GLASGOW SLUMS

Looking again at Fly Home McDoo I've been reminded of how obsessed I was, back in the 1970s, with the Glasgow slums. Maybe it was because I had to live in Glasgow for three years.

I spent a lot of my time in the Gorbals and Maryhill sketching. Today, these Victorian tenements have all had their nineteenth century grime removed and are restored to beautiful pink and yellow sandstone but back then they were grey. In places, Glasgow looked like a bomb site with piles of rubble and rubbish and gaping gable ends exposing interior walls and intimate glimpses into what was once someone's home -patterned wall paper and old fireplaces.

 

What appealed to me as an artist were the small patches of colour in this dirty grey setting of boarded-up shops and tenement back courts. I found the Glaswegians an exceptionally warm and good humoured people and I was always trying to slip the the place into stories but my editor, Pam Royds, was firm - no picture book stories set in slums -

somehow she missed the one in Fly Home McDoo.

ZEITGEIST

It's an annoying thing, but it can happen, that other authors have exactly the same idea as you at exactly the same time. They call it zeitgeist.

I had a bad case of zeitgeist in 1979 with my third picture book, Fly Home McDoo, a story about a racing pigeon.  Within a week or so of publication two other racing pigeon stories had appeared: Mr Potter's Pigeon illustrated by Reg Cartwright

and Bertha and the Racing Pigeon written and illustrated by Pam Ayres. Needless to say, McDoo lost the race.

There's not much you can do about zeitgeist - when an idea is 'in the air' we're all tapping into it.

 It was donkeys not pigeons in 1993. I did The Christmas Donkey embellished with gold

and Jan Ormerod illustrated Father Christmas and the Donkey embellished with silver.

That bit of zeitgeist worked to both Jan's and my advantage when, in December 1999, I was unable to give a Christmas Donkey talk to some librarians because I had to go into hospital. At short notice Jan kindly gave the talk for me and was able to give the librarians value for money by adding an extra bit on her Christmas donkey book and selling lots of copies of both.