Every one of us is the unreliable narrator of our own life. The bucket and spade summers may not have been entirely sunny, the ice-cream not quite so delicious. But Shirley Hughes's books, with their deftly sketched figures and everyday adventures, uphold a greater, altogether more magical truth about the sequestered world of childhood. Scraped knees and escaped piglets, digging for worms and teatime jellies (shaped like proper jellies) - it's all in there.
With pen and paint, Hughes unsentimentally summons the puppy fat of babyhood and the awkward stringiness of adolescent girls. Her life-drawn images are as vivid and timeless as childhood itself; the rounded cheek, the wayward hair, the shyness and boldness, the delicious terror and laugh-aloud joy of being young.
