was already in her 80s I think, and who was a retired illustrator, as her husband had been. And one day she mentioned that her late husband had illustrated several of the Ladybird books, and she urged us to look at this very book, The Gingerbread Boy, and then to look out at the street. This was the street we lived on (on today's Google Maps)

What do you notice? Well it turned out that we were living in the illustrations of a book we had read 25 years earlier! Her husband had used our street as the model for the illustrations in the story, and our house was the weatherboarded white one near the top of the image above. In fact she also said that one of the young children in one of the stories was now the Fifty-something butcher who worked up the road. 

This was a very extreme and unusual connection of life and art. A place that I had thought to be a work of the imagination when I read it as a child turns out to be a real place and we are renting a house right in the middle of the front cover! It sounded like one of those preposterous Hollywood role reversal plots, but we were living in it.

My sister kindly bought me this copy of the book for my birthday a few years later, and it is nice to be able to point at a fairy story and say "Oh yes, we used to live there."